Tusványos and nation-building: Orbán’s populist performance in Transylvania

Abstract

This article analyses how Viktor Orbán’s annual speeches at the Tusványos summer school in Transylvania construct a transnational Hungarian political community through populist performance. While scholarship on Orbán has focused primarily on illiberalism, electoral strategy, and domestic nationalism, less attention has been paid to how national belonging is articulated beyond the territorial state. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of Orbán’s Tusványos speeches between 2014 and 2025, the article examines three recurring discursive processes: the construction of a Hungarian nation extending beyond state borders, the definition of moral boundaries between those who belong and those who threaten the community, and the role of Tusványos itself as a symbolic site through which this political community is reproduced. Combining Anderson’s concept of imagined communities with Moffitt’s understanding of populism as performance, the article demonstrates how Orbán’s discourse rearticulates the Hungarian nation as a transborder political community under threat. The findings show how populist performance, when embedded within a symbolically significant place, can contribute to the reproduction and maintenance of national communities beyond the territorial state.