Email Archive of the Civil Circles (2002-2006)

Political propaganda via electronic mail played an unprecedented role in the 2002 parliamentary election campaign in Hungary. The Blinken OSA Archivum decided to collect this new, and in Hungary yet unknown, instrument of political persuasion and soon after the elections made our collection public as the Archive of Electronic Campaign Letters.

However, the campaigning did not stop with the elections. After the National-Conservative coalition lost the parliamentary elections in June 2002, former prime minister Viktor Orbán called his supporters to organize small civil circles in order to further the political aims and values of the opposition forces (the "true representatives of the nation") in local politics. Civil circles formed a nationwide network organized through the Demokrácia Központ (Democracy Center), located at the headquarters of the biggest opposition party, FIDESZ-Magyar Polgári Párt (the Alliance of Young Democrats – Hungarian Civil Party). The Democracy Center registers local civil circles and facilitates continuous contact between them, mostly by electronic mail.

The vast amount of electronic mail is collected and put online by the Archivum. It remains an important and revealing source of the internal cultural and organizational life of an emerging mass political movement.