Subverting EU legal concepts: How Hungary enacts illiberalism in constitutional discourse

This paper analyzes how Hungarian constitutional court rulings subvert EU legal discourse. Drawing on legal studies and discourse studies, we examine how the Fidesz-KDNP regime leverages the Hungarian Constitutional Court to curtail the rights of asylum seekers and migrants within an evolving EU legal framework of identity recognition. We show how an illiberal agenda was enacted in a populist constitutional imaginary that, instead of outright rejecting established legal concepts, inflects these concepts with subversive new meanings. Our analysis reveals how the legal principles of the rule of law, human dignity, sincere cooperation and EU constitutional identity are recontextualized to legitimize a politically exclusionary agenda and redefine the moral boundaries of political inclusion and exclusion within the EU.