Manufacturing the Enemy: Hungary’s Anti-Soros Poster Campaign

In July 2017 billboards appeared across Hungary showing a photograph of George Soros, laughing, above the text: Don't let Soros have the last laugh. A national consultation followed, then a further campaign — Stop Soros — and eventually a package of laws bearing that name, criminalizing certain forms of assistance to asylum seekers.

The campaign was national, government-funded, and physically unavoidable. Billboards on motorways, in villages, at bus stops, in metro stations, in every town, for months. Some were defaced with antisemitic graffiti. Hungarian Jewish organizations and the Israeli ambassador objected that the imagery drew on antisemitic tropes; that particular campaign was wound down and the messaging continued in other forms.

The mechanism is enemy construction, and it has three components.

Diffuse anxiety needs a face. Economic insecurity, demographic change, migration, the sense that decisions affecting a country are made elsewhere — these are structural and have no agent. An identifiable person converts an unmanageable condition into an intentional act by someone, which is both cognitively easier and emotionally more satisfying. The frustration-aggression tradition in psychology describes the mechanism, and the social identity work of chapter 12 describes what it does to group cohesion: an out-group threat raises in-group solidarity and, crucially, raises tolerance for a leader's overreach.

Saturation does the persuasion. Nothing on the billboards is an argument. It is a face, a name and a short phrase, repeated until it is familiar, and familiarity produces the fluency and positive processing of chapter 24. Repetition here is not reinforcing an argument; it is establishing an association that never has to be defended because it is never stated as a claim.

And unfalsifiability sustains it. The target is a private individual living abroad who funds a large number of organizations, some of which do work the government opposes. That is enough of a foothold that every specific fact-check — this particular claim about this particular plan is false — leaves the general association intact. The claim was never precise enough to be refuted.

The chapter belongs in this part of the guide, rather than being a comment on one government, because the structure is generic and appears across the political spectrum and across countries. What is worth noting is the specification: a named individual, foreign, wealthy, connected to many things, and not in a position to answer.

That combination is chosen. A domestic opponent can reply, and an abstract force cannot be hated.