This paper contributes to the literature on solidarity mobilizations and the framings of social and political change in the context of the shrinking welfare state, de-democratization, and repressive state policies towards civil society. These issues are explored through the lens of interview-based research on Hungarian solidarity initiatives that emerged in response to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic between March and June 2020. We specifically look at the ways in which volunteers and activists engaged in solidarity activities associated with healthcare, care-work, and education; accounted for their aspirations; conceptualized social responsibility; and reflected on the crisis management of the state. We found that newly emerging grassroots actors reinforced the documented trend of depoliticization in civil society. Although most respondents formulated a depoliticizing narrative, they did offer interpretations of their public role and collective action, values, and responsibilities, and pronounced a desire for social change. Nevertheless, to account for these framings, we need to move beyond the binary understanding of politics in solidarity and civil society research.

This paper engages with civic solidarity initiatives and explores how mobilization and interpretations of the former are shaped by repressive state policies in de-democratizing and increasingly authoritarian states (Gerő 2020; Pirro and della Porta 2021; della Porta and Steinhilper 2022). Focusing on Hungarian civic actors engaged in solidarity activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore how the divisive and hostile political space created by the Hungarian government for civil society affected their interpretations of public-, political-, and collective responsibility. In response to the repressive policies of the populist neoconservative government, sociological studies have identified the depoliticization of Hungarian civil society since 2010 (Gerő 2020). However, during the 2015 migration crisis we also documented the politicizing effect of engagement in contentious solidarity mobilizations (Feischmidt and Zakariás 2019). In conducting interviews with organizers of solidarity initiatives during the crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were interested in their narratives and motivations. More specifically, we explored their reactions to the shrinking civic space and the political potential of their activities and perceptions.

Our study relies on interviews with key actors of Hungarian solidarity mobilizations during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, between March and May 2020. We concentrate on solidarity initiatives that addressed two areas of welfare that have been particularly affected by the retrenchment of state involvement in welfare provision over the last decades: healthcare and education. Our main finding is that while the mobilizations at the onset of the pandemic were outstanding in intensity, and numerous new actors entered the field of solidarity, the latter mainly employed a depoliticizing frame primarily because they considered this a practical and essential condition for operating amidst the government's hostility towards civic action. However, we argue that while most respondents carefully dissociated their activities from political connotations, they nevertheless engaged with the themes of collectivity, public engagement, and social responsibility. Concurrently, respondents who typically represented established civil organizations explicitly advocated for social change and made a clear connection between their engagement in solidarity mobilizations and their own politics and aspirations for structural and policy change.

Following the overview of the literature on political mobilizations, the contentious politics of solidarity, and the role of civil society amidst crises, we discuss the main features of the relations between the state and civil society in the Hungarian health and education sector before and during the first wave of the pandemic. Then, we present the methodology of our study and offer a descriptive overview of the actors and activities we encountered. The discussion –focusing on the respondents’ action repertoires and framings of responsibility, collectivity, and politics – is presented in three thematic sections, centering on their views about the state's crisis management and the specificities of their depoliticizing and politicizing discursive frames for addressing issues at stake in mobilizations and civic solidarity.

Literature on the relations between civil society and the state has documented a ‘counter-associational revolution’ (Swiney 2019) across the globe over the past two decades. There is a general trend for governments to withdraw from communication with civil society and to introduce restrictive policies such as funding cuts, restrictive laws, protest policing and surveillance, and to publicly discredit civil society (della Porta and Steinhilper 2022: 3). While counter-terrorism restrictions accelerated these developments in Western Europe and in the US, in Russia, Hungary, Poland and Israel, under the frame of the ‘war on liberalism’, restrictions targeting organizations critical to the government have been closely associated with the de-democratization process and the transformation of democracy (Gerő 2020). Hungary is a prominent example of a country in which the crackdown on non-aligned NGOs, the repression of the political rights and operational conditions of civil society (Pirro and della Porta 2021), and the corresponding rearrangement of civil society and the solidarity field have occurred. While the Hungarian government has actively engaged with eliminating organizations that deal with contentious political issues such as human rights and the reception of migrants, it has also been constructing a pro-government civil society by establishing proto-civil organizations and providing generous financial and symbolical support, thereby co-opting organizations and counter-movements (Gerő et al.2020; Fejős and Szikra 2020; Krizsán and Roggeband, 2021).

The forms of contentious solidarity that emerge in the context of repressive state policies and opposition to civil society have been thoroughly studied (della Porta and Steinhilper 2022: 2). Studies have found that the shrinking space for civil society results in the moderation of repertoires, the depoliticization of frames, as well as limited capacity for political mobilization, which is manifested in the hybridization of social-movement activism and volunteerism (della Porta and Steinhilper 2022: 12-13). Recent studies on the transformation of Hungarian civil society have also revealed the depoliticization of those directly affected by political pressure and the general decrease in capacities for political mobilization and collective action (Gerő 2020; Pirro and della Porta 2021).

There is vivid discussion in the literature about whether moments of crisis which typically push mobilizations to promote quick-fix, practical solutions depoliticize solidarity and marginalize critical reflection on the structural causes and effects of solidarity (see Shachar 2020; Fassin 2012; Ticktin 2011) or if they rather open up space for new alliances, various sorts of public engagement, and space for otherwise being political. In agreement with those who argue for widening the horizon of social-movement studies (Della Porta and Steinhilper 2022) and recognizing indirect, implicit forms of politicization that motivate ordinary and everyday acts of collective problem-solving (Jakobsson and Korolczuk 2020: 131), we turn our attention to the interpretations of solidarity action framed in broader terms of collective goods, values, and responsibilities (Eliasoph 2013).

While crises deeply challenge the organization of daily life and the stability of societies, they also open up new venues for help, lead to the constitution of new modes of solidarity (Koos 2019: 630), and attract new, grassroots initiatives previously not recognized by solidarity research (Koos 2019: 634). As Baumann proposes, these extraordinary moments bring about an ‘explosion of solidarity’ and a ‘carnival of solidarity’ (Bauman 2013). Solidarity mobilizations tend to be more flexible, more efficient, and much quicker at satisfying emergent needs than formal institutions (Solnit 2009; Spear et al.2020; Firmin et al.2020; Youngs 2020). Recent literature on crisis and solidarity mobilizations that addressed the financial crisis and the 2015 migration crisis found the growing politicization of solidarity activism (della Porta and Steinhilper 2022; Koos and Seibel 2019; Feischmidt and Zakariás 2019) as well as the transformative force of solidarity (Vandervoordt and Verschaegen 2019).

We were specifically interested in the roles and relations between state and non-state civic actors during crises in de-democratizing political contexts. The literature on natural disasters and social crises identifies four constellations in this regard (Kövér 2021). First, local and central governments can mobilize and coordinate grassroots and civic initiatives and orient their resources into areas where state provisions are lacking (Youngs 2020). Second, governments, international organizations, private foundations, and policy entrepreneurs tend to make use of crises by putting forward radical, controversial economic and social reforms and free-market solutions (Jessop 2010; Klein 2007). Third, grassroots solidarity and civic organizations may concentrate on compensating for government failures and applying critical pressure to governments that fail to handle crises or neglect certain issues or social groups (Youngs 2020). Finally, in de-democratizing contexts where co-optation is a dominant form of state-non-state relations, the government selectively concentrates resources in organizations that have previously excelled in cooperation with the state (Kövér 2021; Najam 2000).

The latter two configurations are especially characteristic of de-democratizing regimes, and they resonate closely with our observations about Hungary. For instance, based on a study of the Russian state's crisis-relief efforts in the early 2010s, Aslomov (2014) argues that if authoritarian governments decide to neglect or even constrain non-state actors, this can prompt the politicization of solidarity and the emergence of alternative forms of governance and social order in the long term. Therefore, it is a crucial question in de-democratizing regimes whether non-state crisis responses can represent visions of systemic solutions and a political identity through their acts of solidarity.

Having addressed the theoretical background of our inquiry, we now turn to discussing the relations of state and non-state actors and the transformation of civil society, with a focus on healthcare, care-work, and education.

The illiberal and de-democratizing turn under the Orbán government (Szombati 2017, Gerő et al 2020) has led to the significant transformation of state-civil relations and civil society itself. Yet if we turn our attention away from sectors directly attacked by government propaganda, a more complex picture of continuities and ruptures unfolds, and we can examine how the crisis induced by the pandemic has rearranged state-civil relations.

We chose to focus on healthcare and education because – as a legacy of state socialism – these areas have been dominated by state provision and particularly affected by the post-socialist, capitalist transformation, the retrenchment of state involvement, crucial underfunding, and low salaries. Some indicators that illustrate the devastating state of public healthcare are that the national budget allocated to healthcare per capita is half of the EU average, the significant regional disparities (Belicza 2004) and differences in the health indicators of different social groups, the fact that life expectancy is well below the EU average,1 and that Hungary ranks in fifth place in the EU for deaths preventable by medical care (OECD 2017). In agreement with the results of the European Social Survey, Sik and Zakariás (2021) found that the Hungarian population was exceptionally dissatisfied with the governance of the healthcare and education sectors during the pandemic. The education system has been infamous for its extreme inequalities and low teacher salaries in European comparison, which have lately cumulated in a critical teacher shortage. We argue that the results of the long erosion of state involvement, infrastructural decay, and the lack of the recognition for the professionals in these sectors have become strikingly visible and led to devastating consequences during the pandemic.

In both sectors, civil society has traditionally been involved in areas where state capacities were strikingly lacking; it has made up for the shortcomings of under-financed public institutions. Furthermore, civil society has sought to represent vulnerable clientele groups, patients, and professionals. In healthcare, these activities include prevention, addressing problems associated with social and spatial inequalities, and fundraising that supports the daily operation of state institutions (Bocz and Kmetty, 2008). In education, NGO activities include educational support programs for disadvantaged communities, adult learning or ‘second-chance’ programs, talent education, civic education and anti-discrimination programs, as well as support for labor market transitions.

However, there have been significant differences in the relations with policymaking between the two sectors. While civil society typically does not take part in shaping healthcare policies and related organizations have embraced a depoliticized, task-oriented framework of operation, a network of activists have been strongly engaged in policymaking in the education sector since before 2010, and policy-makers have considered NGO-led programs hotbeds of innovation that have the potential for system-wide upscaling. Therefore, NGOs that provide education programs for the disadvantaged and Roma communities were more likely to embrace a politicized frame for their mission and there has been a shared understanding that they are engaging with the most crucial systemic injustices associated with the education system. After 2010, civil society actors working in the education sector experienced narrowing opportunities and exclusion from formal channels of consultation. Concurrently, alongside allocating generous funding, the state has invited faith-based organizations to carry out activities previously dominantly provided by NGOs (Neumann 2021).

Due to the quick introduction of preventive measures, including lockdowns, the first wave of the pandemic affected Hungary lightly and confirmed COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants were relatively low in European comparison. However, by the second and third waves the capacity of the healthcare system was exhausted, and by the summer of 2021 the overall death toll per 100,000 inhabitants was the highest in Europe and the second highest globally. The Hungarian government portrayed scientific expertise about the pandemic as fueling political polarization (Körösényi, Szabó and Böcskei 2020). As part of this effort, the teachers’ union, which voiced criticism of the crisis measures in education, was repeatedly accused of using the pandemic for political gain by government officials. In line with its earlier approach to civil society, the government neither sought out cooperation nor undertook the coordination of civic activities. Concurrently, church-run charities received financial and symbolic governmental support: they were included in crisis management efforts as members of the government-led Humanitarian Coordination Council and were entrusted with the coordination of state-managed donations campaign.

Both sectors were governed and managed in a centralized control-and-command style before the pandemic. Framing the crisis as a ‘medical emergency’, the governance of the health sector was assigned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose hierarchical, centralized, and commanding military-style leadership also mandated the closing of all communication channels in hospitals and classifying data about the health crisis. Schools were closed down and education was moved to remote teaching between mid-March and the end of May. The greatest challenges involved the lack of digital infrastructure and the lack of teachers’ and students’ digital skills and competencies. Since those affected by digital poverty received their schoolwork in printed form, educational inequalities were exacerbated. The central administration refused to lower educational expectations and standards, and schools received no additional centrally distributed financial or professional support. Concurrently, schools were given freedom and flexibility to identify adequate pedagogical means of adapting to local circumstances. Therefore, a substantial difference in the opportunities for solidarity in the two sectors was that while the governance of the health sector became even more centralized and tightly controlled, stakeholders of the education sector received unexpected autonomy during the period of remote education compared to the normal centralized approach to the management of schools.

This paper is based on a study by the authors entitled ‘Solidarity as a reaction to the pandemic-induced crisis’, which we conducted with a larger research group. We created our sample of solidarity initiatives in two cycles, first completing a two-week-long online investigation on social media and in online newspapers (70 initiatives), then using a targeted Google search to expand the dataset (242 initiatives). Following the principle of qualitative representativeness, we contacted about one hundred organizations and initiatives. The semi-structured online interviews were conducted between April and June 2020. The interviews usually lasted for 60 min. Following a common interview guide, the interviews started with the respondent's narration of the current solidarity activity and continued with the narrator's broader account as civilian, activist, or volunteer, and covered their views about issues of responsibility during the crisis and beyond.

The research team investigated five areas of solidarity: health and care-work, education, labor and unemployment, social assistance to marginalized communities, and leisure and culture. The analysis described below concentrates on a sub-sample of the 52 semi-structured online interviews. The researchers developed a common code list for the analysis, coded the interviews, and subsequently conducted a narrative analysis. Here, we exclusively focus on healthcare and care-work, and education, related to which we conducted 29 interviews. While the two sectors are similar in terms of the participation of the state and how they became priority areas of crisis management during the pandemic, the analysis highlighted significant differences that enable us to draw theoretical conclusions about the political aspects of solidarity mobilizations.

Even the first interpretations of the pandemic crisis in 2020 drew attention to the fact that – like during other disasters – social solidarity and mutual assistance between people had significantly increased (Hartley and Jarvis 2020; Kövér 2021; Firmin et al.2020). Sik and Zakariás (2021) found that in Hungary the mobilizing effect of the epidemic primarily involved personal relationships (family and friends), and the previously inactive were only mobilized to a smaller extent. Researching political behavior during the epidemic, Mikecz and Oross (2020) found a significant increase in volunteering, especially among the lower-status population, who typically relied on informal relationships rather than organizations. Another study that specifically looked at NGOs highlighted that ‘programs to help those in need’ were oriented around charitable activities, and fundraising. Several organizations reported a temporary increase in donations from private individuals (NIOK 2021; Ökotárs 2021).

In our study, we found three main types of solidarity mobilization in healthcare and education. First, the latter initiatives responded to infrastructural needs stemming from systemic problems. Second, they supported the professional work of caretakers, healthcare professionals, teachers and service-users who lacked skills and expertise. Finally, they directly addressed the special needs of at-risk groups. Most initiatives, recognizing the complexity of social and educational problems, engaged in more than one type of activity.

Initiatives aimed at providing digital infrastructure for educational purposes illustrate the first type. For instance, an NGO concentrating on community building started a donation campaign which successfully provided digital devices to 350 disadvantaged children in nineteen villages by the end of May 2020. Collaborating with friends, the owner of an IT repair company delivered PCs to 40 schools, who could then lend them to families. Projects that produced and distributed personal protective equipment (masks, sanitizers) were typical examples of such initiatives in the healthcare sector. One of our subjects became famous for developing a technology for printing face-shields digitally and organized the production and distribution of around 150,000 masks in a short period of time.

The second type of initiatives concentrated on distributing knowledge and skills to the professionals and users of state-run institutions. In education, such initiatives supported the transition to remote learning with professional and methodological knowledge. For instance, a top-ranking consultant mobilized his network in the start-up and IT industry and organized informatics and digital pedagogical support for schools, students, and their parents. Gathering 300–400 volunteers, he developed a knowledge-sharing platform through which professionals answered incoming questions. In another case, a group of university students gathered volunteers and created an ‘online digital knowledge hub’ for schools and students consisting of study materials, software tutorials, examination-related support, and exercise sheets.

Several solidarity activities initiated by healthcare professionals aimed at alleviating the fear and uncertainty that patients, professionals, and broader segments of society faced. One of our subjects occupies a top-ranking position in a union and is a member of an exceptionally active new civic initiative. She mediated between healthcare professionals and society as well as socially responsible companies in both of her institutional roles: she helped to provide accommodation and transportation for doctors, to distribute protective and sanitary equipment, and to organize testing as well as mental and psychological support for healthcare workers. Her main motivation, however, was to highlight the structural challenges of the sector, and thus find supporters for achieving structural transformation.

Volunteers of civic organizations engaging with care-work and healthcare provided information and established communication channels on the phone and online platforms for care-workers or families with disabled children. Although they were aware of the growing care burden on families, they could not increase their human capacity accordingly. One organization managed a matchmaking Facebook group for family members, nurses and care workers.

After-school programs and peer-tutoring projects addressed the specific needs of at-risk groups in the education sector. It is a principle for the civic organizations running these programs not to work according to the immediate and everyday demands of teachers in normal times (like doing homework with the students): instead of helping with homework, they typically concentrate on community building and developing students’ competences. However, it became much more important to undertake the former tasks during the pandemic. In terms of healthcare, solidarity initiatives expanded the care-work characteristics of family relations to those who could not take care of themselves, such as the elderly, sick, and people with disabilities. Such informal care-work concentrated on satisfying the material- (e.g. doing the shopping and administrative tasks) and mental-health needs (chatting with lonely people).

Most interviewees interpreted their work as directly fulfilling tangible, often material, and sometimes mental and emotional needs. Many emphasized that they did not aim to do more; moreover, they seem to have deliberately avoided making any link with public concerns. However, in several interviews direct help was interpreted in the broader context of social responsibility and collective goods and was connected with a critique of the crisis management of the state. Slightly fewer than half of our subjects aspired to contribute to larger, more enduring change in society. Within this group, the majority aimed to achieve social change on the level of individual attitudes, while a minority aimed at the level of institutions. These findings will be explained in more detail in the following sections, which are organized around the themes of solidarity and collective responsibilities in times of crisis, the assessment of state interventions, and the causes and modalities of avoiding politics on the one hand and the politicization of the frames of solidarity on the other.

Solidarity and collective responsibilities in crisis management and critiques of the state

The major responsibility of the government to handle crisis management tasks was a common expectation of our interviewees, but this replicated actual experience in only a few cases, particularly in relation to church-run charity organizations. Continuing earlier patterns of cooperation and co-optation, faith-based charities that had been invited to collaborate in crisis management with the government emphasized the necessity of hierarchical government control in times of crisis. The head of a charity stated that strict oversight, regulations, and centralized decision-making are necessary and the only way to run healthcare institutions during a state of emergency. He compared the pandemic to a humanitarian crisis when prompt individual needs should be satisfied by organizations who are familiar with and skilled at dealing with disasters.

… humanitarians have a special role in these abysmal catastrophes. (…) in times like this, the attention of the state – and we should include all the branches of the state [here], not only the government but municipalities – (…) so, they cannot focus on individual cases, therefore the goal is to find solutions to [such] mass deficiencies in the most efficient and quickest way. (Head of a church-run charity)

Another charity head experienced that the government positioned itself as a ‘commander’ rather than as a ‘mediator’. However, communication with state secretaries was still intense, especially with the social and health secretary, who requested frequent feedback from church-run charities, and they revised their crisis management accordingly.

However, civilians – both established NGOs and newly emerging solidarity mobilizations – reported to drastically different experiences with the state. Civic initiatives tried to compensate for the lack of human resources by recruiting and preparing volunteers. Yet only those initiatives succeeded which did not need to enter hospital buildings, such as those that produced protective wear and equipment, or prepared meals for healthcare workers. Many voiced that they were not allowed to approach or interfere with the healthcare system. While in other countries state-managed labor-force reorganization and re-skilling as well as volunteer recruitment were important resources, such initiatives were absent in Hungary. The central government regarded the sector as a closed, total system of institutions which required central control, and that only those with qualifications should offer care-work. Healthcare professionals who were working in areas outside epidemiology, such as general medical practitioners, explained that the government neither supported them in managing the crisis, nor consulted professional representatives. Contestations around medical professionals’ rewards, salaries and bonuses signaled the lack of moral and material recognition of their work.

Compared to the whole sample, representatives of solidarity mobilizations associated with healthcare and care-work were significantly less likely to express criticism about structural problems, while actors mobilizing around the education sector were more directly critical of the government and explicitly stated that the government had failed to help those in need. The administrator of a Facebook group that supported digital education by sharing pedagogical resources argued that the reason why their initiative was so well received was that teachers did not receive any support from central administration and, deprived of their professional autonomy, principals were often afraid to act proactively.

Interviewees working at organizations that address digital poverty in disadvantaged communities stressed that they had to take over the role of the state in some locations, but given their scarce resources they could not substitute for public policy and structural intervention.

… what we do is basically the task of the state. (…) They should have intervened and come up with something [some means of providing] access to an internet connection, and [helped] get electronic devices for children. (Educational NGO)

While newly emerging solidarity mobilizations in education were well aware of educational inequalities, their target group was not constrained to disadvantaged groups. Partly, this was due to their understanding that the crisis in education was affecting a broader social stratum, not only marginalized or at-risk groups. Even though these new actors were aware of the grave deficiencies in public education, they typically did not formulate criticism of the government.

This section has highlighted the importance of state involvement and the need for cooperation from the perspective of civic actors and emphasized that only co-opted faith-based charities were invited and allowed to cooperate. The critique of the government's crisis management was a central motif in the narratives of the civic activists who have long been engaged in mitigating educational inequalities. During the pandemic, they worked in policy areas neglected by the state. Those active in solidarity mobilizations in the healthcare sector rarely formulated structural criticism or aspirations for structural change. Interviewees who represented newly emerging grassroots mobilizations were less critical of the government in both sectors in general. They typically took a pragmatic stance, and their critical comments primarily concerned the lack of top-down coordination of the government.

The depoliticization of solidarity

The pragmatic, task-oriented approach of solidarity mobilizations can be partly explained by the crisis conditions which required a rapid response, either because they emerged unexpectedly or because they concerned tasks which have long been unattended by state-run institutions. Most of our subjects emphasized that grassroots solidarity was quicker and more flexible than the slow and inefficient state, and argued that their expertise and help was only needed temporarily until the state could arrive with structural solutions, or their initiatives would be accommodated into state-level crisis management. While these respondents primarily considered their solidarity engagements as ordinary or everyday acts of collective problem-solving (Jakobsson and Korolczuk 2020) or – adopting the concept of vernacular humanitarianism by Brkovic (2017) – vernacular solidarity, many of them also evinced a conscious strategy of avoiding ‘politics’. However, these are not the only reasons why structural problems and the lack of state responsibility were rarely addressed in our interviews.

The de-democratizing regime politicized civic solidarity by constructing antagonism between anti-system, ‘foreign-funded’ organizations and those who act in accordance with ‘national’, patriotic goals. Most of our subjects reacted negatively – usually through voluntary or constrained deflection – when we asked them about the possibilities of improving state provision. As the quote below illustrates, such aversion towards ‘politics’ reveals their relations with the state. They were more open to cooperating in other areas, like with citizens or market actors.

We do not want to deal with politics. It is not our goal, and we do not like it. We managed on our own and thanks to Hungarian citizens, donations, and the businesses who helped through production. We got by on our own, so to say. (Grassroots actor)

One of the creators of a pro-bono initiative that provided meals for medical staff reported that all discussions that went beyond the theme of cooking created conflict. Therefore, they intentionally avoided taking a stance on political issues: ‘we tried to establish an apolitical thing from the beginning which was truly charity work’.

New actors engaging with education expressed similar views about ‘dealing with politics’. Even if they took a stance about the governments’ crisis management personally, they resolutely separated this from their initiatives. Several argued that staying clear of all types of political associations is a prerequisite of their operations.

… as an organization, we distance ourselves from all types of politics. (…) It is hard to judge the political actors in this situation, because … this was just as new for them as for civil society, but they are … less agile and flexible, because their hands are tied with laws and budgets and protocols, and it takes a longer time for decisions to go through. But of course, they could have managed it better. (Grassroots actor)

The administrators of a Facebook group defined their community as a professional arena, and like those who established the pro-bono kitchen and wanted to avoid political debates, they made it a moderators’ rule that all political and market-related content would result in exclusion from the group.

While our conclusions confirm the findings in the literature inasmuch as the depoliticizing of solidarity was identified to be a general characteristic of solidarity and humanitarian work, in the context of the shrinking civil space in which the stigmatization of NGOs has been part of the government's political agenda, we found explicit expressions of the need to dissociate the work of solidarity from the political sphere. Avoiding politics was considered a fundamental condition for operating and maintaining day-to-day problem-solving activities. Apart from with charities, depoliticization was a strikingly strong feature of the narratives of newly emerging, grassroots mobilizations. In their case, depoliticizing narratives went hand in hand with hybridization (Shachar 2020) – the blurring of boundaries between volunteering, care work, and market logics and outcomes (Zentai 2020).

The politicization of solidarity

A smaller share of the sample linked their solidarity activities with an apparent political aim or strategy. Organizations which had dominantly been engaged in advocacy work (e.g. trade unions) or in providing support services to vulnerable groups (e.g. educational support for disadvantaged communities) and had been involved in policy debates beforehand also mobilized during the first wave of the pandemic. Those who stressed the need for cooperation between healthcare professionals and representative bodies (e.g. the Hungarian Medical Chamber and the Union of Hungarian Doctors) thoroughly discussed the systemic problems of the health sector revealed by the crisis. In a context in which hospital directors and employees were forbidden to speak freely to the public, an organization outside the sector whose mission was to increase the visibility of petitions and engage with a larger audience helped to spread the word about civil initiatives through online communication. In collaboration with local civil actors, a religious congregation offered support to locals in crisis. The activist pastor – who took a rather unusual position within our sample – criticized the separation of individual and communal as well as moral and political action and argued for political solidarity based on moral and Christian faith.

While most actors in the education sector were critical of the government's crisis management, only those working in or volunteering for civic organizations interpreted their own activities in a political frame. Four out of the six NGOs in our sample took part in composing an open letter in which they demanded that the educational administration prepare an action plan for managing the crisis and implementing system-level solutions for children left out of digital education. In contrast to the new actors who evaded political questions, in the narratives of those NGOs that had supported marginalized communities for a longer period, the experience of the failure of systemic state support, criticism of the education system, respondents’ personal motivations, and the means and goals of their work were connected organically. These interviewees conceived their work as a sort of political statement. They argued that the pandemic is not an extraordinary event, but one in which pre-existing structural inequalities had become more visible and further accentuated.

… what has been magnified here (…) is the same as what has always been there. I was furious when for a month (…) journalists and everyone else were saying that it is indeed awful and so on, I do not know, people are suffering. I said: ‘no! It is the same as always’ – meaning that these people are living from one day to another like beforehand. Children did not get quality education, like beforehand. (Educational NGO)

The narratives suggested that most interviewees felt a sense of responsibility: as one of our key informants formulated, they had ‘become political in disposition’. However, she added immediately that ‘but this [disposition] does not turn into political action’. Her observation about being political in disposition resonates with the same process of other respondents of distancing from politics, who nevertheless passionately talked about how – beyond the mitigation of suffering or deprivation – they were striving to achieve social change through their solidarity activities. Civil society, they argued, incentivizes citizens’ participation in care-work and helps to disseminate an ethos which renders care for the elderly, sick and disabled part of community, local, and citizenship-based responsibilities. Almost all interviews conducted with volunteers at charities and half of those with NGO-based or grassroots initiatives mentioned these goals. One charity representative spoke about the transformative force of solidarity as follows:

In fact, my role and the role of this organization is not to ‘forward’ help from society to those in need, like a postman. But [rather] to match the two, and to be a type of catalyst. Thus, our job is to do the groundwork for solidarity and develop it every day. (…) It is important for us that solidarity is a question of trust. (…) So, our goal is to build such trust, the social trust that is necessary between different social groups to achieve acceptance. (…) Thus, developing some kind of social consciousness or social transformation or attitudinal transformation is as much part of our mission as those related activities which create the grounds for this. (Head of a church-run charity)

In summary, we found that the depoliticization of civilians in the context of the increasing state control of the civil sector was dominant, but not exclusive. We identified two framings of politicizing solidarity and the ways in which civic helping activities were interconnected narratively with ideas about collective action, responsibility, and social change. The first is similar to what we have called the ‘charitization of politics’ in the context of the refugee crisis (Feischmidt and Zakariás, 2019). In this case, solidarity mobilizations developed on the foundation of pre-existing actors and positions whose former role and voice concerning public concerns became louder in the context of the crisis. The second type of narrative framing highlights how the experience of solidarity mobilizations may lead to a new understanding of public morality.

Expressing the force of civic capacities, solidarity mobilizations exploded in reaction to the shortcomings and failures of the government's crisis management during the first wave of COVID 19 in Hungary, a country where civil society's space has considerably shrunk because of repressive policies. Our study concentrated on the narrative framings of solidarity mobilizations in the context of a divisive and hostile discursive space constructed by the authoritarian government. Consistent with previous research, the current investigation found that emerging civic responses did not fundamentally change the depoliticizing character of the interpretative frames for civic mobilization. Nevertheless, we also proved that the narratives that reflected on responsibilities associated with state-non-state relations and hopes and aspirations for social change revealed the political potential of solidarity mobilizations.

It was a widely used discursive strategy to reject moving beyond direct helping activities and avoid participation in the public sphere. Such a strategy of depoliticizing solidarity was frequently motivated by the fear that, in a hostile political context, being ‘political’ would damage the opportunity for action and cooperation. Therefore, these subjects regarded depoliticization as a prerequisite for their operations. Most believed that the state should play a central role in crisis management; some would have expected cooperation. However, apart from church-run charities, they did not recount positive experiences in this respect. In connection to this, most of our respondents were critical of the government's crisis management and the way it related to civil society. Concurrently, and mostly framed as moral commitment, these depoliticizing narratives were often accompanied by the aspiration of shaping the understandings of social responsibility of others. These narratives represent a particular form of being ‘political otherwise’. The gap between being ‘political’ and being ‘political otherwise’ was accentuated by the authoritarian political context.

Such general tendencies become more nuanced when scoping out the solidarity actions that emerged in the two sectors long dominated by state provision in Hungary. In relation to the whole sample, actors engaged with healthcare and care work were significantly less likely to express criticism about structural problems and to take a public stance. Most followed a practical, task-oriented logic of solidarity. Even though the pandemic strikingly revealed the shortcomings of the healthcare system, only a few respondents aspired to change institutional structures, and even fewer were committed to taking action. Lay civilians who came to help from outside the sector were never among them, thus professionals who had a broad overview of the healthcare system and a vision of structural change did not find support in the community capacities that emerged during the pandemic.

Solidarity initiatives in education responded to neglected areas or failed measures of the government. Since the educational administration did not attempt to assess needs or to coordinate solidarity action, non-governmental actors practically operated independently of the state in the form of an autonomous and self-reliant system. It seems that merely the fact that education was able to escape the clutches of a rigid and bureaucratic system of schooling meant that new channels for cooperation opened up between non-state actors, families, and the teaching profession. Moreover, the crisis opened up space for action for new actors. In healthcare, however, the situation was the opposite: strong centralization, militarization, and the prohibition of communication hampered the opportunity for community capacity to find the form and means of alleviating the crisis, thereby obstructing healthcare professionals from formulating their needs.

Those established civil organizations which survived previous waves of political and symbolic oppression and concentrated on areas neglected by the government before and during the pandemic were most likely to express visions of systemic solutions. However, this mindset did not unfold during the pandemic; rather, it was grounded in their previous praxis. Educational NGOs publicly called on education policy-makers to address the learning losses of children left out of digital education and to prepare schools for their reintegration. Such structural critiques and political commitments, however, could not take hold in broader society, and – ultimately fulfilling the goals of the government's communication – remained within the bubbles of the governmental opposition. These actors framed solidarity explicitly as a political act; in their narratives, structural inequalities, the lack of systemic state responsibility to provide help, their engagement with the institutional system, and the chosen means of solidarity were inherently intertwined.

The authoritarian government's hostile communication about civil society constructed a social space in which new actors were constrained to pick a strategy of depoliticizing and being as pragmatic as possible. Unlike our earlier findings about the politicization of solidarity during the refugee crisis (Feischmidt and Zakariás 2019), neither the crisis induced by the pandemic nor the appearance of new grassroots initiatives reshaped the field of solidarity. Co-opted charities collaborated with the state and deflected structural criticism, and only those few NGOs took a public stance and acted as watchdogs for government failings which had already been doing so. While we found that the first wave of the pandemic mobilized significant community capacity, which played an essential role in crisis management, most of the newly emerging actors further strengthened the pre-existing tendency to depoliticization in civil society. Nevertheless, some of the former expressed the moral aspiration to achieve social change and a desire to emphasize responsibilities at the individual level, opening up the possibility for new interpretations of politics or for being ‘political otherwise’ against a backdrop of a shrinking welfare state and narrowing space for civil society.

We are grateful to the members of the research group who worked with us on the ‘Solidarity during the Covid 19 epidemic’ project (Judit Acsádi, Judit Durst, Domonkos Sik, Ildikó Zakariás, and Csilla Zsigmond), especially to Zsuzsa Sütő and Violetta Zentai. We thank the Center for Social Sciences (MTA) for financial support and our colleagues who encouraged our thinking on the topic: Márton Gerő, Szabina Kerényi, Zsolt Körtvélyesi, Ágnes Kövér van Til, Attila Melegh, Beáta Nagy, Attila Papp Z, Ferenc Péterfi, Andrea Szabó, and three anonymous reviewers.

The Institutional Ethical Board of the ELKH Center for Social sciences found that the research is compliant with the ethics principle of the institution (decision no. FOIG-1/130-13/2022).

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

1

Life expectancy is 75.7 years in Hungary in contrast to the EU average of 80.6.

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Eszter Neumann is a research fellow at the Institute for Minority Studies in the Center for Social Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. She is a sociologist of education and her main research interests lie the area of policy sociology, the sociology of expertise and policy enactment in schools. Her current research concerns populist and neoconservative education policy-making. She is the convenor of the Sociologies of education network of the European Education Research Association.

Margit Feischmidt is research professor at the Center for Social Sciences, Budapest, where she leads the Department for Sociology and Anthropology in the Institute for Minority Studies. She is the editor in chief of Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics and teaches as a full professor at the Institute for Communication and Media Studies, University of Pécs. Her most recent edited book (coeditors Ludger Pries and Celine Cantat) is on civic forms of solidarity (Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Author notes

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