The paper discusses explanations for attitudes towards immigrants before and after
the start of the ‘migrant crisis’. Though the crisis caused changes in peoples’ attitudes
all over Europe, the Hungarian case is special due to the Hungarian government’s intensive
anti-immigration campaign. To explain the circumstances people encountered during
the crisis and the campaign, we first prove that moral panic abounded in society.
Then, we show the background effects which affected the emergence of attitudes towards
immigration in a political context. In the second part of the paper, we introduce
a path model to explain the presumed effect of migration. We analyze this model with
regard to the different political party preference groups, assuming that the government’s
anti-immigration campaign affected people’s opinions and that people with different
party preferences had different attitudes towards immigration: namely, those who were
sympathetic to the incumbent party had more negative attitudes towards immigration.
This effect has two interpretations. The first is that those who sympathized with
the incumbent party were more sensitive to its messages. The other is that those who
resonated more with the campaign changed their party preference to favour Fidesz,
but those who resonated less with the campaign but used to be sympathizers of Fidesz
do not support them anymore. The models show that before the migrant crisis there
were only slight differences between political preference groups regarding how anti-migrant
attitudes arose. However, after the start of the crisis (and the campaign), diverse
processes could be identified in the different political groups, especially in the
case of Fidesz sympathizers.
