Foreign policy attitudes and their impact
The possibilities of representation and participation in contemporary Hungarian foreign policy
Abstract
The study examines the attitudes of the Hungarian public towards foreign policy and its impact on policy-making, focusing on the period during and after the Covid–19 pandemic. Its research question is to what extent Hungarian public opinion was in line with the official foreign policy orientation of the government and what policy impact it could have on it. Based on the latter, the paper presents the main orientations of the foreign policy strategy after 2010, explores the centralisation of decision-making, and compares these with the foreign policy preferences and decision-making effects of the Hungarian public, based on primary research findings and secondary measures. The results reveal that the Hungarian government, in criticising the Euro-Atlantic orientation, clearly represented marginal and minority preferences, which, due to the concentration of power, neither the wider public nor foreign policy interest groups were able to influence in any meaningful way.
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