The paper focus on a unique trajectory of Hungary's Adult Learning System - ALS (Desjardins, 2017; Desjardins and Ioannidou, 2020), which has seen remarkable growth from being one of the smallest in Europe in the 1990s to becoming one of the largest by the early 2020s. The evolution of Hungary's ALS since the fall of communism has been significantly shaped not only by the market's deregulation and liberalisation, which enhanced the role of job-related non-formal education, but primarily through deliberate state interventions that began after 2001 and reached a new height of governmental regulation after 2010. The historical development of Hungary's ALS is characterised by two critical institutional junctures (Fioretos et al. 2019; Thelen, 2004) that fundamentally altered the coordination and provision of Adult Education and Training (AET) in the country. The first juncture occurred post-1989 when Hungary began to decentralise its public system of organised adult learning. Unlike many post-socialist states, Hungary maintained a notable continuity between the old regime and the new, sustaining a wide system of adult liberal education throughout the 1990s. During this period, however, the Hungarian ALS transitioned from a centralised, state-centric system to a very liberal model of ALS. Since the early 2000s, the Hungarian state has gradually endeavoured to standardise and regulate the provision of AET, with the aim of enhancing the competitiveness of the national economy and supporting the transition to a knowledge economy (Kalenda, 2024). However, this period of gradual social transformation was eclipsed by another significant juncture that followed the 2010 election of Viktor Orbán’s right-populist government. The new administration implemented a series of policies leading to a "dualisation" (Thelen, 2019) within ALS—narrowly focusing support and provision of AET on specific sectors and targeted initiatives that catered primarily to workers in key segments of the national economy. Notably, the government's proactive strategies included mobilising the unemployed for mandatory work and training programmes that significantly boosted participation rates across the country. These measures, including financially subsidised training for workers in selected sectors, transformed Hungary's ALS into one of the most expansive in Europe, illustrating a profound shift in the scale and scope of its adult education provisions (Kalenda, 2024).

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