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This article analyses the changes that have occurred in the nature of Hungary’s transnational engagement with both its cross-border and wider global diaspora in the years since 2010. State actors and policymakers in Hungary have shifted towards embracing a ‘global nation’ framework that encompasses relations with long-established migrant diasporas, and coethnic Hungarian minority communities in neighbouring countries. This shift has created an increasingly complex institutional environment and changed how and why states like Hungary preferentially target or exclude members of their diaspora, with more focus on finding loyal diaspora members within communities rather than differentiating among different types of external communities. Hungary’s diaspora engagement has become deeply intertwined with the Fidesz party’s attempt to maintain and legitimise incumbent control through a widening menu of illiberal and non-democratic practices, which I term ‘illiberal transnationalism’. This illiberal transnationalism has been produced, I argue, by the evolution of Hungary into a hybrid regime with highly constrained political competition. Almost 15 years of single-party rule since 2010 in Hungary has created a much more closed, more ideological, and less transparent policy system. The nature of the Hungarian political regime has, therefore, had a significant impact on the structure and content of its transnational practices, suggesting that scholars of kin-state politics and diaspora engagement need to pay more attention to regime type in their analyses.