Beyond Branding: Us vs. Them
Orbán’s Shift from Persuasion to Friend–Enemy Propaganda
After 2015, Orbán didn’t fumble the art of persuasion; he walked beyond branding. When growth cooled and threat signals rose, he swapped campaign gloss for decision design: collapse the noise into one clear stake—us vs. them—then pin it to things you can touch and count: jobs, roads, pensions, rezsi. The result wasn’t louder slogans; it was a simpler choice set that mapped fear to protection and talk to delivery.
Critics call it corrosive, and they’re not wrong about the democratic toll. But the opposition mostly mirrors the binary, casting Orbán as the villain while offering no equally legible payoff. In a market where attention is scarce and trust is rationed, the winning play isn’t “be nicer”—it’s out-clarify and out-prove: one sentence of what’s at stake, a credible safety bundle, and evidence people feel in their bills and paychecks—which, unfortunately, is why the us-vs-them play keeps winning.
In contemporary Hungarian politics, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has cultivated a distinctive rhetorical style that increasingly merits close attention.
In an earlier essay—The Politics of Persuasion: Strategic Branding in Hungary’s Electoral Landscape. Orbán Was Winning Like a Brand. The Opposition Still Hasn’t Learned How —I highlighted how, between 2010 and roughly 2015, Fidesz built durable dominance through disciplined political marketing, narrative craft, and brand strategy.
Yet from about 2015 onward, the marketing compass appears to have shifted: exaggeration, fear appeals, and top‑down messaging crowded out dialogue. What began as persuasive branding hardened into propaganda; vision ceded ground to threat inflation—particularly as economic headwinds mounted and the “product” grew harder to sell.
From Branding to Propaganda—and the Friend/Enemy Turn
From 2015 onward, government communication increasingly adopted an antagonistic binary—friend or enemy. By Orbán’s third and fourth terms, the message architecture had normalized a continuous, war-like posture, staging simulated conflicts against actors labeled “enemies.” The move resonates strongly with the work of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the German jurist and political theorist, and appears to draw directly on Schmittian premises.
In Schmitt’s terms, this shift marks an intensification of the political: a move from persuasive branding to existential positioning, where collective identity coheres by naming an enemy.
For Schmitt, the essence of the political is the friend–enemy distinction: a collective becomes political when it recognizes another collective as a possible existential adversary. The enemy is public (not personal) and defined not by moral fault but by the intensity of opposition that may culminate in violent conflict. The point is not that war must occur, but that its possibility gives politics its distinctive gravity and calls for decisive leadership. This criterion also underpins Schmitt’s notions of sovereignty and the “exception”: the sovereign decides, in concrete circumstances, who counts as the enemy and what extraordinary measures are required to preserve political unity. In practice, this logic tends to manufacture “exceptions”—moments framed as extraordinary (migration, “Brussels,” the war in Ukraine, disorder) that justify extraordinary measures in messaging and policy.
Schmitt’s influence is profound across political theory and constitutional thought; his Nazi affiliation and authoritarian commitments, however, shadow his legacy, making him a thinker many consider indispensable to read but hazardous to admire.
“Schmitt left a mark on four different incarnations of his native Germany: the absolutist regime that was Wilhelmine Germany, the failed republic of Weimar Germany, the authoritarian and totalitarian Nazi Germany, and the consolidated democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany”.1
Importantly, his concepts have been taken up across the spectrum—the left, too, adapts Schmitt (e.g., Mouffe/Laclau’s left-populist “people vs. elite” framing and Agamben’s “state of exception”) to advance progressive agendas.
A Contemporary Example
The communicative style that once showcased competent brand‑building now tends not merely to oppose rivals but to annihilate them rhetorically. Rather than engage policy or ideology on their merits, opponents are often reduced to illegitimate, threatening caricatures.
Here is one example of an Orbán’s September 2025 Facebook post distilled this strategy into a striking binary:
Context matters. In mid-September 2025, Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi—former Chief of the Defence Staff and, by then, the TISZA Party’s defence spokesman—acknowledged bringing a legally owned firearm to a public forum. As a high-profile former military leader, he reportedly held a lawful carry licence. The incident triggered a political storm; authorities later intervened and seized the weapon. Pro‑government and opposition media alike amplified images and footage from multiple events where he had allegedly carried a gun. While Hungarian law allows firearm ownership under very strict rules (one of the strictest if not the strictest in European Union), carrying a weapon at rallies or public assemblies is prohibited; even licensed owners can face consequences for doing so.
Against this backdrop, Orbán’s post functioned as a narrative keystone. To be clear, this essay does not dispute the illegality of bringing a firearm to a public assembly; it examines how that genuine misstep was instrumentalized into a broader campaign narrative and a tool of instant character killing. The “pistol” frame operates as a mini‑exception, converting a discrete incident into a generalised warrant for heightened, extraordinary political language.
Instant Character Killing: Concept and Mechanics
Instant character killing names a communicative move that collapses argument into condemnation. It operates by metaphor, escalation, and moral labeling rather than by evidence and debate.
The maneuver does not merely question competence or policy; it invalidates personhood as a legitimate political actor. In a polarized environment, once an opponent is framed as violent, dishonest, or anti‑national, deliberation becomes unnecessary. The rival’s program need not be weighed—its proponent has already been expelled from the circle of legitimate contestation.
Operationally, this applies the friend–enemy boundary at the level of persona, excluding the rival from the circle of legitimate political actors.
The Sequence: From Word to Weapon
Orbán’s September 2025 post lays out a rhetorical ladder:
Aggression – The adversary’s default mode is hostility.
Lies – The adversary is not mistaken but fundamentally dishonest.
Exaggeration – Speech is inflated; truth‑value is suspect.
Incitement – Language aims to provoke unrest.
Pistol – The trajectory culminates in physical violence.
The “pistol” functions both symbolically and literally. It condenses disparate worries—about public order, national trauma, and the sanctity of peace—into a single, vivid image. Thus, the opponent is mapped onto a path from immoral words to criminal deeds, justifying exceptional vigilance and, ultimately, exclusion.
The Positive Mirror: Accumulating Achievements
After delegitimising the adversary, the narrative pivots to a list of concrete achievements: highways built, family support expanded, jobs created, pensions restored, housing support and utility cuts delivered, peace defended. The device is accumulation—tangible results are stacked to produce an aura of competence and benevolence. The contrast is total: abstract threat (them) versus material delivery (us). Politics becomes a choice between chaos and order.
Binary Moral Cosmology and Populist Structure
Where Schmitt’s enemy is public and amoral, this rhetoric moralizes the enemy into evil—turning a Schmittian structure into a Manichaean moral frame:
They: aggression, lies, incitement, weapons.
We: trust, work, construction, peace.
It dovetails with a familiar populist structure—“the pure people” versus “the corrupt/alien elite”—but retools corruption as violence. Recurring antagonists in this register include “Brussels,” migration and border threats, “Soros/NGOs,”and, since 2022, a “pro‑war” opposition contrasted with a government of “peace.” At times, opposition actors mirror the game, recoding Orbán himself as the malevolent antagonist—an authoritarian “evil” whose removal is framed as a moral imperative—thereby reproducing the same Manichaean split from the other side. Elections, in this idiom, are not contests of visions; they are rituals of purification. Hence the closing call to “bid farewell to weapons… by next April at the latest,” implicitly reframing the coming vote as civic disarmament.
Strategic Function and Democratic Costs
Strategically, the approach consolidates in‑group cohesion, saturates the agenda with security cues, and crowds out complex policy debate. The democratic costs, however, are steep: opposition is delegitimised, policy is moralised, and pluralism is flattened. Stability is fetishised; deliberation withers.
Conclusion
Orbán’s post-2015 playbook looks Schmittian to the core: friend–enemy politics scaled for mass audiences. Trading branding for a friend–enemy frame—with instant character killing baked in—wins elections but rewires the democratic field. The opposition follows the same route, participating in the very logic it condemns.
In such a frame, Orbán is cast not merely as candidate but as guarantor of national survival—a position that secures hegemony even as it erodes the conditions for genuine democratic contestation.
First, public speech narrows: security-coded cues and moral binaries crowd out policy argument, raising the cost of dissent and rewarding performative outrage over deliberation.
Second, pluralism thins: opponents are cast as illegitimate rather than alternative, so competition becomes purification, not persuasion.
Third, institutions bend toward the exception: extraordinary framing (migration, “Brussels,” war) normalizes extraordinary measures—in messaging and sometimes in policy—making emergency a habit rather than a threshold.
Fourth, media incentives tilt to conflict maximalism, amplifying the binary and shrinking the middle.
Finally, citizen autonomy degrades: choice architecture reduces complexity to a single moral stake (order vs. chaos), trading informed consent for compelled alignment. In this frame, Orbán is not merely a candidate but a guarantor of survival—an advantage that sustains hegemony even as it erodes the conditions for democratic disagreement and renewal.
Disagree? Good. I don’t write to be right—I write to be tested. Bring your “Tenth Man” view, your sharpest counterpoint, or even a quiet doubt. Sometimes the most useful critique is the one that unsettles my own thinking.
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Meierhenrich, J. & Simons, O. (2016). A Fanatic of Order in an Epoch of Confusing Turmoil”: The Political, Legal, and Cultural Thought of Carl Schmitt Purchased. The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. Jens Meierhenrich (ed.), Oliver Simons (ed.), Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199916931.013.26