Football as a Tool of Propaganda and Public Diplomacy: The Strategy of Viktor Orbán’s Government

Abstract

The article focuses on the use of sport, particularly football, as a propaganda and public diplomacy tool by the Fidesz political party and the government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The first part outlines the relationship between politics and sport in post-Trianon Hungary, and the activities of the ‘Golden Team’ of footballers during the first post-WWII decade. This period ended with the suppression of the 1956 autumn revolution by the Red Army. The construction of the myth of an ‘invincible team’ is linked to conspiracies and more general negative perceptions of external actors, as well as nostalgia for a glorified, albeit fabricated, national and state history. This mythologisation is reflected in Orbán’s illiberal democracy regime and its instruments of public diplomacy and soft power strategies. The analysis focused on selected phenomena of this process within Hungarian society and externally, primarily among the so-called cross-border Hungarians. The author contextualised football within the realms of emotions, identity and centralised authoritarian power, where it emerges as a pivotal phenomenon in the establishment of Orbán’s national oligarchic regime.