One man’s war: Person-marking and geopolitical positioning in Viktor Orbán’s speeches (2022–2025).
Abstract
Following Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, the European Union and NATO largely reached a consensus on supporting Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. However, Hungary’s government opted for a different approach, consistently obstructing decision-making processes. This raises the question how Hungary’s leaders positioned the country amid these disagreements during the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. This paper explores the rhetoric of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the primary spokesperson for the Hungarian government, to unravel how he portrays his leadership and the various group dynamics involving Hungary and its people. Utilizing the experiential view of person-marking and corpus linguistic methods, we analyzed four of his annual speeches from 2022 to 2025, focusing on first-person singular and plural, as well as third-person plural references. The use of the first person indicates whether the speaker emphasizes their own viewpoint in their rhetoric. First- and third-person plural references shed light on different in-group and out-group dynamics. Our research indicates that the Prime Minister increasingly expressed his personal views in his addresses, while distancing Hungary from its usual alliances and crafting a narrative centered on “foreign adversaries.” These trends illustrate how political figures can manipulate alliance structures in their discourse and contribute to democratic backslide by normalizing narratives of external threats.
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