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Email archives of the Civil Circles (Polgari Kor)

During the 2002 parliamentary election campaign in Hungary the political propaganda via electronic mail played an unprecedently important and big role. Open Society Archives decided to collect the documents of this new and in Hungary yet unknown instrument of political persuasion, and we made public our collection soon after the elections (See: Campaign Archives/Kampany Archivum on our web-site).

However, the political campaigning did not stop with the elections. The movement for establishing local Civil Circles nationwide was launched in June, 2002, after the national-conservative coalition lost the parliamentary elections. Former prime minister, Viktor Orban called his supporters for organising small circles in order to take part in the local politics, and also for propagating the political aims and values of the opposition forces (the „true representatives of the nation”) locally. The cells of the civil circles formed a nation-wide network via the Democracy Center which is located in the headquarter of the bigger opposition party, FIDESZ-Magyar Polgari Part (Alliance of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civil Party). The Democracy Center registers the local civil circles and helps them to keep continuous contact with each other, mostly by electronic mail. The mails the Open Society Archives collected and made public inform about the local programs and political initiations of the circles. The vast amount of electronic mails is important and revealing source of the internal cultural and organisational life of a newly shaped political mass movement in Hungary.