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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how yurts function as mobile political infrastructures in Hungarian right-wing populism, enabling ideological communication, affective proximity, and self-orientalism while sustaining the appearance of spontaneity within an increasingly institutionalised populist state.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary, this paper looks at cultural and political initiatives around the Kurultaj festival and related state-backed projects as sites where Viktor Orbán’s populism is made and performed. These initiatives promote Hungarian claims of cultural, ancestral, and political kinship with Central Asian peoples and have become central to the symbolic repertoire of the Orbán government. One recurring object within this repertoire is the yurt. Since the 1990s, yurts have circulated in Hungary both as hobby structures and as fixtures of festivals, exhibitions, and political events sponsored by the state.

The yurt’s appeal lies partly in its technical qualities: it is lightweight, mobile, easy to assemble and dismantle. These very qualities allow it to function as a political infrastructure. Set against the image of Brussels as a distant, technocratic “castle,” the yurt stages proximity, informality, and a sense of the governing elite being physically and affectively “among the people.” In a context where populism has become structurally embedded in state institutions, such temporary assemblages help maintain an impression of spontaneity, immediacy, and direct communication between leader and people.

Critics often attack the yurt as inauthentic to Hungarian history, but this paper argues that the question of authenticity misses the point. What matters is how yurts are used as communicative and affective infrastructures, channelling self-orientalism, identity bravado, and phatic forms of political belonging. The paper shows how the yurt, as a mobile architecture, becomes a key vessel of contemporary right-wing populist propaganda in Hungary.