After a boom in foreign-currency denominated (forex) mortgage loans in the 2000s and the resulting debt crisis in 2008-2009, Hungary’s debt management came to be defined by a highly politicised combination of several phenomena: the existence of a large social base at risk of defaulting on their mortgages; the integration of debtors’ struggles into a shift from the post-socialist dominance of neoliberalism to a national conservative political hegemony during the crisis years; and the political foregrounding of forex debt management in the post-2010 Orbán governments’ construction of a new financial model as part of a post-neoliberal authoritarian capitalist regime. The article traces how two main aspects of the forex mortgage crisis, housing debt under dependent financialisation and the problem of limited housing access, became integrated into Hungary’s electoral politics and macroeconomic transformation in the last decade.
Although financialization of housing is well known global concept, in our paper we attempt to present how financialization produces new spaces and household practises in a Central Eastern European semipheripheral context. We approach this framework through an anthropological investigation, the transformation of allotment gardens what we consider as a combination of social and spatial transformations after the 1990s. In our case study we are curious how different waves of financialization influence the formation of the transformation of an informal housing space and how informal practices of the households could be an agency against financialization.