Research on familialism in Europe usually focuses on family policies, pointing out how female reproductive and work rights are often contrasted with the interest of the family, as shown by the individualism vs. familism understanding of familism (familialism). Here, however, I focus on another understanding of familism that sees the family as the model for other social institutions. This novel angle on the European context enables research on a scarcely researched aspect: how familism is used to render non‐heterosexual rights illegitimate. Turning to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s rhetorical understanding of politics, I show how the rhetorical use of the family legitimizes anti‐LGBTQ+ sentiments. I focus on the Hungarian “Child Protective Law,” passed by the illiberal Fidesz‐KDNP government in 2021. The content analysis of the material shows how the Hungarian government’s aspiration to protect children, both as crucial members of heterosexual nuclear families as well as symbols of the illiberalist future of the country, legitimizes anti‐LGBTQ+ stances. This happens, first, through a discursive link between LGBTQ+ people and child abuse. Second, it occurs through the government´s familistic ideal of the Christian heterosexual family, which also constitutes its antagonistic frontier as the LGBTQ+ community. I argue for a new articulation of the illiberal “us” and its liberal frontier, where the ideal family, and in particular heterosexuality, function as a means of exclusion. This article contributes to existing literature on gender and illiberalism as well as to current discussions on the limits of the theoretical concepts of familism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Hungarian Fidesz-KDNP government´s discursive practices of control and care during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper researches the Hungarian government’s communication on the official Hungarian COVID-19 Facebook page during the first wave of the pandemic. Its aim is to answer the question how the Hungarian government articulated control and care to reinforce sedimented gendered division of care work and institutions of control to tackle the potential disruption of the system of care before the widespread vaccination of the elderly population was available in the country. The paper argues that the pandemic has allowed the government to exert control in areas, such as the crisis in the workforce market and health care system, as well as in the destabilized system of care work. The main finding is that in the material the government performs control over care work, whose intensified discussion during the pandemic could lead to a potential disruption within the illiberal logic on two different levels. First, physical care work related to immediate physical needs, like hunger, clothing, pain enacted by female shoppers, female health care workers and female social workers, is newly defined during the pandemic as local, family-bound and a naturally female task. Second, the government articulates care work, either as potentially harmful (for the elderly population and thus indirectly to the government’s familialist politics), or as vulnerable and in need of protection from outside influences (portrayed through the interaction of health care workers and “hospital commanders”). This enables the government to perform full state control over care workers through the mobilization of police and military masculinity and to strengthen and re-naturalize the already existing hierarchies between traditional gender roles from a new perspective during the pandemic. This state of affairs highlights the vulnerability both of the elderly population, on whom its familialism builds, and of the system of informal care work, which builds on the unpaid care work of female citizens, who paradoxically are also articulated as potential harm for the elderly and for the system.