Civil Solidarity and Systemic Change: Dimensions of Social Change in the Work of Solidarity-Based Civil Initiatives in Hungary
Abstract
The demand for systemic change often appears in the objectives and communication of Hungarian civil organizations. Following the April 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election campaign and the removal of the Orbán government—which had been in power for 16 years—”regime change” has once again become a central concept in Hungarian public discourse. The article’s main research question is how the role of local solidarity initiatives in social change can be conceptualized. We conclude that local organizations create social infrastructures based on alternative system concepts, visions, community practices, and relationships in areas where the state and the market abandon the population. In the classical literature on social change—including various institutionalist theories focusing on regimes and social movements—local solidarity actors are emphasized only insofar as they are capable of achieving significant political or policy outcomes. However, a key argument of this article is that despite these organizations holding such structural visions, they lack the opportunity to realize them. Consequently, they establish alternative infrastructures in spaces of deprivation to ensure survival, which incorporate both material elements, such as community spaces, and non-material elements, such as critical systems thinking, alternative visions of the future, care as social shaping, the reinforcement of agency, and the creation of alternative social relations. During our fieldwork, we conducted interviews and participant observations in ten Hungarian settlements of varying sizes with civil actors active in education, housing, community organizing, and social services who define local and/or national social change as their objective. This rich empirical material enabled us to examine the role of social infrastructures not only in the metropolitan context prevalent in the literature but also in smaller settlements. Thus, in addition to addressing the role of Hungarian civil organizations in social change, the article also contributes to uncovering the formation and functioning of social infrastructures in non-urban settings.
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