Hungary has been governed by the populist Fidesz party for 15 consecutive years, maintaining a parliamentary supermajority throughout all four of its terms since 2010. This remarkable success story is most intriguing because it is often argued that populist parties thrive in opposition but lose momentum once they get into government.
This is definitely not the case with Viktor Orbán’s party, which has won all of its electoral campaigns by a great margin since it assumed power. Not surprisingly, Fidesz’s success has been researched extensively and explained from many different perspectives (political, social, ideational, etc.).
This article will focus specifically on the campaigns of Fidesz. I will shed some light on their success from a psychological perspective, focusing on the cognitive biases and heuristics that these campaigns build on.
Basic Elements of Hate Campaigns
It is well established that one of the key components of Fidesz’s communication strategy is the use of so-called hate or smear campaigns, in which they target certain actors – whether it be an opposition figure, the European elite, or immigrants – and frame them as the enemy of the people. This enemy-creation is a classic tool of populists, who divide society into the pure people (or us) and the corrupt elite (or them), and – supposedly representing the people in their fight against the elite – they deepen the antagonism between these two polarized groups. (This strategy is well documented in the literature of populism; see, for example, The Populist Zeitgeist by Cas Mudde [1] or – for a more specific analysis of the Hungarian case – Kitti Kosa’s article titled Scapegoating as Political Strategy: Practice of Orbán’s Regime.)
In their hate campaigns, Fidesz usually targets two types of enemies: either their political opposition – the most prominent examples being Ferenc Gyurcsány, Gábor Vona, and more recently Péter Magyar – or the “outsiders” – let it be immigrants, the “Brussels bureaucrats”, or George Soros. In both types of cases, Fidesz either posits the designated enemy as a threat, generating fear and anger towards them in the voters (as in the case of the anti-immigrant or anti-Brussels campaigns) or as a ridiculous figure, making them appear as incompetent and unserious (usually in the case of opposition figures, the most prominent example being the “Mini Feri” campaign against the leader of the opposition, Péter Márki-Zay before the 2022 national elections; Fidesz has also tried this strategy against Péter Magyar, framing him as “Brussels’ humble servant”).
What is most interesting for me in these campaigns is the underlying psychological mechanisms they build on. That is because if we look at some examples in juxtaposition, the messages and the intent of manipulation behind them are so blatantly clear that it should be hard to take them seriously. Yet they have been almost always successful in mobilizing voters. I believe this success is best explained by the psychological mechanisms behind these campaigns, more specifically, by the cognitive biases and heuristics they activate in the voters.
Persuasion and Cognitive Biases: Why Are Hate Campaigns So Successful?
This article builds mostly on concepts borrowed from social psychology (as understood by Smith, Mackie, and Claypool [2]), the most fundamental of which for the present topic is persuasion: the conscious alteration of attitudes through communication, more specifically, through forming new or reinforcing old associations. Persuasion of voters is the basis of all political campaigns: the goal of the politician – understood from the perspective of social psychology – is to shape the attitudes of their voters in such a way that it fits their interests.
Simply put, politicians want voters to evaluate them and their program more positively, while the opposition and its program more negatively, as this may lead to their re-election. Of course, this is a rather crude and simplified understanding of the politicians’ thinking, and the demand side of politics also shapes political strategies. Still, in any case, persuasion does play a key role in campaigning, which is why this section dives into the psychological toolkit behind it.
Persuasion can work through two types of channels: systematic processing and superficial processing. The difference between the two is how deeply we process the information: do we elaborate on it, try to understand it in more detail, and look at it from different perspectives? Or, alternatively, we just take it as it is without giving it much thought. Persuasion is most efficient if it works through both channels, but this essay focuses on superficial processing only, as this is the channel that Fidesz mostly makes use of in their campaigns.
When we use superficial processing (also called the peripheral route to persuasion), our attitudes are formed based on persuasion heuristics instead of deliberation. This means that the attitude object – in our case, the enemy figures designated by Fidesz – is associated with a positive or negative stimulus, allowing for its quick and effortless evaluation. In other words, a positive or negative attitude can arise with minimal cognitive effort when we use superficial processing. Fidesz campaigns use different persuasion heuristics and cognitive biases that work through this type of information processing; here, I will elaborate on four of them: in-group / out-group bias, availability heuristic, confirmation bias, and evaluative conditioning.
In-Group / Out-Group Bias
As pointed out by Lior Sheffer in a 2020 study [3], group identities play a significant role in shaping individual decision-making, including voting. In social psychology, this is explained by two parallel mechanisms: the in-group and the out-group bias. The former essentially means that we perceive the members of our own group to be more like us, leading us to automatically (through superficial processing) like them, while the latter works in the opposite direction: we feel hostility toward members of external groups, and we devalue and discriminate against them based on the extent to which we perceive them as a threat to our own group.
The resulting antagonism between us and them is exactly what populism builds on: in-group and out-group biases widen the gap between the “morally good people” and the “morally corrupt elite”. The delineation of these two groups is the ever-present task of the populist politician: Robert Csehi argues in his 2019 study [4] about the success of Hungarian populism that if a populist party or politician wants to extend its time in power, they must constantly reconstruct the two antagonistic groups and the nature of antagonism between them.
In his work titled Neither episodic, nor destined to failure? The endurance of Hungarian populism after 2010, Csehi gives an overview of how Orbán reframed both the people and the elite in his narratives. The former changed from “we, Hungarians” to “we, people of Europe”, and ultimately to “we the sovereign nations”, while the latter went from “the speculators” to “Brussels bureaucrats” and “Soros’ mafia network”; in his most recent March 15 speech, Orbán once again rephrased the narrative of the two antagonistic groups as “free Hungarians” versus “the Empire”. This evolution of us and them is most clearly reflected in the hate campaigns of Fidesz, which continue to evoke in the voter a strong in-group bias toward the people – whether it be “we, Hungarians” or “we the sovereign nations” – and an even stronger out-group bias against the elite – Soros, Brussels or the “rainbow world-empire.”
Availability Heuristic
When we make decisions through superficial processing, we tend to rely on those attitudes of ours that are the most available to us at the time. The availability of information also determines the stability of our attitudes because we firmly hold onto our readily accessible mental representations, and we find them relatively difficult to change. Therefore, when voters decide who to support, they tend to rely on the information about the candidates they can most easily recall. Politicians take advantage of this simple psychological mechanism called availability heuristic by constantly reinforcing their own narrative through billboards, social media, TV, and online ads: the more someone encounters these ads, the more their content becomes readily available for the viewer when they make a decision.
Fidesz builds on this heuristic more than most political parties, which is best reflected in the crazy amount of money they spend on campaigns. According to Political Capital’s analysis of the 2024 EP campaigns, Viktor Orbán’s party spent four times as much (2,136 billion forints) on ads as all of its opposition parties combined, and it was the largest advertiser on Google among all political parties in the entire EU during the EP campaign.
Fidesz’s campaign was centered around the “war vs peace” narrative, according to which the opposition parties (in line with “Brussels”) support war, while Fidesz supports peace. By flooding the internet with ads and the streets with billboards, Orbán’s party managed to reinforce this narrative in the voters, as they basically could not spend a day without encountering this campaign in one form or the other. When it came to casting their vote, many people – relying on superficial processing – made their decision based on the most available information: the narrative propagated everywhere by Fidesz.
Confirmation Bias
Another psychological mechanism connected to attitude reinforcement is confirmation bias, which means that we tend to look for information consistent with our attitudes and beliefs; the other side of this coin is the conscious avoidance of those pieces of information that challenge our existing attitudes. Both mechanisms aim to reduce cognitive dissonances (understood here as uncomfortable contradictions between our thoughts) and to protect our attitudes.
The current view in the literature is that people generally approach political messages with confirmation bias: we read those media outlets and follow those political influencers from whom we expect the reinforcement of our political views. In line with this, media users are also more familiar with sources that are aligned with their political attitudes and they perceive them as in-group sources, while news outlets that challenge their views are perceived as out-group sources. This leads to a deep political polarization in which populism can thrive. In the context of political campaigning, confirmation bias is not very suitable for winning over voters from other parties, as that would require a changing of attitudes; on the other hand, this mechanism can ensure that someone whose attitudes are already in line with a political party’s narrative is not persuaded by another party.
To put this into context, someone who is strongly opposed to Fidesz is unlikely to be persuaded by the party’s hate campaigns because they look for those pieces of information that are in line with their anti-Fidesz attitudes; thus, they can more easily ignore the campaign messages that are incongruent with their views. On the other hand, someone who sympathizes with Fidesz but is tempted by another party – e.g., the Tisza Party – can be reinforced in their support for the former through confirmation bias, as they will naturally look for those campaign messages that are consistent with their original attitudes. In the upcoming election campaign, this will be more important for Fidesz than ever because Péter Magyar seems to be successfully converting former Fidesz supporters to his party, and Orbán must do everything to ensure the continued backing of his voters.
It has been found by a 2017 study [5] that confirmation bias is stronger if an individual is met with a wider selection of attitude-consistent messages to choose from. This means that the more platforms a narrative is spread on, the more likely confirmation bias will indeed work. Taking this into consideration, Fidesz has great potential to strengthen its voter base through confirmation bias, as they have a whole media empire that spreads the party’s narrative through several news outlets and platforms, including television and radio channels, websites, newspapers, billboards, postal letters and even through the infamous social media influencers of Megafon. As mentioned above, during campaign periods, Fidesz pours insane amounts of money into these platforms, making it easier for its voters to find messages congruent with their pro-Fidesz attitudes and strengthen their commitment.
Evaluative Conditioning
Finally, I must mention evaluative conditioning in this overview. Although it is not exactly a cognitive bias like the previous ones, it also works through superficial processing, and it is a key element of Fidesz’s hate campaigns. In evaluative conditioning, an attitude object is continuously linked to emotionally charged stimuli (e.g., horrifying images), causing it to evoke a positive or negative evaluation of said object without conscious deliberation.
Fidesz uses this conditioning technique in their hate campaigns quite extensively. For instance, the 2017 “Stop Brussels” campaign ads involved stereotypical images of migrants acting aggressively at the borders, followed by the black-and-white images of the EUs most easily recognizable symbols (the flags and the EP’s hemicycle) and George Soros. In 2018, Fidesz took this a step further in their “Stop Soros” campaign, which not only featured the stereotypical fearmongering images of migrants paired with the image of George Soros, but these ads also included the caption “This is dangerous!” in capital letters over a red background.
Another example of the usage of evaluative conditioning is the “Stop War” campaign ad from 2024, in which the faces of the well-known adversaries of Fidesz (George Soros, Gergely Karácsony, Ferenc Gyurcsány and Péter Magyar) were superimposed over the horrifying images of the Russia-Ukraine war, while a warning siren sound was playing in the background with the caption “The war brings death, it destroys our homes, causes war inflation and wrecks the economy”. These examples all build on the same technique of associating emotionally charged images (whether it be aggressive migrants or exploding buildings and tanks) with the political enemies of Fidesz, causing the viewers to – even unconsciously – form negative evaluations of these figures.
Stop War campaign billboard from 2024
Summary and Outlook
While the enduring electoral success of Fidesz obviously cannot be explained solely by the campaigns of the party, it is undeniable that the mobilization of voters against the “enemies of the people” through hate campaigns has proved successful. The psychological mechanisms presented here offer an explanation for this, but given the nature of this article, there is no room for delving into the possible strategies that could counter this success. This could be an interesting topic to explore, given the current drop in Fidesz’s support and Péter Magyar’s seemingly efficient resistance to the hate campaigns launched against him. Nevertheless, a more general conclusion to this topic is that as long as politicians continue to take advantage of voters’ superficial information processing, their ability to mobilize support through fear, antagonism, and repetition will persist.
References
1Mudde, C. (2004) The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, Volume 39, Issue 4, 2004, pp. 541 – 563. DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
2Smith, E. R., Mackie, D. M., & Claypool, H. M. (2016). Szociálpszichológia. ELTE Eötvös Kiadó Kft.
3Sheffer, L. (2020) Partisan in-group bias before and after elections. Electoral Studies 67(2):102191. DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102191
4Csehi, R. (2019) Neither episodic, nor destined to failure? The endurance of Hungarian populism after 2010. Democratization, 26:6, 1011-1027. DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2019.1590814
5Knobloch-Westerwick, S., Mothes, C., & Polavin, N. (2017) Confirmation Bias, Ingroup Bias, and Negativity Bias in Selective Exposure to Political Information. Communication Research, 47(1), 104-124. DOI: 10.1177/0093650217719596
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