Codifying Belonging

Amid numerous global catastrophes, a quieter crisis at home is strikingly overlooked: a direct attack on equality and, effectively, the denial of Roma people’s rights, their freedom of movement, and dignity as European citizens. The newly adopted Hungary’s 2025 Act on the Protection of Local Identity straightforwardly normalises racial exclusion at the local level under the guise of safeguarding “heritage” and “community values,” and directly empowers local governments to determine who may belong within their borders. This is not merely a legal failure but a moral abandonment – a betrayal of the European Union’s foundational promise that citizenship and rights cannot depend on local or racialised boundaries. Moreover, such denial of Roma people’s rights is similarly visible across Europe, where racialised exclusion increasingly takes the form of legislation, policy, or administrative order.

Discretion as a tool of exclusion

Across Europe, new legal and municipal instruments are quietly transforming the principle of equal citizenship into a conditional privilege. Hungary’s 2025 Act on the Protection of Local Identity offers perhaps the clearest codification of this trend. Based on the right to local self-identity, the law empowers the municipal community to “exercise self-defence, which aims to protect and preserve the community’s societal structure, way of life, traditions and customs as well as the municipality’s characteristics.” The municipal community “may prevent the undesired increase of the population of the settlement” and “have the right to determine who may move into the municipality and under what conditions.”

In practice, this new legislation allows mayors and municipal councils to intervene in property transactions and even to refuse the sale of real estate after a personal interview, on the subjective grounds that a prospective buyer does not “fit” into the community. While the law presents itself as a neutral measure to preserve local identity, its discretionary framework provides fertile ground for selective racialized exclusion. From the outset, observers warned that the act could easily become a tool for keeping so-called “troublesome” Roma families away from certain villages.

This concern is not merely theoretical, as informal practices have long been employed by certain municipalities to exclude Roma residents. In some cases, wealthier locals collectively purchased the houses of departing neighbours to prevent Roma families from moving in; in others – as in the town of Mezőkeresztes – the mayor’s office itself bought up vacant properties, claiming that they would later be converted into service apartments or housing for young families. In 2015 the mayor of Mezőkeresztes published an open letter in the town’s official municipal newspaper, urging residents not to sell their properties to Roma buyers arriving from other settlements. In the municipal paper, the town’s independent mayor addressed the population under the title “Let’s Stop the Decline in Property Prices”. He wrote that properties in Mezőkeresztes should be sold or rented only to private individuals or companies with regular income, savings, and the ability to start businesses – a seemingly neutral formulation that, in the local context, functioned as coded language to exclude Roma families. Behind the economic criteria lay a clear social and racial message: only those deemed “respectable” or “prosperous” enough – implicitly, non-Roma – were considered suitable members of the community. The mayor went further, making a concrete proposal for “changing the situation”: he explicitly asked residents that, “if possible, they should not sell their properties to Roma individuals arriving from other towns.” The open letter was also published on the municipality’s official website. Following a complaint filed by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ), the Equal Treatment Authority (EBH) concluded that through this action, the mayor had committed harassment against Roma individuals, thereby violating the principle of equal treatment.

In 2015, human rights organizations and individuals were still able to lodge complaints concerning violations of equal treatment. However, a decade later, the institutional framework for such protection was dismantled. As of January 1, 2021, the Hungarian Equal Treatment Authority (EBH) was abolished, and its responsibilities were transferred to the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights.

The new constitutional clause on “local identity”

The 15th Amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary preceded the enactment of 2025 Act on the Protection of Local Identity. The Fundamental Law was amended on nine points. While critics were quick – and absolutely right – to raise concerns about several provisions of Hungary’s 2025 constitutional amendment, such as the declaration that there are only two genders, the blanket ban on drug use, and the subordination of freedom of assembly to child protection, the amendment’s most tolerated form of exclusion has drawn far less attention. The new “local identity” clause empowers municipalities to decide who belongs in their community. This may not appear the most dramatic of the changes, but it is the most insidious: a legalized mechanism for racial exclusion, as illustrated above especially targeting Roma citizens, quietly normalized under the language of protecting traditions and values. The silence surrounding this provision is itself a form of complicity. Why do we tolerate racial exclusion? The answer is telling: racialization against Roma remains Europe’s most tolerated form of exclusion, as several scholars and activists have articulated over the last three decades.

The case of Teresztenye

Consider the case of Teresztenye, a town in the north-eastern part of Hungary, which has remained “Gypsy free”, as reported by the Szabad Európa media outlet in April 2025, just as the Hungarian Parliament adopted the 15th Amendment to the Fundamental Law. In Teresztenye, not just anyone can buy property. Prospective buyers must first pass through the filter of the real estate agent; if that hurdle is cleared, the final decision rests on the goodwill of the mayor. Back in 2002, the village passed a so-called heritage protection regulation granting the municipality the right of first refusal on every property – a tool quickly turned into a mechanism for screening out Roma. Yet the system faltered when the Sifter family – a middle-class, educated Roma family with two children – succeeded in purchasing a house. Since then, the family has been subjected to harassment by both local inhabitants and the municipality. Ágnes Sifter, the mother and wife, holds both a law degree and a teaching degree, and teaches history at the school in Bódvaszilas. She explains that the real aim of the local regulation was never heritage protection: the municipality wanted to filter prospective buyers and ensure that only those it deemed “suitable” could purchase property in the village.

The Szabad Európa warned that this case could be scaled up through the government’s newly adopted constitutional amendment and subsequent legislation on the protection of local identity, which places powerful legal instruments in the hands of so-called “overcrowded” towns. The Hungarian Minister Tibor Navracsics (former European Commissioner in charge of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport) presented this at some other platforms too as a sugar-coated idea. Yet this very language of formal neutrality – “protecting local identity” and “preserving population balance” – is what makes the law so insidious: by embedding wide discretion in local governance, it enables racialized exclusion without ever naming race, turning prejudice into policy through ostensibly legal means. What emerges is the codification of a racialized social norm into a legal rule designed to filter out unwanted, racialized newcomers.

Hungary’s recently enacted Act on the Protection of Local Identity is a warning sign. Cloaked in the language of “organic development,” “community values,” and the “preservation of traditions,” the law gives municipalities sweeping powers to regulate who can settle, buy property, or become part of a community. Article 2 of the Act on the Protection of Local Identity stipulates:

(1) Based on the right to local self-identity, the municipal community may exercise self-defence, which aims to protect and preserve the community’s societal structure, way of life, traditions and customs as well as the municipality’s characteristics.

(2) Based on the right to local self-identity, the municipal community may prevent the undesired increase of the population of the settlement and may take action against the undesired directions of societal developments.

(3) As a local matter of public interest, the municipal community shall have the right to determine who may move into the municipality and under what conditions.

Even on paper it hardly appears “neutral”, allegedly promising harmony between individual rights and collective interests. In practice, however, it hands local leaders a legal pretext to exclude Roma families and anyone else deemed incompatible with a village’s supposed and assumed “identity”.

Europe’s quiet right to exclude

This is not an Eastern European anomaly. In Italy, the 2007 EU enlargement became a pretext to cast Roma migrants as an “invasion”, amplified by sensationalist media and a racialized murder case. Successive governments under Prodi and Berlusconi responded with sweeping “emergency” laws that suspended rule of law protections, authorized mass expulsions, and even fingerprinted Roma communities – including children. Condemned by the European Parliament as reminiscent of fascist-era persecution, these measures were cynically repackaged as “humanitarian” efforts to provide identity papers. They entrenched the image of Roma as criminals and outsiders, offering other European governments a blueprint for exclusion under the guise of security or social inclusion.

In France, Nicolas Sarkozy’s government followed a similar path. In 2010, it launched a securitized campaign linking Roma and Travelers to crime and social disorder, framing them as a threat to the nation. Under the guise of demolishing “illegal camps,” France carried out mass deportations of Roma migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, despite EU guarantees of free movement. The policy drew sharp condemnation from the UN, the Vatican, human rights groups, and the EU. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding compared the expulsions to Vichy France’s persecution of Jews, but once Paris replaced its directive with a race-neutral memo, Brussels quietly dropped infringement proceedings. Like Italy two years earlier, France disguised a racialized expulsion policy in the language of security and legality – normalizing exclusion while evading accountability.

Denmark went even further. Its 2018 “Ghetto Package” (Case C‑417/23) explicitly targeted neighbourhoods with majority “non-Western” residents, mandating demolition, sales, and mass evictions to slash common housing. In 2025, the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that “non-Western” is simply a proxy for ethnicity – and that the scheme amounted to direct racial discrimination. By stigmatising whole communities as outsiders and justifying displacement in the name of “integration,” Denmark violated the right to housing while legitimizing area-based discrimination against racialized minorities.

The trickle-up pattern is unmistakable across Europe: the elevation of “local identity” and “community character” above the equal rights of racialized citizens. Hungary’s new legislation is the most explicit codification of a broader European drift toward exclusionary localism – a quiet but pervasive redefinition of belonging. Across the continent, municipalities increasingly claim the authority to decide who may settle, who is “fit” to join a community, and who must remain an outsider. What appears as local governance is, in truth, a creeping renationalization of citizenship from below – one that normalizes the right to exclude under the guise of preserving local heritage.

The lesson is clear: when Europe tolerates these experiments in exclusion under the guise of protecting traditions or community harmony, it does more than harm its Roma citizens. It normalizes a politics in which collective (white) majority identity is weaponized against human rights – the very opposite of the values Europe claims to stand for.

If the European political class and its intellectuals wish to be credible, they must first confront the quiet “authoritarianism” solidified within the laws, ordinances, and everyday practices that make exclusion appear natural, even reasonable. This means naming racialized discrimination for what it is, refusing to hide it behind seemingly neutral euphemisms like “local identity,” and enforcing the principle that equal citizenship cannot be subject to municipal veto.

Europe’s role: from condemnation to enforcement

The Hungarian Act on the Protection of Local Identity should be read not only as a national deviation but as a test case for the European Union’s capacity to defend its founding values under Article 2 The Treaty on the European Union. The EU already possesses instruments to address systemic threats to equality and the rule of law – from the Article 7 procedure to the Rule of Law Framework introduced by the European Commission in 2014. Yet these remain largely political and slow-moving, hindered by the requirement of unanimity in the Council and by Member States’ reluctance to act. Strengthening enforcement would require lowering the voting thresholds under Article 7, extending the mandate of the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) to monitor Member States directly, and introducing a “freezing procedure” to suspend national measures that violate EU values and its fundamental rights before they take effect. The European Parliament has repeatedly called for such reform in the annual Rule of Law Cycle – designed to provide early warning and consistent oversights. In 2013 Jan-Werner Müller has proposed a Copenhagen Commission – an independent watchdog to warn the EU of threats to democracy and the rule of law, of the kind now unfolding in Hungary. Implementing these recommendations would allow the EU to act preventively, not reactively, when Member States codify exclusion into law.