Stigmatized but not alone: illiberal coalition-building between Turkey and Hungary

This article examines how Turkey and Hungary cooperated to contest norms of the Liberal International Order (LIO) between 2013 and 2025. Drawing on the content analysis of semi-structured interviews and speeches, it argues that their partnership was rooted in shared experiences of stigmatization by the EU. They reinterpreted EU criticism and stalled accession prospects through civilizational narratives portraying their regimes as unfairly misrecognized. This process of counter-stigmatization created an ideational foundation for mutual recognition and coalition-building. First, in the EU, Hungary and Turkey cooperated to contest enlargement conditionality, by advocating faster and less normative accession and visa liberalization processes. Second, Hungary challenged EU gas diversification efforts by making Turkey’s Russian gas dominated energy hub more visible in the EU via Budapest's observer status in the Organization of Turkic States. The findings contribute to the literature on ontological security, populist foreign policy, and the LIO’s contestation with an ideational perspective.