Disenchantment with global finance in Central-Eastern Europe enabled financial nationalism to emerge as a counter-hegemonic strategy. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán put forth his explicit aim to increase domestic ownership in banking to over 50% and legitimized the ensuing re-nationalization of the financial sector with resentment over neoliberal banking practices. The article describes how the financial crisis created an opportunity for Orbán and his allies to usher in a new era of financial ownership structures. It provides a critical political economy analysis of how the Orbán government selected economic sectors to target and how it used a network of associated private actors in its quest to re-nationalize and then re-privatize major banks to a newly created elite, the ‘national capitalists’. In this, financial nationalism constituted a grand strategy to reconstruct Hungarian capitalism in order to regain autonomy and assure long-term political survival within a liberal EU context.

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Despite the diffusion of the paradigm of central bank independence, there is still meaningful variation in the operating missions of central banks both across countries and over time.Through a detailed qualitative case study, this article develops the concept of the operating mission of the central bank and applies it to the case of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB) to provide a more complete understanding of mission shift. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of policy agency, as the central bank governors moulded the operating mission of the central bank, even in the face of dominant international norms.

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