There is a general scholarly consensus that populist governments undermine liberal democracy at home, but less agreement over how they behave abroad. While many scholars still subscribe to the view that populism has no consistent impact on foreign policy, we argue that populist leaders engage in a characteristic set of behaviors calculated to elevate the state’s status on the international stage. However, the mechanism by which populist elite-versus people rhetoric translates into concrete foreign policy action remains underspecified. To address this gap, we develop a model showing how populism serves as a political argument to enable status elevation on the international stage. To illustrate this mechanism in action, we analyze the foreign policy rhetoric and behavior of the 2010–2020 Fidesz governments in Hungary, showing how populist argumentation was used to justify revisionist foreign policy through (1) the politicization of diplomatic machinery, (2) confrontation with traditional allies, and (3), the pursuit of more flexible partnerships. In these three respects, we show how populist arguments were used by Orbán to achieve a revolution in Hungarian foreign affairs. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41295-021-00256-3.

This chapter investigates the ways in which the post-2010 Fidesz government under Viktor Orbán used antisemitic tropes to configure George Soros—once hailed as a champion of market reform, freedom, and democracy—as an ontological threat to the Hungarian nation that should therefore be expunged from the country, together with “his networks,” including the Open Society Institute and Central European University. To show the government’s communication strategy in action, we combined an analysis of antisemitic discourse on the far right with a media content analysis of Sorosozás in government-backed online news portals from 2015 to 2020. We show that, from 2010, Orbán and his media allies discursively interpellated specific individuals and states as “financiers” and “global powers” as cogs in a global “Soros network.” In doing so, they drew upon well-established fifth-column narratives originally constructed and refined by ideologists from the Kádár era who employed a latent antisemitic code in their writing. At one time vehemently rejecting such discourse, Orbán and his government allies have become its chief articulators with devastating effects for one of his targets—the Central European University in Budapest.