I did not expect four air-conditioning units in Vác to become one of my favourite political developments of July. Yet here we are.

They were installed over two days at the Jávorszky Ödön Hospital, cooling the emergency waiting areas and the triage room, where nurses assess patients before treatment. A second system was planned for the respiratory clinic, covering two examination rooms and the laboratory used for lung-function testing. The hospital described the purpose plainly: improving patient safety as Hungary adapts to changing weather conditions.

I realise how modest this sounds, but in Hungary this is progress all the same. The government spent July recovering access to billions of euros, presenting the largest railway programme announced in the country’s recent history and recalling dozens of diplomats who had represented Viktor Orbán’s foreign policy abroad. Still, I am going to begin with four cooling units.

Last month, I followed Hungary’s democratic transition through constitutional amendments, appointment rules and the recovery of powers that Orbán’s governments had placed beyond the reach of ordinary elections. This month, I wanted to know whether anything had improved outside Parliament.

The answer is yes, although the progress remains incomplete and is occasionally surrounded by government language so confident that one might assume the new metro extension had already carried its first passenger. The clearest evidence appeared first in hospitals. Beyond them, the government reopened a route to European financing, revived transport projects that had spent years suspended between promise and neglect, and began changing the people through whom Hungary speaks to Washington, Moscow and Kyiv.

Then the Danube fell towards a historic low.

At the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, reactors began shutting down unit by unit. The same heat that had made hospital cooling urgent was now slowing trains, damaging crops and narrowing the country’s electricity supply. Hungary’s first visible repairs found themselves racing a climate emergency that had no interest in its political timetable.

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Four air conditioners

The national hospital cooling programme began on 11 June with HUF 3.668 billion, roughly $11.6 million at July exchange rates, set aside for urgent repairs and reconstruction.

The first government survey identified thirty-two projects. The June heatwave exposed failures at another twenty-five institutions, bringing the total to fifty-seven. By 18 July, Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs, by now the government’s improbable dancing legend, reported that eleven projects had been completed. New cooling equipment was operating at ten more locations, where formal handovers were continuing, while fourteen projects were under construction and twenty-two remained in design.

Those figures come from the minister’s progress report, so I will return to them as the summer reaches its closing stages. For now, they establish a useful distinction: eleven projects were complete, ten institutions had begun using new equipment, and work elsewhere ranged from active construction to technical drawings. A plan sitting on an engineer’s desk offers no relief during a heatwave. In Vác, patients can already feel the result.

I know something of the atmosphere inside Hungarian hospitals. I was a clumsy child and spent more time in them than I would have preferred, usually after some fresh collision with a pavement, a bicycle or my own poor judgment. The buildings often frightened me almost as much as the injuries. Their tired corridors and worn rooms carried the sense that the institution itself was struggling alongside the people inside it.

That was around twenty years ago. Too little has changed since.

Hungarians have wanted better healthcare for as long as I can remember, and the scale of the work ahead remains formidable. Staffing shortages, waiting lists, exhausted buildings and deep regional inequalities will require years of sustained attention. That is precisely why a small completed repair deserves recognition. It shows that improvement has begun somewhere more tangible than a government presentation.

Hungary has lived with seasonal hospital cooling failures for years. Each summer brought reports of overheated wards, failed ventilation, postponed procedures and nurses attempting to create tolerable conditions with portable fans. Because every breakdown appeared under the name of a different institution, the country could discuss them as isolated incidents instead of recognising a health service that had normalised unsafe summer conditions.

The new programme suggests a more responsive approach. Officials surveyed the hospitals, began urgent work and expanded the programme after the first heatwave revealed that the initial assessment had missed too much. In sum, the first plan proved inadequate and the government revised it, which should be ordinary public administration and in Hungary feels faintly luxurious.

Cooling systems will not replace missing nurses, shorten waiting lists or restore neglected rural services. They determine whether operations can proceed safely, whether intensive-care staff can work in tolerable conditions and whether patients already weakened by illness must also endure extreme indoor heat. Hegedűs described adequate cooling in operating theatres and intensive-care units as essential to safe treatment.

This is where political change becomes real. A patient arrives frightened and unwell, the triage area remains usable, and the staff can concentrate on the person in front of them. No minister needs to unveil a plaque. I find that more persuasive than another declaration delivered beneath the chandeliers of Parliament.

Europe opens the door

On 10 July, the Council of the European Union approved Hungary’s revised recovery and resilience plan. The agreement should allow €10 billion to be disbursed, comprising approximately €6.5 billion in grants and €3.5 billion in loans, with payments tied to verified reforms and investment targets.

The decision did not place €10 billion at the government’s immediate disposal. It reopened access to funding Hungary had spent years losing.

That is a major achievement after Orbán’s government repeatedly described European scrutiny as an assault on national dignity. Frozen funds became part of a permanent political performance in which Brussels was accused of withholding Hungary’s property, while the legal and administrative conditions attached to the money remained unresolved. Péter Magyar’s government chose cooperation and accepted stronger safeguards around public finance, and the Council’s decision is the first large financial result of that choice.

The success arrived with a demanding timetable. The European Recovery and Resilience Facility closes at the end of August 2026, leaving Hungary to complete agreed reforms and investments under a schedule compressed by years of delay. Some of the funding can reimburse eligible projects already completed, while the remaining milestones still require rapid verification and delivery.

The timetable places particular pressure on procurement. The government has weeks to complete work that should have been organised over several years, and urgency cannot become an excuse for obscure contracts, weak competition or projects selected mainly because they can be finished before the European deadline.

I will also be watching how often the same funding reappears in government announcements. European money tends to acquire several political lives as it moves from an agreement in Brussels to a programme in Budapest, then through a public institution and eventually towards a contractor. Each stage deserves its own description. Approval means that funding has become available under agreed conditions; it does not mean that a hospital has been renovated or a railway has been built.

Three days after the Council’s decision, the European Commission approved a €2 billion capital injection into the Hungarian Development Bank. A public development bank can finance projects whose benefits arrive too slowly for commercial lenders and, therefore, support regional businesses, housing and infrastructure that strengthen communities over decades.

Hungarians have good reason to approach this arrangement with caution. We are all scarred by what happened under Fidesz, when public funds, state institutions and private political networks became so closely intertwined that following the money often required an investigative newsroom and considerable stamina. I remain hopeful that Tisza and Magyar intend to break with that culture, although the public will need evidence in the form of transparent lending criteria, published beneficiaries and contracts that can withstand independent scrutiny.

The government should make each significant loan and investment traceable. People should be able to follow European funding from approval to contract and from contract to the hospital, railway station or electrical substation it was meant to improve. That level of disclosure would allow the new government to demonstrate that European money has returned alongside a different understanding of public responsibility.

Changing Hungary’s voice abroad

The same month, the government began changing the people through whom Hungary speaks to the world.

On 26 June, Foreign Minister Anita Orbán recalled thirty-seven heads of diplomatic missions. Some had reached the end of their mandates, while others were removed under a stated test of representing the new government’s priorities credibly and effectively. Orbán also created a personnel and training division with a larger ambition for the ministry.

“A real profession again.”

The scale was quite extraordinary. The recalls covered almost a quarter of Hungary’s foreign representations and reached Washington, Moscow and Kyiv, the three capitals around which much of Viktor Orbán’s final foreign-policy identity had formed.

Szabolcs Takács had served as ambassador to Washington since 2020 after holding senior positions in Budapest. His embassy operated during a period when Fidesz invested heavily in the American nationalist right and treated access to Donald Trump’s movement as one of Hungary’s principal diplomatic assets.

Look where that got us.

Hungary’s relationship with Washington became so ideologically narrow that Budapest’s influence rose and fell with the fortunes of one American political movement. The next ambassador will need to rebuild contacts across the federal government, Congress, business, defence and the Hungarian-American community. Relations between two countries cannot be sustained through photographs with whichever political faction happens to feel most sympathetic towards the Hungarian prime minister.

Moscow carries a heavier burden.

Norbert Konkoly had led Hungary’s embassy there since 2018, covering Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hungary’s growing isolation among its European allies and the continuation of the Paks II project with Rosatom. His recall suggests that the government is reconsidering the political instructions attached to the post, rather than simply changing the person who holds it.

The Moscow embassy is now led temporarily by chargé d’affaires Gábor Gergics. Hungary currently has no permanent ambassador in the capital that shaped so much of Orbán’s energy policy and international positioning, while the new government decides what kind of relationship it wants with the Kremlin.

Kyiv represents another kind of repair.

Legitimate concerns about the rights of Hungarians in Transcarpathia became entangled with obstruction, election rhetoric and Budapest’s hostility towards the Ukrainian government. Minority rights were repeatedly discussed within a relationship already poisoned by Hungary’s accommodation of Moscow.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the two governments were trying to rebuild the relationship on trust.

“A new, mutually beneficial chapter.”

The phrase establishes a different basis for negotiations. Disputes over education, language rights and Ukraine’s European future can be addressed within a functioning bilateral relationship, rather than being allowed to define every contact between Budapest and Kyiv.

The thirty-seven vacancies now require credible appointments. Washington needs an ambassador capable of working beyond one American political camp. Moscow requires somebody who understands energy dependence, security and the limits of accommodation with an aggressive state. Kyiv needs a diplomat able to defend the Hungarian minority without turning that responsibility into an instrument of permanent conflict.

Language skills, regional knowledge, security experience and independence from party patronage should guide these appointments. The choices made for these three capitals will show whether the promised professional renewal has substance.

A railway plan I want to believe

On 22 July, Transport and Investment Minister Dávid Vitézy joined Magyar at Rákospalota-Újpest railway station to announce the Baross Gábor Railway Development Plan.

The government presented it as a ten-year programme worth HUF 3.55 trillion, approximately $11.2 billion at July exchange rates. Its financing combines HUF 1.8 trillion from the current European budget cycle with commitments from the next cycle, European Investment Bank lending and concession-based investment.

The official announcement gave the programme a grand destination:

“The end of the era of railway destruction.”

Hungarian passengers may wish to reserve judgment until the first replacement bus has been returned safely to its depot.

The plan is nevertheless quite substantial. It proposes thirty-five high-capacity InterCity trains and forty-two low-floor, air-conditioned HÉV suburban trains, alongside station reconstruction, track renewal, stronger regional services and work to remove speed restrictions. The government says it wants to avoid “isolated prestige projects” and pursue a national programme capable of continuing across several parliamentary terms.

Anyone who has travelled regularly by rail in Hungary knows how quickly optimism can evaporate inside an overheated carriage standing somewhere outside Szolnok. Some of the existing vehicles appear old enough to remember the Warsaw Pact personally. Temporary speed restrictions have acquired a permanence that makes the word temporary feel generous, so the programme has inherited a formidable amount of work.

The M3 metro extension is the most recognisable promise within it.

The line would continue north from Újpest-központ through two new stations to Rákospalota-Újpest railway station, creating a direct interchange with routes towards Veresegyház, Vác and Szob. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony greeted the announcement as:

“A historic day for Hungarian public transport.”

The current design ends at Rákospalota-Újpest rather than continuing to Káposztásmegyer, the destination discussed for decades. Transport specialists gave a practical explanation: the shorter version already has permit designs and may still fit within the current European financing period. Continuing to Káposztásmegyer would probably push completion into 2032 or 2033. Even the two-station version requires a contractor to be selected within approximately six months, together with land purchases, utility diversions and detailed construction preparations.

The shorter route would create a useful interchange and preserve the possibility of further expansion, while leaving the historic promise to Káposztásmegyer unfinished. The government should say this plainly rather than presenting the first stage as the fulfilment of the entire plan.

For the first time in years, the extension has an agreed route, an identified funding window and a deadline. Construction has yet to begin, so passengers should probably avoid queuing, but it is promising.

The heat found every weak point

I had planned to end this edition with the trains. It would have been an unusually optimistic monthly report about cooler hospitals, recovered European financing, diplomatic repair and a government directing its attention towards infrastructure people can use.

Then the Danube continued falling.

June had already broken the boundaries of an ordinary Hungarian summer. According to HungaroMet’s monthly analysis, the national average temperature reached 22.5 degrees Celsius, making it the country’s second-hottest June since measurements began in 1901. Rainfall reached only 39.8 millimetres, around 45 per cent below the modern average, while Szécsény recorded a new national high of 42 degrees. On 29 June, the average temperature across Hungary reached 30.2 degrees, the highest national daily mean recorded since the beginning of the twentieth century.

HungaroMet found the right phrase for the month:

“The Carpathian Basin became a Carpathian furnace.”

By late July, the description was visible in reduced production at Paks, restrictions across the railway network, damaged crops and the emergency work taking place inside hospitals.

Hungary’s only nuclear power station relies on the Danube for cooling and normally provides up to forty per cent of the country’s electricity. During July, unusually warm river water forced temporary reductions in output so that the cooling water discharged by the plant remained within environmental limits.

The Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority stressed that nuclear safety had not been compromised. Technical reserves could continue cooling the reactors even if river flow fell as much as ninety per cent below its seasonal level. The reactors remained safe, while normal electricity production became increasingly difficult within the plant’s operating and environmental limits.

As July approached its end, the temperature of the water was joined by a second problem. The river itself was becoming too shallow.

On Sunday, 2 August, Magyar warned that Hungary faced its “five most critical days”. Full generation at Paks was expected to stop from Monday as temperatures approached forty degrees, removing close to two gigawatts of domestic capacity during the most demanding part of the summer.

“Our electricity system, our public utilities and all of us will come under enormous strain.”

The shutdown would arrive at the most difficult point in Hungary’s daily energy cycle. Solar power could carry much of the country’s consumption under the bright afternoon sun, although its output would fall rapidly towards evening while homes, hospitals and businesses remained hot. Gas-fired stations and imported electricity would then have to replace much of the missing nuclear generation, with neighbouring countries drawing on many of the same regional supplies during the same heatwave.

In response, the government prepared a graduated reduction in demand. Large industrial users could face compulsory cuts if voluntary restraint failed, while freight services might be suspended during periods of peak consumption and passenger trains slowed to conserve electricity. Decorative lighting would be extinguished, and companies and households were asked to reduce consumption during the evening.

The crisis moved through the country from one vulnerable system to another. Hospitals required more electricity to keep wards and operating theatres cool just as Paks was losing output. Railway services faced heat-related restrictions, and depleted soil moisture spread the damage across the Great Plain, where European crop monitors recorded severe losses among winter and summer crops.

The World Health Organization has warned that extreme heat should now be treated as a recurring public-health crisis. Interruptions to electricity, transport and water services place additional pressure on hospitals precisely when older people, those with chronic illnesses and outdoor workers face the greatest danger.

The four air-conditioning units in Vác therefore belong to a far larger story. They form part of a healthcare service preparing for recurrent extreme heat while depending upon an electricity system weakened by the same temperatures.

Hungary may survive the immediate emergency through imports, industrial reductions and the eventual restart of Paks. The lasting response will have to be reflected in budgets and construction schedules long after the river begins to rise again. Before next summer, the government should be able to identify which storage projects have been commissioned, which hospitals have completed cooling work, where water-retention schemes have begun and how the grid will carry evening demand when solar production falls.

The country that consumes too much

Hungary’s vulnerability has been shaped by its geography and by economic policies that placed growing demands on electricity and water.

The European Commission’s 2026 country report found that the Hungarian economy uses around seventy per cent more energy than the EU average to produce the same amount of economic value. It also warned that government support for resource-intensive industries, including battery manufacturing, was increasing pressure on systems already exposed to drought and water scarcity.

Successive governments encouraged factories requiring vast quantities of electricity and water while investment in storage, grid flexibility and water retention remained inadequate. In several regions, industrial expansion therefore arrived before the public infrastructure required to sustain it securely.

In a July parliamentary speech, Magyar established his own standard for investment:

“Hungarian water, air, soil and nature are not made to pay the price of profit.”

The energy emergency now gives his government an opportunity to apply those words. Large industrial projects should disclose their expected electricity and water consumption before approval, together with the public cost of the additional infrastructure they require. Local communities should receive environmental assessments early enough to influence decisions rather than merely being informed after contracts have been signed.

The same Commission report estimates that Hungary will need to invest the equivalent of approximately 0.52 per cent of GDP every year until 2050 to address its climate exposure. It has also identified weak coordination among the authorities responsible for energy, agriculture, industry and water.

That estimate should become a permanent line in Hungary’s annual budgets. By the summer of 2027, progress should be visible through completed hospital cooling projects, contracted electricity storage, strengthened water-retention programmes and published adaptation plans for the regions facing the most severe drought.

The Russian knot

The difficulties at Paks revealed the physical concentration of Hungary’s electricity system, while the emergency response drew attention to how much of the country’s wider energy supply still depends upon Russia.

In 2025, more than ninety per cent of Hungary’s imported oil and seventy-four per cent of its imported gas came from Russia. The Russian share of oil imports had increased from the previous year, even as most European countries continued reducing their purchases following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Across the European Union, Russia’s share of gas imports fell from approximately forty-five per cent before the invasion to twelve per cent in 2025. Its share of imported oil declined from twenty-seven per cent to around two per cent, leaving Hungary among the final buyers.

Budapest frequently answered criticism of this dependence by pointing to the construction of additional pipelines and interconnectors. Those routes gave Hungary more options for moving gas across its borders, although the International Energy Agency described their central limitation plainly:

“Diversification of supply routes, not of natural gas supply sources.”

Much of the gas continued to originate in Russia regardless of the country through which it arrived.

Hungary’s landlocked position makes rapid replacement costly and technically difficult, which gives the additional connections genuine value. The previous government nevertheless turned this constraint into a political doctrine. Russian oil and gas were repeatedly presented as uniquely cheap and practically irreplaceable, allowing dependence upon Moscow to acquire the language of national sovereignty.

Diversification had begun before the election. Three long-term agreements with American and European suppliers are expected eventually to cover around twelve per cent of Hungary’s annual gas consumption. Alternative nuclear-fuel arrangements were also signed with Framatome, with deliveries planned from 2027, and Westinghouse, whose deliveries are expected from 2028 subject to licensing. Russian fuel will remain central to the existing reactors until those alternatives arrive and receive regulatory approval.

Budapest also faces a European deadline. A binding EU regulation took effect on 3 February 2026, beginning the permanent phase-out of Russian gas. Russian liquefied natural gas is due to leave the EU market by the end of 2026, while pipeline imports must end no later than 30 November 2027.

The pressure extends into nuclear power.

The proposed Paks II expansion remains tied to Rosatom through Russian technology, financing and contractors. The first concrete for Unit 5 was poured on 5 February 2026, giving the project the formal international status of a nuclear power plant under construction.

Magyar’s government has therefore inherited an active building site rather than a proposal awaiting approval. Excavation has taken place, foundations have begun and substantial legal and financial commitments already exist.

On 24 July, Economy and Energy Minister István Kapitány dismissed Gergely Jákli as chief executive of Paks II and appointed Attila Ságodi. Kapitány had already promised a review of the project’s classified contracts, which the new government said it had not previously been able to examine.

Every available route carries serious costs. Continuing with the existing project could provide the low-carbon electricity Hungary will need as the current reactors age, while preserving a strategic Russian role in the country’s energy supply for decades. Cancellation could generate large compensation claims and leave Hungary without replacement capacity. Renegotiation will depend on the contents of the classified contracts and the extent to which other companies can replace Russian finance, technology and expertise.

The summer shutdown strengthens the case for a broader review of Hungary’s nuclear future. Paks remains central to the country’s low-carbon electricity supply, and allowing that capacity to disappear without reliable replacement would increase dependence on gas and imported power. The summer has also demonstrated the danger of concentrating so much generation at one site beside a river whose behaviour is becoming less predictable, while the project intended to replace the ageing reactors remains bound to Russian finance, contractors and technology.

The review of Paks II must move beyond changing its chief executive. The government should publish what it can from the classified agreements and explain the financial consequences of continuing, renegotiating or leaving the project. Hungarians deserve to know how much has already been spent, which obligations can still be altered and how far alternative companies could replace Rosatom without producing years of delay.

Every available route will be expensive. That is the inheritance.

The first attempt at an answer

The government had begun responding before the Danube reached its lowest point. In June, it opened EU-financed programmes worth HUF 500 billion, approximately $1.6 billion, for electricity-network upgrades and smart meters. Around €1.5 billion from the wider reopening of European funding is expected to support the grid and help connect more than 4,800 megawatts of additional clean generating capacity by 2030.

The Energy Ministry reduced the problem to four words:

“We need to move quickly.”

By August, those words described an emergency rather than a development programme.

Hungary has built solar capacity at remarkable speed, and during the brightest hours of the crisis it carried much of the country’s consumption. The weakness arrives later in the day, when production falls with the sun while buildings remain hot and demand stays high. Storage, grid upgrades and more flexible generation will determine how much of that daytime electricity can still be useful after sunset.

The government does not yet have every answer, and no credible energy policy could be produced in the middle of a five-day emergency. The immediate programme does, however, identify where the work has to begin. Electricity needs to move more easily between regions, renewable production needs stronger storage behind it, and Hungary needs more options when one large source of generation suddenly disappears.

Water policy now belongs inside the same conversation. The low Danube affected nuclear output, while drought damaged crops and increased pressure on local supplies. The government will have to decide which investments deserve priority, where water can be retained more effectively and how industrial development should proceed in regions already facing scarcity. Those choices require hydrologists, energy planners, farmers, local authorities and engineers working from the same projections rather than separate ministerial assumptions.

The first proof will come through construction. By next summer, the public should be able to see which storage projects have contracts, which sections of the grid are being strengthened and which hospital cooling programmes have moved from plans into operating equipment. The emergency has already produced enough speeches.

August will be less patient

The first week of August will examine the government through the electricity system itself.

Paks is expected to remain offline until river conditions permit normal production. Large industrial consumers have been asked to reduce demand voluntarily, with compulsory restrictions available if those reductions prove insufficient. Imports and gas-fired stations will carry more of the evening load as solar output fades.

Ágnes Forsthoffer, carrying out the president’s duties, has invited the prime minister and parliamentary faction leaders to discuss the emergency. Fidesz and the Christian Democrats agreed to attend after weeks of boycotts, walkouts and declarations of resistance.

Their presence will be useful, although their recent conduct offers little basis for romanticism. Fidesz has shown that it can turn a procedural dispute into an existential drama before lunch. The government should publish the technical information presented at the meeting, explain the decisions taken and prevent the energy crisis from becoming another contest of competing rumours.

August will also be the month when several of July’s announcements begin meeting their deadlines.

The recovery plan approved by the European Union must produce verified reforms and completed investments before the facility closes. The government will have to show how much of the available funding has been secured and which projects remain at risk because of delays inherited from the previous administration.

At the Foreign Ministry, thirty-seven recalls must now be followed by appointments. The choices for Washington, Moscow and Kyiv will reveal whether Anita Orbán’s promised professional renewal reaches beyond the dismissal notices. The relevant evidence will be found in the careers, expertise and independence of the people selected.

As summer reaches its final weeks, the Health Ministry also owes the public another accounting of the cooling programme. Hegedűs has reported eleven completed projects and ten more already operating; the next update should show how many of the remaining sites have advanced beyond drawings and whether the systems installed during the heatwave are functioning as promised.

Meanwhile, the railway programme begins its slower passage through design, procurement and permits. The M3 extension has a narrow financing window, and the government has roughly six months to select a contractor if the shortened route to Rákospalota-Újpest is to remain credible.

By the end of August, the new government will have fewer opportunities to rely on the exhilaration of its first announcements. The grid will have faced its first national emergency, European milestones will have reached their deadline and the diplomatic appointments will begin revealing what professional renewal means in practice.

A republic at human temperature

At the Jávorszky Ödön Hospital, four air-conditioning units are now cooling the emergency waiting areas and the triage room.

There is nothing grand about them, which is precisely why I keep returning to them. Hungarian politics spent years producing immense declarations while the physical country deteriorated beneath them. Billboards promised strength and sovereignty while patients waited in overheated wards and passengers sat inside trains whose air-conditioning had surrendered somewhere outside Szolnok.

July began to alter that relationship between political language and ordinary experience. The first evidence appeared in rooms that became cooler and in European funding that became accessible again. It appeared in a railway programme with identified financing, in diplomatic posts cleared for new appointments and in a government willing to revise its hospital plan after discovering that the original survey had missed too much.

Then the Danube fell and placed every achievement inside a harsher landscape.

Hungary is rebuilding public services while the environmental conditions beneath them are changing. The country must modernise its hospitals and railways while preparing for longer heatwaves, weaker river flows and rising electricity demand. It must reduce an energy dependence that previous governments described as unavoidable, even as Europe removes Russian gas from its market and Paks II advances through contracts signed with Rosatom.

The completed hospital work deserves recognition. The larger programmes now require scrutiny until funding produces finished infrastructure and appointments produce credible institutions.

Last month, I measured Hungary’s transition through constitutional clauses and public offices. July brought the transition closer to ordinary life. It could be felt in the temperature of a hospital ward, seen in the falling Danube and heard in the announcement that Paks would stop generating electricity.

I still believe four air conditioners are a good place to begin.

They will not rescue Hungarian healthcare, yet they show what progress looks like before anyone finds a heroic name for it. A room is safer than it was a month earlier. Patients and staff feel the change immediately.

The same standard should now be applied everywhere else.

By next summer, Hungary should have more hospital wards that remain usable during extreme heat, more electricity that survives the journey beyond sunset and a clearer account of how the country intends to loosen Moscow’s grip on its energy supply.

July showed that repair has begun.

August will reveal how far the government can carry it while the temperature rises.

My line of the month

During his parliamentary speech on 13 July, Magyar learned that Gergely Gulyás had resigned as leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group. He looked across the chamber and addressed him directly:

“Today is a great day, Mr Group Leader. From today, you are a free man.”

When I moved from Budapest to Ireland as a child, Hungary became something I had to explain.

Until then, it had simply been the world around me. In Ireland, I met people who knew little about the country, and some could not even place it on a map. I did not mind, though. I was proud to say that I came from Budapest, and I enjoyed telling people about my city, my language and the rich, complicated history that seemed to run beneath everything I remembered.

Distance gave Hungary an outline. Each time I described it, I entered it again.

That pride became harder to sustain as I grew older. Conversations with friends and relatives increasingly focused on what had stopped working, who had left, where they had gone, and what those who remained had learned to tolerate. People I knew reorganised their lives around compromises they should never have been asked to make. Consequently, politics entered family conversations and divided people who had once seemed to inhabit the same country.

Hungary was shrinking around the ambitions of its people.

For a long time, life abroad allowed me to keep some distance from this decline. Hungary could remain a country preserved in childhood memory while its political reality drifted further from anything I wanted to defend. During Viktor Orbán’s final year in power, that distance began to collapse.

In June 2025, around one hundred thousand people joined Budapest Pride after Parliament passed a law targeting the event, and the police prohibited the march. Participants faced possible fines and identification through facial-recognition technology. They came anyway, filling the streets in the largest Pride event in Hungary’s history.

Two days before the April 2026 election, more than one hundred thousand people gathered in Heroes’ Square and the surrounding avenues for the Rendszerbontó Nagykoncert, the System-Breaking Grand Concert. More than fifty Hungarian acts performed during a seven-hour event organised by the Civic Resistance Movement, independently of Péter Magyar’s party. The images showed a heavily young crowd, drawn together by music, humour and the growing conviction that fear had lost much of its authority.

Many of those present had spent their entire political lives under Orbán. They had grown up in a country where public institutions, national symbols and the language of loyalty had been drawn into the orbit of a single government. That evening, the square seemed to belong to these very people.

For the first time in many years, my pride in Hungary belonged to the present.

Magyar’s campaign also changed my response to Hungarian symbols. I had come to find patriotic performances sort of embarrassing. Orbán had bound the flag, folk traditions, family rhetoric and familiar historical references so tightly to his government that each seemed to carry his political meaning. That never felt right with me, even as a child.

On the other hand, when Magyar travelled through rural Hungary, carrying the flag, singing national songs, and reciting poems generations had learned at school, those gestures awakened memories of a home I had missed so gradually that I had barely noticed its absence.

The songs had outlived the government that claimed them.

A few weeks ago, I joined the constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele and the political scientist Rory Truex for a conversation about Orbán’s defeat. Kim made a brilliant point that much of Hungary’s liberal and urban opposition had surrendered the language of patriotism. National symbols became associated with Fidesz, and many of Orbán’s opponents withdrew from them. Magyar understood the cost of leaving that territory uncontested.

He carried those symbols into neglected towns and villages while speaking about the condition of the local hospital, school, railway, and road. Corruption acquired a material form. European funds lost to political favouritism became operating theatres where staff worked in temperatures approaching forty degrees. They became delayed trains, exhausted teachers and public services worn thin through years of neglect.

Hungarian history became a demand placed upon the present.

The recovery of national symbols was meaningful because Magyar attached them to an obligation. Pride in the country would now depend on the conditions in which its people live. The flag carried an argument about competence, dignity and the responsibilities of the state.

The exact argument appeared in ceremonial form when the new Parliament convened on May 9.

The European Union flag returned to the Parliament building after an absence of more than twelve years. Inside the chamber, the ceremony included the Hungarian anthem, Beethoven’s European anthem, the Szekler anthem and Zöld az erdő, widely regarded as the unofficial anthem of Hungary’s Roma. Several representatives took their oaths in Lovari, Beás and Croatian.

Among those watching outside was Károly Baranyi, a Roma former restaurateur. He cried when he heard the song from inside Parliament.

“I love this country,” he told Le Monde.

His words harboured years of exclusion, attachment and frustrated loyalty. They expressed a form of Hungarian identity that public life had long struggled to accommodate. The ceremony enabled more citizens to hear their own histories recognised by the state and suggested that Hungarian belonging could encompass multiple memories and voices while retaining its coherence.

Though, since the election, I’ve been thinking about a question: what kind of country should such patriotism build?

Hungary’s most admired achievements present part of the answer. Its scientific, artistic and intellectual successes were seldom acts of solitary brilliance appearing from an empty landscape. Rather, they emerged from institutions that recognised ability and provided a place for it to develop.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2025 found a country divided between attachment and disappointment. When asked what made them proud of Hungary, 23% of respondents said they felt little pride or offered criticism. History was mentioned by 21 per cent, the Hungarian people by 20 per cent, and innovation by 11 per cent. Hungary was among the few surveyed countries where expressions of dissatisfaction appeared as frequently as the leading sources of pride.

The generational difference was especially revealing. Thirty-one per cent of Hungarians under thirty-five mentioned arts and culture, compared with twelve per cent of those aged fifty and above.

Younger Hungarians already possess the beginnings of a more comprehensive national vocabulary. Their pride reaches towards culture, invention and creativity. Their disappointment often concerns the country’s failure to offer them a future worthy of their abilities.

I recognise myself in that fracture.

As a football-obsessed child, Hungarian greatness commenced with Ferenc Puskás. His name travelled easily, even among people who knew little else about Hungary. Later, my understanding widened to include the mathematicians, physicians, composers, and inventors whose work had infiltrated the lives of people far beyond the country’s borders.

John von Neumann helped design the architecture of modern computing, shaping the logic that now runs almost every digital system on Earth. Eugene Wigner pushed the boundaries of twentieth-century physics so far that they still define how we understand matter itself. Zoltán Kodály reimagined musical education in a way that traversed across continents, teaching children everywhere to hear music not as privilege but as possibility. And Katalin Karikó’s persistence in the face of doubt helped unlock the science behind mRNA vaccines, a breakthrough that changed how the world responds to disease.

The familiar names remain extraordinary; what explains them is not exceptionality itself, but the quiet system that first noticed it in a classroom.

László Rátz taught mathematics at Budapest’s Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium. He recognised von Neumann’s unusual ability while the future mathematician was still a schoolboy and helped arrange advanced tuition for him. He also taught Wigner, who later described Rátz as the greatest among the exceptional teachers at Fasori.

Rátz’s influence extended far beyond his classroom. He edited the High School Mathematics Journal, later known as KöMaL. The journal presented secondary school students with difficult problems, invited them to submit solutions, and published the strongest work with the students’ names. It connected ambitious pupils to a larger mathematical community and gave them demanding standards against which they could measure themselves.

KöMaL first appeared in 1893 and subsequently survived two world wars and successive political systems, with interruptions during the wars, and continues to publish nine issues each year. Its archive contains more than thirty-five thousand pages.

A teacher noticed something rare in a child and chose to take it seriously. A journal turned curiosity into real problems worth wrestling with, not just exercises to be completed. Competitions bridged classrooms with a wider world of mathematicians who could already see what those pupils might become.

The achievements that later appeared miraculous had been prepared in classrooms.

Hungarian musical education developed through a similar culture of cultivation. Kodály joined folk-music research with teacher training, school choirs, composition and musical literacy. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences supported the systematic collection and preservation of folk music from 1933. The educational philosophy that grew from this work remained rooted in Hungarian culture and proved adaptable to other countries and musical traditions.

Kodály’s project contained the kind of patriotism Hungary urgently needs. It treated inheritance as material to be studied, practised and shared. A child could learn where a song came from while developing the confidence to enter a wider world.

Hungary’s most enduring achievements grew through this culture of attention. It lived in classrooms, journals, laboratories, archives, choirs and sporting clubs. Its success depended on adults who considered the discovery of ability a public responsibility.

That history also contains exclusion, departure, and squandered human promise.

Many of the figures later claimed as Hungarian intellectual treasures were Jewish, multilingual or born in territories beyond the country’s present borders. Several completed their most important work abroad. Hungarian institutions helped educate them while Hungarian governments restricted the lives and careers of the communities from which they came.

The numerus clausus law of 1920 introduced nationality quotas into Hungarian higher education and was used to reduce Jewish enrolment to roughly the Jewish share of the population. It pushed students towards universities abroad and contributed to the dispersal of an intellectual generation that Hungary would later claim with pride.

Hungary’s Jewish scientists are inseparable from this history. Their careers reflect both the strength of Hungarian education and the ways in which exclusion shaped its limits. They belonged to a tradition that extended beyond the country’s borders and, in many cases, had to endure or outlast the decisions of Hungarian governments.

The country cultivated minds whose departure it then hastened.

Karikó’s life points to a more recent version of recognition, opportunity and departure.

She grew up in Kisújszállás in a working-class family and had never met a scientist. A high-school teacher repeatedly told her that she could become one. She later recalled that she eventually came to believe him and began to imagine such a life for herself.

She studied at the University of Szeged and continued her RNA research at the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. When funding for her work ended, she left Hungary in 1985 and continued her career in the United States. In 2023, Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.

Her biography begins with a Hungarian teacher recognising ability in a small-town girl. It continues through a Hungarian university and research institute. Its decisive scientific chapters unfolded in American and German institutions after Hungary could no longer sustain her work.

Pride in her achievement creates an obligation. It should compel Hungary to consider how many children with similar potential currently attend schools where such recognition never occurs.

Hungarian education still produces capable students and survives through the labour of committed teachers. Opportunity, however, remains distributed with severe inequality. The European Commission found that differences connected to socioeconomic background are among the starkest in the European Union. In 2023, early school leaving among Roma students was estimated at 58.7 per cent, compared with 9.3 per cent among non-Roma students. Teacher shortages are most severe in rural areas, while disadvantaged schools employ unqualified teachers at rates 2 to 3 times those found elsewhere.

These figures reveal how strongly a child’s prospects remain governed by postcode, family income and ethnicity. They determine whether unusual ability is recognised, neglected or extinguished so gradually that nobody records its disappearance.

I find it difficult to grasp the reality that many important encounters never take place at all.

Orbán built his national story from genuine wounds. The Treaty of Trianon separated communities and left millions of Hungarians outside the country’s borders. Soviet occupation and communist dictatorship created further experiences of coercion, loss and humiliation. These memories remained within family life long after the governments responsible had disappeared.

Orbán compiled them into a permanent ambience of siege.

His kind of politics answered a genuine emotional need. It gave people a language for loss and historical recognition, while grievance became one of the state’s principal forms of belonging.

Orbán’s governments also celebrated Hungarian scientists, engineers, athletes and economic achievements. But these accomplishments fit into a larger story about endurance, national unity, and the protective authority of the state. The National Core Curriculum emphasised common national values, the preservation of traditions and the development of national identity.

Within that culture, curiosity and dissent became increasingly difficult to accommodate whenever they disturbed the government’s account of Hungary. A country capable of extraordinary creativity was encouraged to understand itself through obedience, injury and the repeated discovery of enemies.

Magyar retained the language of patriotism and attached it to the condition of public life. During the campaign, national pride became tied to whether hospitals could function safely, whether trains arrived, whether teachers could remain in their profession, and whether young people could imagine their future within the country.

That standard now applies to Magyar’s own government.

Hungary’s expenditure on research and development fell from 1.63 per cent of gross domestic product in 2021 to 1.31 per cent in 2024. The national figure conceals deep regional inequalities. Budapest spent 2.21 per cent of its economic output on research in 2024, while several counties remained below 0.5 per cent.

The new government has announced changes to the highly centralised school-district system. The Klebelsberg Centre is due to lose its intermediary management role and become a research and professional-support institution. District leaders are to be selected through open competitions. The government and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are also preparing legislation that could reunify the national research network under the Academy.

These announcements suggest that the government understands the scale of the institutional damage.

A government that invokes von Neumann inherits a responsibility towards mathematics teaching. A country proud of Karikó owes its scientists autonomy, time and reliable support.

Hungary’s intellectual flowering unfolded alongside poverty, class hierarchy and antisemitism. Its most celebrated institutions reached only a fraction of the population. Recovering their seriousness now solicits enlarging their reach and carrying their standards into places where talent has too often been abandoned to chance.

Hungary already possesses the prizes, monuments and famous names. Those achievements leave a debt to the institutions that remain and to the generations still waiting to enter them.

Hungarian patriotism should now be judged by the lives and work the country makes possible.

Hungary knows the names it celebrates; its future rests with those it has yet to know.

A note to readers

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Source: Pew Research Center; European Commission; Hungarian Central Statistical Office; Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Nobel Prize; KöMaL; Budapest-Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium; MacTutor History of Mathematics; UNESCO; Associated Press; Telex; Le Monde; Civic Forum transcript; research on Hungary’s numerus clausus and memory politics.

Earlier this month, Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov, used a word with a bluntness that would once have been dangerous in an ordinary Russian mouth.

“There is a war going on, this is a real war.”

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman told state television that Russia had begun with a “special military operation.” The support given to Ukraine by Western governments had since transformed it, he claimed, into something larger.

Russian citizens were imprisoned for using precisely that language. Alexei Gorinov, a municipal deputy in Moscow, received a prison sentence after calling the invasion a war during a council meeting. Thousands of others learned to speak through the Kremlin’s vocabulary, a political dialect designed to make conquest sound technical, controlled and geographically remote.

The abbreviation survives in decrees and broadcasts even as the shelter it provided begins to fail. “Special military operation” placed the invasion beyond ordinary law and daily experience. It suggested a limited undertaking conducted by professionals somewhere beyond the horizon, requiring little from the civilian majority except silence and a periodic display of loyalty.

The other night, my partner was showing me videos from Russia. Most of her family still lives there, scattered across a country large enough for the same invasion to exist as several different realities.

Recruitment notices and military funerals reached Tuva and Buryatia early. Belgorod lived beneath shelling. Poor villages watched young men leave for wages that civilian employment could never match. Moscow carried on beneath illuminated towers and crowded restaurants, while millions of Russians encountered Ukraine through television maps, presidential speeches and the distant phenomenon of cities being destroyed.

The videos my partner showed me came from places that had once appeared safely removed from the fighting. People waited for petrol, watched warehouses burn and stared at damaged industrial sites whose distance from Ukraine had seemed a form of protection. In one clip, an elderly woman, looking at the confusion around her, spoke as though the war had only just started.

For her, the distinction may have felt real. Russia’s full-scale invasion was already in its fifth year, although the burden had entered Russian communities according to a cruel and unequal timetable.

Mediazona and BBC Russian had verified 200,000 Russian military deaths by February 2026. Their map contained 27,000 cities, towns and villages, tracing a cartography of sacrifice that grew darkest far from the political centre.

Tuva had recorded 476 confirmed deaths for every 100,000 residents, while Buryatia had recorded 400. In the Buryat village of Chikoy, ten men had died from a population of 525. Komsomolskoye, a village of similar size, had lost nine. In places this small, death passes through schoolrooms, apartment blocks and family tables until absence becomes part of the local landscape.

Bashkortostan has since become the first Russian region to exceed 10,000 confirmed military deaths, followed by neighbouring Tatarstan with around 9,000. The dead came disproportionately from villages and small towns where military wages could alter the fortunes of an entire household.

Their graves formed the first domestic map of the invasion. Putin’s achievement was geographical: grief remained scattered across remote republics, border districts and provincial settlements, where funerals stayed local, and compensation payments entered household budgets. Distance became political infrastructure, allowing responsibility to dissolve into the immensity of the country.

The arrangement demanded acquiescence more than conviction. Citizens could praise the army, repeat the approved vocabulary and continue with their routines while the invasion extracted its heaviest price from people they would never meet.

Propaganda maintained the haze by renewing the explanation whenever the previous one wore thin. Ukraine contained Nazis, secret laboratories, Western mercenaries and threats to Russia’s historical existence. The operation would defend the Donbas, restrain NATO, reunite the Russian people and protect the motherland from destruction. The stated objectives drifted until the Kremlin simply invoked the “goals of the SVO” without explaining them.

The haze served its purpose. Each new version renewed the public’s permission to surrender judgment to the state and retreat into private life.

Ukraine’s long-range campaign is narrowing that retreat. Its drones and missiles are reaching refineries, factories, warehouses and transport systems deep inside Russia. The damage spans through the commercial and administrative networks that allowed millions of people to live beside the invasion without feeling surrounded by it.

Wildberries is an online marketplace commonly described as Russia’s Amazon, although its reach through provincial Russia gives it a more intimate place in the country’s economic life. It accounts for approximately 52 per cent of Russian online orders and serves between 500,000 and 800,000 sellers. Small manufacturers, craftspeople, clothing companies and electronics traders rely on its warehouses to reach customers across eleven time zones.

In July, Ukrainian drones struck Wildberries facilities near Moscow, in Tambov, Krasnodar, Stavropol, St Petersburg, the surrounding Leningrad region and occupied Crimea. At least nine people were killed, and scores were injured. Ukraine said that some of the facilities supplied equipment and components to Russia’s military. An Associated Press search of the marketplace found body armour, helmets, radios and electronics promoted as suitable for the “SVO,” all moving through the same system as clothes, toys, cosmetics and household goods.

The fires consumed the inventories of thousands of small businesses.

Alexey, an electronics seller, drove to the Wildberries warehouse in Elektrostal after a friend called to say that drones were striking the site. Police had sealed the area by the time he arrived.

“All I could do was watch my merchandise burn.”

Inside the warehouse were around 210 PlayStation 5 consoles, worth between 10 million and 12 million roubles at retail prices. Alexey put his car up for sale to finance replacement stock. A clothing manufacturer lost more than 600,000 roubles of merchandise. Another producer estimated that 2 million roubles of stock had burned, taking another 4 million in expected revenue with it.

Olga, who sold children’s craft kits, described the financial afterlife of the attack in seven words: “None of our obligations have gone away.” The merchandise had vanished while taxes, salaries, rent, supplier invoices and loan repayments remained.

Wildberries had added drone attacks to the force majeure provisions of its seller contract, transferring much of the risk to merchants. The company later announced support and compensation measures, though sellers remained uncertain about how much they would receive or when they might receive it.

For these businesses, the invasion joined daily life through a loading bay. It came as burning inventory, unpaid obligations and the sudden erasure of work that had taken years to build.

The attacks reveal how deeply civilian commerce has become entangled with Russia’s military economy. Warehouses, railways, ports and marketplaces move civilian and military goods through the same arteries. A logistics hub can contain craft kits, game consoles, and components intended for drone production, all stacked under one roof.

The people killed in those warehouses were workers, and many of the sellers whose livelihoods were burned had no influence over the invasion. Russia has imposed this fusion of military logistics and civilian danger across Ukraine on an incomparably greater scale.

The reliability of Wildberries kept the rites of normal life turning across Russia’s immense interior. Small businesses went on trading, customers waited for their parcels, and ordinary consumption endured while Russian forces laid waste to Ukrainian cities. When the warehouses went up in flame, the invasion seemed to travel through the country’s commercial bloodstream.

The same pressure is spreading through petrol stations.

Ukraine carried out more than 50 attacks against Russian refineries, depots and other energy infrastructure between March and late June. Some facilities were struck repeatedly. By June, crude processing had fallen by 25 per cent from the previous year, reaching its lowest level in more than two decades. Petrol production had declined by 17 per cent, while analysts estimated that around one-third of Russia’s refining capacity was offline.

Fuel restrictions reached 56 Russian regions. Filling stations limited the amount sold to each driver, banned sales in cans or suspended operations entirely. Cars waited along roadsides as prices rose and supplies tightened. In Irkutsk, queues lasted long enough for the mayor to order portable toilets near petrol stations.

The war reached people who never saw the drone, moving through channels, delivery schedules and the illuminated signs above empty pumps.

In Bashkortostan, refineries surrounding Ufa have repeatedly come under attack. The region already carries Russia’s highest confirmed absolute military death toll. Families have buried more than 10,000 soldiers, while nearby industrial facilities supplied the economy that sent them to war. Refinery fires, airport closures and petrol shortages now join the funerals in the same landscape.

Ufa once appeared safely removed from Ukraine. Its remoteness has become another asset the Russian state must defend, repair and finance.

The state’s response spreads the disruption further. Russian authorities routinely restrict mobile internet during drone alerts, hoping to interfere with navigation systems and protect potential targets. The policy can disable payments, transport and communications across entire cities.

Around 80 per cent of respondents in an ExtremeScan survey had experienced mobile internet shutdowns, while 70 per cent had encountered restrictions on messaging services. Nearly half described limits on online services as the most painful measures affecting them.

The shutdowns reached Siberia and the Far East, far beyond the regions most exposed to Ukrainian drones. Payments failed at the point of sale, taxi drivers lost navigation, and patients struggled to contact doctors and carers. A defensive measure aimed at the sky felt through every transaction conducted beneath it.

Five days of mobile internet restrictions in Moscow were estimated to have cost businesses between three billion and five billion roubles. Cafés could not accept card payments, taxis operated without reliable applications, and parking systems ceased to function. Demand rose for cash, landlines, pagers and portable radios as the digital skin of a modern capital flickered under wartime pressure.

The Kremlin describes these failures as the consequences of attacks upon Russia, and the disruption is real. The political damage grows from an older promise: the state claimed it could wage a vast war while preserving order at home.

Every cancelled flight, failed payment, and petrol queue makes that promise harder to sustain.

Public opinion reflects a society holding several loyalties and desires at once. Levada Centre’s June survey found that 67 per cent supported the actions of the Russian armed forces, while 64 per cent favoured peace negotiations. Among respondents under 25, support for negotiations reached 78 per cent. But such figures should be treated cautiously as in a political environment shaped by repression, state media and fear of speaking openly; poll results may understate hesitation or dissent.

Concurrently, those figures portray a public capable of affirming the army while longing for an end. Loyalty can survive beside exhaustion, especially in a country where the wrong answer may carry professional, social or legal consequences.

Chronicles applies a stricter measure of wartime commitment. It defines a consistent supporter as someone who backs the invasion, opposes withdrawing troops before its declared objectives have been achieved and wants military spending prioritised over healthcare, education and pensions.

Only 14 per cent met all three conditions in its latest published survey. 42% would support withdrawing troops and beginning negotiations without achieving the invasion’s original objectives. 47% wanted scarce government funds directed towards social spending.

The same survey found that 87 per cent of respondents had experienced war-related consequences in their town or district. Seventy-two per cent had encountered mobile internet outages, 47 per cent had experienced shelling or drone attacks, and 21 per cent had faced fuel shortages. Sixty per cent reported financial decline, job loss or another personal consequence connected to the war.

Chronicles found higher declared support among people exposed directly to shelling and drone strikes. It found lower support where mobile service and electricity failed repeatedly. Fear may drive people towards the state during an attack, while the slow decay of services exposes how little protection the state can provide after the sirens fade.

Ukraine’s campaign will not, by itself, summon an organised anti-war movement. Russia has imprisoned critics, dismantled political opposition and trained millions of people to understand silence as a condition of survival. Private anger can remain sealed inside kitchens and family conversations long after public faith has withered.

The strikes already impose strategic costs. Russia must defend more facilities across an immense territory, repair specialised equipment under sanctions, reroute fuel and disperse air defences. The Kremlin must spend more while asking the population to endure declining services, rising prices and recurring disruption.

Ukraine is forcing Putin to decide which parts of Russia receive protection and which are left to absorb the consequences.

The campaign also cuts into his theory of victory. Putin believes that Russia can endure longer than the democracies supporting Ukraine. Elections, budget disputes and political fatigue will eventually weaken Kyiv’s allies. Russia will continue absorbing casualties, rebuilding equipment and waiting for Western governments to lose interest.

That strategy depends upon domestic costs remaining manageable and geographically dispersed. Grief in Buryatia must remain a local sorrow, attacks in Belgorod a border problem and shortages in Siberia a temporary inconvenience. Coffins can return to provincial towns as long as the civilian majority continues to receive parcels, fuel and mobile service.

The compartments are beginning to leak into one another.

At the end of June, Yandex searches for “when will the SVO end” reached their highest level since the full-scale invasion began. Russians entered the question more than 137,000 times in one week, with Moscow and St Petersburg accounting for nearly 13 per cent of searches during the month.

The language carries its own history. “SVO” remains the state-approved abbreviation for the “special military operation.” Russians continued to use the sanctioned vocabulary while, with growing urgency, searching for the moment it would release them.

Soon afterwards, Peskov appeared on state television and called it a real war. He blamed Western governments, described Ukrainian strikes as terrorism and presented Russia as the injured party. The old narrative persisted in the admission, though the euphemism had lost some of its power.

Political language creates the chamber in which a society understands events. “Special military operation” promised control, expertise and limited sacrifice. The word “war” carries darker cargo: mobilisation, danger, uncertainty and the knowledge that the horizon no longer offers shelter.

For my partner, the invasion often arrives through absence. There is a grandmother she cannot visit, relatives scattered across several countries, and calls that fail when communications are restricted. These losses belong to the long shadow cast by the war, though they do not approach the scale of what Ukraine has endured: the dead, the wounded, the occupied towns, the destroyed homes and the families driven from their country.

Her relatives and friends did not experience the war at the same time or in the same way. Some encountered it through military deaths, while others felt it through rising prices, isolation and the shrinking possibilities of travel. Some continued to discuss deteriorating businesses without connecting them to an invasion consuming Russia’s labour, money and industrial capacity. Their dislocation is real, but it exists on the outer edge of a catastrophe inflicted upon Ukrainians.

Distance allowed these realities to coexist inside one country. They are now pressing against one another.

A seller watches his merchandise burn outside Moscow. A motorist in Omsk discovers that Siberia’s largest refinery cannot protect him from a national fuel crisis. A family in Buryatia buries another young man. A shopkeeper in Moscow loses the ability to accept payment. An elderly woman hears an explosion and speaks as though the war has only just begun.

The invasion has crossed the space between the television and the street.

Western governments should continue helping Ukraine apply pressure across Russia’s military and industrial systems. Predictable financing, air defence, long-range capabilities and tighter restrictions on the equipment Russia needs for repairs can deny Putin the pause he expects.

Sustained pressure makes the invasion harder to finance, supply, repair and conceal. It limits the Kremlin’s ability to restore the appearance of normality while Russian forces continue destroying another country.

Russia can absorb immense suffering. Repression may contain anger, propaganda may turn attacks into demands for escalation, and the state may transfer more of the burden towards regions with little political power. Putin’s system can survive conditions that would destabilise a freer society because endurance has become one of its principal instruments of rule.

Its survival has also depended upon a fiction whose maintenance grows more expensive with every burning warehouse, empty pump and silent phone.

The special military operation is over, and the war has entered the country that was told it would always remain somewhere else.

This week in Hungary delivered another episode of what Péter Magyar likes to call absolute cinema: prosecutors entering a data centre, Viktor Orbán standing outside his own headquarters, and the party that once seemed capable of reaching into every institution in the country announcing that it could no longer reach the internet.

On 21 July, prosecutorial investigators entered a Magyar Telekom data centre on Asztalos Sándor Street in Budapest, where Fidesz hosted part of its digital infrastructure. According to the party and subsequent reporting, investigators sought access to systems containing Fidesz’s internal communications and databases. The party’s website and email service reportedly went offline.

The following day, Orbán appeared on the pavement outside Fidesz headquarters and delivered what amounted to a victim statement. The building had been cut off, he said. The people inside could not get online.

It was a small complaint from a man whose power had never been small.

Over more than a decade, Orbán built a political system in which the boundaries between party and state, private fortune and public authority, personal loyalty and professional advancement became increasingly difficult to locate. Ministers, foundations, state banks, media companies and contractors formed the visible parts of that system. The servers were less visible, though no less important.

Now he stood outside his fallen regime, complaining that it had stopped answering.

There are few images more satisfying than the man who wired the Hungarian state around his political party, claiming that he could no longer connect to the internet inside his own headquarters.

Reporting connected the operation to an investigation involving spending by the National Cultural Fund, though the precise legal basis for accessing the party’s systems remains unclear.

There is, unsurprisingly, an outcry from Fidesz. But Hungarians made a choice at the ballot box, and we have the right to understand what Fidesz has done to us and what it has taken. At the same time, Fidesz can use the speed of the transition and the investigations now underway against Magyar and Tisza. The party appears almost relieved to play the victim and present itself as the defender of democracy.

Still, the scene on Asztalos Sándor Street celebrated a change. The state under the new government had made physical contact with the party's technical apparatus that governed Hungary from 2010 until April of this year.

The transition had reached the servers.

Over the following days, it thrust through the prosecution service, the state export bank, Hungary’s nuclear expansion project and several of the country’s most important cultural institutions. Each action belonged to a different legal category. Searches, criminal complaints, resignations and management dismissals carry different evidentiary weight and different consequences.

Together, they revealed a state commencing to test the powers it had inherited.

The top prosecutor leaves

On 22 July, Prosecutor General Gábor Bálint Nagy announced his resignation.

His statement possessed a sentence that should resonate throughout the entire week:

“The prosecution service must not become an instrument in the struggles of political actors.”

Gábor Bálint Nagy asked for his mandate to end on 25 August. The prosecutor general is proposed by the president and elected by parliament for a nine-year term. The appointment requires a two-thirds majority. Resignation does not require acceptance, although the accelerated timetable created immediate questions about succession and the operation of the prosecution service after his departure.

The statement offered each political camp the interpretation it required.

Fidesz presented the resignation as evidence that prosecutors were being subjected to intolerable political pressure. János Bóka, the party’s newly appointed parliamentary group leader, said the departure showed that Péter Magyar’s government was moving towards direct political control of the prosecution service.

Magyar celebrated the same event as liberation.

“The country has rid itself of another Orbán puppet.”

Many regard Gábor Bálint Nagy as an Orbán loyalist, particularly after a prosecution service that repeatedly failed to pursue cases involving politically connected figures. Hungary’s refusal to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office was one of the previous government’s defining institutional choices.

Following the guarantees

The following day, the government moved from personnel to money.

At its 23 July briefing, the Ministry for the Economy and Energy announced four criminal complaints concerning transactions involving the state-owned Hungarian Export-Import Bank.

Taken separately, the cases involved a hotel, a motorway through central Africa, railway carriages for Egypt and a loan to a friendly foreign government. Brought together, they suggested an unusually unambiguous map of the Orbán economy: private advantage protected by political proximity, public risk concealed inside institutions whose authority had been borrowed from the state.

The first complaint concerned approximately HUF 59 billion ($185 million) in financing linked to a company with business interests tied to István Tiborcz, Orbán’s son-in-law.

According to the government, the decision was taken within two days and breached Eximbank’s internal procedures. Officials referred to suspected disloyal management and related offences.

For now, these remain allegations in a criminal complaint, as prosecutors have yet to establish that an offence occurred.

The second case involved approximately HUF 126 billion, about $395 million, for a proposed motorway between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project was associated with Duna Aszfalt, the construction group linked to László Szíjj, one of the businessmen who prospered most visibly under Fidesz.

The Hungarian state reportedly guaranteed up to HUF 101 billion, about $317 million, of the exposure, despite the financial and political risks surrounding the project. The private company stood to benefit from the concession. Hungarian taxpayers waited at the end of the arrangement, where they would have discovered what had been done in their name if the project failed.

The third complaint concerned approximately HUF 176 billion, about $552 million, connected to the Egyptian railway project involving Dunakeszi Járműjavító and a Hungarian-Russian consortium.

The Orbán government presented the deal as evidence of Hungary’s expanding commercial reach. Whereas, the new Tisza government has focused on dividend withdrawals, subsequent losses and possible negligent or disloyal management.

Those suspicions now rest with investigators.

The fourth case concerned the €1 billion loan Hungary granted to North Macedonia.

The loan bore an interest rate of 3.25 per cent and a full Hungarian state guarantee. Magyar’s government argues that the arrangement imposed a fiscal burden of approximately HUF 90 billion, about $282 million, and reflected political favouritism towards an allied government.

The four transactions differ in purpose, structure and legal status. One touches the business network surrounding Orbán’s family. Another involves a construction company pursuing a concession in Africa. A third sits inside the Hungarian-Russian commercial relationship. The fourth concerns state lending to a politically aligned government.

Their common feature is the transfer of risk.

During the Orbán years, the Hungarian state repeatedly placed its credit, authority and future obligations behind projects whose rewards flowed towards a narrow circle. The risk remained where it had begun, with citizens who had never been invited into the conversation.

Eximbank’s own figures give some sense of the scale. The Hungarian state guaranteed the bank’s obligations up to HUF 4.3 trillion, about $13.5 billion. Around 80 per cent of that capacity was reportedly already in use by the end of June.

The significance of these complaints extends beyond the satisfaction of seeing names such as István Tiborcz or László Szíjj attached to an investigation. Moreover, they concern the intricate ways through which private wealth, foreign policy, and state finance were fused.

The complaints consist of pages, signatures and transaction numbers. Behind them stands a simpler arrangement: the beneficiary close to power, the state behind the debt, and the public at the end of the chain.

Paks changes hands

On 24 July, the transition reached Hungary’s most expensive and geopolitically sensitive investment.

Economy and Energy Minister István Kapitány dismissed Gergely Jákli as chief executive of Paks II and appointed Attila Ságodi as his successor the same day.

Paks II is the planned expansion of Hungary’s only nuclear power station. Its foundations lie in the 2014 agreement signed between the Hungarian and Russian governments. The original financing structure projected a cost of approximately €12.5 billion, with up to €10 billion supplied through a Russian state loan.

The project gave Moscow a long-term position inside Hungary’s energy system. It gave Orbán another vast area of public spending protected from meaningful public scrutiny.

Legislation adopted in 2015 allowed information underlying key project decisions to remain inaccessible for 15 years. A much broader category of technical, commercial and subcontracting information could be withheld for 30 years.

The Orbán government defended those restrictions on commercial and national-security grounds. Their practical effect was simpler: Hungarian citizens were expected to finance one of the largest investments in the country’s history while being denied access to much of the material required to evaluate it.

The European Commission approved the project under state-aid rules in 2017, after closing its procurement infringement procedure the previous year. Those decisions settled specific questions under European law. They did little to resolve the political problem created by a Russian-built nuclear project, financed through a Russian loan and governed through contracts hidden from the Hungarian public.

By the end of 2025, the value of ongoing investment reportedly stood at HUF 528.2 billion, about $1.66 billion. The state had provided approximately HUF 160.8 billion, about $505 million, in additional capital. The company’s balance sheet had reached HUF 645.5 billion, about $2.03 billion.

First concrete was poured in February 2026, formally moving Paks II into the category of a nuclear plant under construction.

The change at the top was visible. The obligations beneath it were not. They remain inside contracts written to survive governments, elections and public curiosity.

István Kapitány’s ministry has begun reviewing the project and its inherited agreements.

The political significance lies in the structure being opened.

Paks II was among the deepest commitments made by the Orbán government. Russian interests, Hungarian public money, European law and decades of secrecy had been welded together inside a project designed to outlast its political architects.

Cancellation would carry enormous financial, diplomatic and legal consequences. Continuation would leave Magyar’s government responsible for an inherited structure it spent years condemning. Renegotiation could lead to delays, compensation claims and further cost increases.

There is no clean way out of Paks II. Every route passes through obligations accumulated by people who expected to be gone long before the final bill arrived.

For now, the government has changed the man at the top.

The cultural administration begins to move

Later that day, three senior cultural officials were dismissed.

The directors of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and the National Széchényi Library lost their positions following a government review. Reporting cited workplace complaints, input from unions and works councils, and concerns about staff safety.

These dismissals inhabit a different category from the search involving Fidesz or the complaints concerning Eximbank.

Their removal still holds broader political significance.

Fidesz ministered culture as an instrument of state power. Museums, theatres, universities, archives and research institutions became parts of a wider campaign to determine who could speak for Hungary, how the country’s history would be presented and which figures would receive the money, buildings and positions required to shape public life.

The system was built through appointments that appeared administrative when viewed alone. Together, they formed an architecture of memory, prestige and permission.

The dismissals showed that the transition had begun to reach this managerial layer of the Orbán-era state.

They also created another obligation for the government. Removing directors requires a signature; building institutions capable of operating independently requires transparent competitions, credible appointments and rules that survive changes in political power. Hungary has seen many waves of replacement presented as renewal, but few governments have left behind institutions strong enough to resist the next one.

Orbán discovers resistance

Fidesz had already prepared its answer.

On 21 July, the party issued what it called a Declaration of Resistance.

“The era of arbitrary rule has returned to Hungary.”

The declaration depicted the constitutional changes adopted by the new parliament as an assault on democratic government. Fidesz pledged peaceful resistance, support for those affected by the new authorities and the systematic recording of alleged abuses.

The following day, Orbán intensified the accusation.

“This new political system is not a democracy. It is tyranny.”

By the time he reached Tusványos in Romania on 25 July, the transformation was complete.

“Instead of opposition self-reflection, we must switch to a politics of resistance.”

I examined the speech itself in The Republic of Viktor Orbán. Here, its importance lies in what it offers Fidesz after defeat, as a doctrine that allows every investigation to be recast as persecution and every former official to be cast as a future martyr.

Orbán has understood that ordinary opposition offers him very little.

Fidesz lost the election decisively. Its support has fallen with remarkable speed. Polling reported in July placed Tisza at 58 per cent and Fidesz at 16 per cent among the wider electorate. Among committed voters, the figures were 74 and 19 per cent.

A party facing numbers like those cannot rebuild itself through committee speeches and amendments to government legislation. It needs a more detailed explanation of its condition.

Orbán is building one.

Electoral defeat is recast as dispossession, investigations as persecution, removed officials as victims of political revenge, and searches, audits and dismissals as evidence that Hungary is living under tyranny. The eventual return of Fidesz is cast as an act of national restoration, almost biblical in scale.

At Tusványos, Orbán elevated the fate of his party into the fate of Hungary itself:

“The question is not what will happen to Fidesz, but what will happen to the homeland.”

To Hungarians, the claim carries the peculiar insolence of a man forgetting the architecture he built. Fidesz and Hungary were made to inhabit the same political body, until a wound to the party could be announced as a wound to the nation, and loyalty to Orbán as loyalty to the country itself. Once that fusion had been completed, anyone who stood outside it, an investigator, a minister, a judge, could be cast not merely as an opponent, but as an alien force acting upon Hungary from beyond its proper body. Orbán’s language should not be dismissed as performance alone. After so many years in which his authority and the authority of Hungary were made to overlap, he may no longer possess a political vocabulary capable of separating his own defeat from the country’s humiliation.

This is what makes the resistance narrative more powerful than a simple lie. It offers an explanation that its author may also have come to believe.

Orbán gave supporters a timetable. He suggested that the real reckoning for Magyar’s government would arrive on its 134th day, when the excitement of political change would meet economic pressure and public disappointment.

The date delivers supporters a promise. Orbán presents the government’s strength as temporary, hardship as the force that will expose its limits, and discipline as the path back to power. Fidesz is asked to remain intact, endure the interval and wait for the country to drift once more towards those who still regard themselves as its rightful custodians.

Orbán is on an endeavour to keep his political class loyal while investigators, ministers and auditors are sniffing out the depth of the corruption beneath his rule.

Former officials must be persuaded that today’s investigation could become tomorrow’s proof of heroism. Businessmen need to believe that the arrangements protecting them can still be restored. Voters must be taught to interpret each accusation as confirmation that their side is being hunted.

The resistance narrative performs all three tasks.

It also gives moral grandeur to a far less noble activity: waiting for the country to fail badly enough for Fidesz to return.

Magyar at Facebook speed

The government has also provided Orbán with material.

The clearest example came before the search, when Magyar attempted to nominate Judit Polgár as Hungary’s next president.

Polgár is one of the greatest chess players in history and a national figure capable of commanding admiration far beyond party politics. Magyar presented her as someone who could serve until the adoption of a new constitution.

“Our country needs unity, peace and a president every Hungarian can be proud of.”

The idea had obvious appeal, meanwhile the process surrounding it was chaotic.

The proposal appeared through Magyar’s social media before anything resembling broad consultation had taken place. Tisza said Polgár had unanimous support inside its parliamentary group. Within a day, she declined.

“I do not feel I have enough strength to take upon myself the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, and therefore I cannot accept the invitation.”

Magyar accepted responsibility.

“The responsibility rests solely with me.”

It was one of his most emphatic statements of the week. It was direct, unqualified and rare in a political culture where responsibility is usually passed around until nobody can remember who first dropped it.

The criticism from some of his own supporters was still instructive. Commenters questioned why a decision of such national importance had been conducted through Facebook. Others asked what purpose the Tisza application served if citizens were expected to monitor Magyar’s personal page throughout the weekend.

Those comments were anecdotal; they were not evidence of national opinion. Still, their substance deserves attention.

Magyar continues to govern at the speed of a movement leader. He posts, announces, provokes and corrects. That rhythm created the momentum that carried him from outsider to prime minister.

His description of Gábor Bálint Nagy as an “Orbán puppet” pleased supporters. His response to Orbán’s Tusványos speech went further:

“There is no point wasting time on a failed mafia boss beyond saving.”

Magyar still moves at campaign speed, but he carries the public with him. He explains each step, reads the comments, joins Reddit discussions, and now takes the case for change on a national tour. The pace is extraordinary; it can be scary, yet the work remains visible, argued over in public, and repeatedly returned to the people whose mandate set it in motion.

That momentum is now passing into law. On 27 July, parliament is due to elect a new Constitutional Court judge for a nine-year term. The following day, MPs are scheduled to vote on the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office and begin debating the full disclosure of the previous system’s secret service activity.

The transition is beginning to acquire durable institutions in full view of the country. Its strength may lie precisely there: in speed joined to explanation, and power exercised before an audience invited to answer back.

What lay beneath the spectacle

By Saturday evening, the week had left behind a strange inventory of server racks, resignation letters, loan files, nuclear contracts, dismissal notices and a declaration of resistance carried onto the Tusványos stage.

Each belonged to a different institution. Together, they revealed the hidden passages of the Orbán state: money moving behind secrecy, loyalty rewarded through appointment, public authority converted into private shelter, and institutions trained to forget whom they served.

Those passages are now being opened. Magyar is moving at extraordinary speed, explaining each step, reading replies, entering Facebook discussions, and carrying the argument across the country. The process is noisy and occasionally clumsy, though it remains visible. For many Hungarians, including myself, politics feels personal, reachable, and meaningful for the first time ever.

After years spent writing about doors closing, there is an odd joy in watching them open. Democracy rarely returns in ceremonial dress. It comes back through late votes, corrected announcements, crowded halls, furious comments and citizens discovering that their questions may alter the next decision. At times, it feels like watching evolution happen in public, one awkward and astonishing movement after another.

This is why the week felt more versatile than its separate scandals and appointments. A state that had been arranged around one man is beginning to recover the use of its own limbs. It is stretching, stumbling, arguing and learning to stand.

This week, the state reached the servers.

These days, Hungary feels unfinished. After so long inside another man’s design, that incompleteness feels very much like freedom.

“There must be a place where things that are indisputable to all of us do not need to be explained,” he said. Everyone present spoke the same language, “politically, historically and culturally.”

Tusványos supplied him exactly that, a setting built on familiar rituals and a loyal audience where sympathetic moderators and a politically attuned community were already prepared to receive his assumptions as national truths.

Orbán had come to explain his defeat without examining it.

The annual gathering in Băile Tușnad, a Romanian town in Transylvania’s Hungarian heartland, began in 1990 as a forum for dialogue between Hungarian and Romanian politicians, students and intellectuals. Under Orbán, it became an elaborately protected stage for his annual interpretation of Hungary and the world. Serious disagreement gradually disappeared from the programme. The leader explained history, and the audience routinely applauded.

From the opposition, he delivered the same sermon.

On April 13, Orbán said, Hungarians had awakened to “a new reality,” something resembling “a bad joke or a tasteless prank.” His country had become difficult to recognise.

The election result was brutally unambiguous. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a clear majority of the vote and a commanding parliamentary majority, a scale of victory that led to the political collapse of the old order. Fidesz was reduced to a distant second, with millions of voters effectively delivering a historic repudiation of Orbán’s system.

Hungary had judged Orbán.

That judgment was the one fact he could not absorb in today’s speech.

“By this, dear friends, they have abolished democracy,” Orbán said, referring to constitutional changes that imposed a retrospective 12-year limit on members of Parliament and could prevent him and other senior Fidesz figures from standing again.

“If the people do not decide whom they vote for, but those in power decide whom they may vote for, then democracy is finished.”

The new government’s constitutional conduct deserves serious scrutiny. Human Rights Watch has warned that the rushed changes, including the removal of President Tamás Sulyok and the president of the Constitutional Court, lacked proper safeguards and risked damaging efforts to restore the rule of law.

The warning is serious, but Orbán’s performance was still revolting.

From 2010 to 2026, his governments used their parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution, redraw electoral rules, reshape constituencies, and steadily bring public broadcasting under control while steering state advertising towards friendly media. Loyalists were given institutional mandates that outlasted elections themselves. Public resources and party campaigning became so intertwined that the line between state and party disappeared.

Not surprisingly, international observers stated that the 2022 election was not a fair contest, highlighting the close overlap between the government and Fidesz campaign organisation. The European Commission later cautioned that media pluralism remained at risk, citing weak safeguards surrounding state advertising, the independence of the media authority, and the editorial independence of public service broadcasters. Orbán demanded that Hungarians accept this as democracy because he kept winning.

The restrictions have now reached his own career, and his commitment to procedural restraint began there.

Under Fidesz, the ballot survived inside a political environment excavated, tilted and fenced by the governing party. Orbán treated the supermajorities produced by that system as sacred expressions of the popular will. Now, another parliamentary majority began using constitutional power against him, and democracy was immediately pronounced dead.

He continued:

“With a personalised, retroactive constitutional amendment, they removed the president of the republic, the president of the Constitutional Court and the chief prosecutor, and with this they abolished the rule of law as well.”

Then the warning appeared.

“This has no significance yet, but it will when we restore the rule of law. Then it will have serious significance.”

The threat was barely concealed. Orbán accused the government of weaponising the law against political opponents, then promised future consequences for those responsible.

His defence of impartial justice came with a list of future defendants.

The phrase “when we restore the rule of law” exposed the deeper arrogance. Orbán still spoke as the authorised custodian of Hungary’s constitutional order. A government elected by a decisive majority could be treated as an illegitimate occupation; meanwhile, its own return would constitute restoration by definition.

Soon, the dictators appeared.

Hungary had become “the new Venezuela, only without the oil wealth.” The new agency created to investigate and recover misused state assets recalled the work of “the communists and Hitler.”

“We know how that ended,” Orbán said.

Venezuela. Communism. Hitler. Each reference piled on the melodrama like a collapsing stack of emergency sirens, attempting to increase emotional pressure while reducing the burden of proof to near zero.

Orbán described party-controlled prosecutors, police raids against political opponents, the intimidation of dissenters, the removal of officials and an atmosphere in which nobody could feel safe. (I guess he has expert insider knowledge of these subjects.)

For us Hungarians who had spent years living under his government, the anger came from recognition: the very man who had spent a decade assembling the order of power was now performing outrage at the sound of it working exactly as it was designed to.

Fidesz watched prosecutors show little interest in cases involving influential Fidesz figures, while public broadcasting gradually became government broadcasting, and state institutions were incorporated into political campaigning. Independent media faced ongoing economic pressure, and public funds were efficiently directed towards families and businesses connected to the ruling elite.

Orbán dismissed these concerns as foreign attacks on Hungary, a familiar framing that had long allowed him to convert domestic criticism into external hostility.

After losing power, he repeated the indictment and placed himself at its centre, as though the system he had built to deflect scrutiny had suddenly been turned against him.

The speech became a confession spoken through accusation, its logic intact but inverted, with every charge revealing more about its author than its target.

Orbán then produced an especially audacious description of modern propaganda.

“Today there is no censorship,” he said. “Reality is simply shouted down.”

He delivered this diagnosis after sixteen years of relentless government campaigning across public television, billboards, social media, and a media empire maintained through state advertising. His government spent vast public resources repeatedly broadcasting political messages on every available surface. Now Orbán was describing that information system as a weapon in someone else’s hands.

The comparison with Venezuela operated similarly, merging investigations, arrests, searches, personnel changes, and parliamentary measures into a single narrative of authoritarian persecution where individual cases became abstract, evidence disappeared from view, procedures lost importance, and any action against a former Fidesz official could be viewed as proof that the entire system was corrupt.

As it goes, this is an exceptionally useful doctrine for a party facing accountability.

An investigated Fidesz politician is recast as a victim; the victim is elevated into a martyr; the martyr is transfigured into a prospective national leader.

During the questions after his speech, Orbán described former counterterrorism chief János Hajdu and former minister Balázs Hankó as men being metamorphosed into heroes through their treatment by the authorities.

The transformation does not require acquittal; investigation itself confers honour, legal jeopardy proves loyalty, and loyalty serves as a qualification for power.

Every allegation can thus be seen as persecution. Every arrest displays courage. Every prosecution reinforces the legend.

Eventually, Orbán acknowledged that Fidesz should examine why it lost.

“We must understand the voters’ decision,” he said. “After a defeat, one must always look at the world self-critically.”

This heightened sense of self-reflection lasted for 9 seconds.

“Unfortunately, we have little time left for this, because freedom is now in danger in Hungary. Therefore, instead of an opposition politics built on self-criticism, we must now switch to a politics of resistance.”

Orbán’s argument is based on the assumption that Hungarians have the memory span of goldfish. He acknowledged the need to listen to voters but then immediately suspended it by declaring an emergency. He often liked to use the power to declare an emergency as a form of political manoeuvring.

Fidesz could now escape the humiliating work of asking why so many Hungarians rejected it, leaving corruption unexamined and the failures of healthcare and education untouched. Inflation, dependence on Russia, institutional decay and the enrichment of politically connected families would be folded into the language of national resistance.

The voters had spoken. Orbán turned their verdict into a siren and called it a crisis.

He eventually set out four tasks for Fidesz, which were to speak against lies, defend the previous sixteen years, stand by its members and resist authoritarianism.

None required the party to reconsider its conduct, and none engaged with the condition of public services, corruption, economic policy, or the collapse of its support among younger voters. The supposed strategic direction announced at Tusványos amounted instead to a posture of self-defence: preserving the record, protecting its own ranks, and waiting for the new government to fail.

Resistance became the way to postpone the explanation permanently.

For too long, every failure was shifted externally until no one in Hungary was ever responsible.

Now, electoral defeat has joined the conspiracy.

Even Orbán’s apology became an exercise in evasion.

“We must admit to you, our own voters, that the prime minister who is now turning the country upside down came from our ranks,” he said. “If there is anything for which I must apologise to you, it is this. He came from among us.”

Four terms in government produced one imaginable cause for apology: Péter Magyar. Bravo.

There was no apology for the public wealth transferred into private hands. No apology for hospitals where families have been expected to supply basic necessities. No apology for teachers subjected to years of centralisation and neglect. No apology for institutions hollowed out and filled with loyalists. No apology for deepening Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy while presenting that dependence as sovereignty. Hungarians must not forget: political memory is short, but we must not forget what Orbán did to our country.

Orbán apologised for allowing the man who defeated him to exist.

Magyar became partly credible because he had witnessed the Fidesz world from within. He understood its privileges, private bargains and cultivated distance between public morality and private conduct. Orbán presented that knowledge as betrayal, whereas millions of voters treated it as testimony.

Then Orbán reached for a psychiatric insinuation.

“So Hungary has now received a rampage in place of sober, balanced leadership,” he said. “I used to have a good laugh at the Americans whenever I read that, over there, the president is subjected to a psychological fitness examination before taking office. But looking at Hungary now, I am no longer laughing. Those Americans must know something after all.”

They do not. This is the typical Trumpian style of feigned institutional seriousness, the same kind of nonsense his hero Trump engages in, a man who could barely be trusted to pass a fork across a table without creating a disaster, let alone survive a psychological fitness test.

Orbán invented an American safeguard to give institutional weight to a personal smear. Generational thinking.

His insinuation was obvious: Péter Magyar might be mentally unfit for office, Fidesz and Orbán say, even as Tisza’s support continues to rise to its highest level yet.

Minutes earlier, Orbán had condemned the laws that would exclude him from future elections. He then invoked an imaginary system in which an opponent’s fitness for office could depend upon a psychological assessment.

Orbán demanded dignity and due process for himself; meanwhile, his opponent was subjected to psychiatric insinuation.

Thus, the former prime minister now speaks of Hungary’s elected leader as a rampaging figure whose mental fitness he questions, calling him an aberration produced by a deceived electorate.

That same contempt extends to those voters.

“Young people were made to believe that everything called European, and everything from Brussels, is good,” Orbán said. Their inexperience had made them easy to deceive.

“We saw this before 2010, but every joke is new to a newborn.”

Young Hungarians have known little else but the Orbán system. It formed the backdrop of their schooling, their encounters with hospitals, their first wages, and the slow, insistent hum of propaganda that accompanied all of it. They watched, almost without being told, as certain families rose with a quiet inevitability, their fortunes thickening in step with political proximity. And then came the departures: friends slipping away one by one, first as a plan, then as a pattern, until leaving Hungary itself became a kind of shared biography.

Orbán heard their verdict and diagnosed it as immaturity.

Their rejection became a product of innocence, foreign seduction and attraction to novelty, an innocence he seeks for that very purpose. His own government escaped examination once again.

This was the arrogance that lay beneath the speech. Orbán treated support for him as though it were proof of political understanding, as if assent itself conferred comprehension. Opposition, by contrast, became a deviation that required explanation, a fault in perception rather than a legitimate judgement.

He applied the same reasoning to the entire election.

“There would really be nothing for us to debate about the twelve years between 2010 and 2022,” Orbán said, because voters had repeatedly given Fidesz a two-thirds parliamentary majority. “There was only a problem with the final four years, to which they said no. They did not say no to sixteen years.”

Fidesz never won two-thirds of the national vote. Its parliamentary supermajorities came through an electoral system written under Fidesz and repeatedly criticised for advantages that favoured the governing coalition. Even in the 2026 election that removed Orbán, international observers found no level playing field and reported systemic advantages that blurred the boundary between state and party.

Orbán transformed seats into absolution.

Every victory sanctified the entire preceding record. The defeat could then be confined to the final term, safely separated from everything that had produced it.

His interpretation grants voters authority only when their judgment confirms his own.

Even after losing, Orbán reserves the right to tell Hungarians what their vote meant.

His treatment of younger voters became still more revealing when he admitted that they see Fidesz as “old, tired and boring.”

A serious political response would have confronted that judgment. Instead, Orbán delivered a strategy based on national deterioration. Hard times, he predicted, would make those qualities attractive again.

Fidesz waits for pain to do what persuasion no longer can. It counts on failure to soften resistance, on disorder abroad to make exhaustion feel like wisdom, on stagnation to pass for safety when everything else has lost its name.

Orbán later said the additional voters Fidesz needed would be delivered by “the political waves created by reality.”

“Economic troubles and economic difficulties,” he clarified.

The former prime minister is waiting for Hungary to suffer its way back to him.

He even supplied a date, drawing on one of the most traumatic episodes in modern Hungarian history. The Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed after 133 days in 1919, and Orbán used that number as a symbolic countdown.

“When the 133 days have passed, and the 134th arrives, watch carefully: resistance will grow day by day, and the camp of freedom will grow.”

The 134th day is a wish disguised as prophecy. It gives supporters a deadline for the collapse they have been instructed to expect. Every autumn price rise, bureaucratic error or public dispute can be presented as fulfilment.

The strategy contains no persuasive new programme; it relies on events punishing voters until they repent.

Orbán’s organisational answer followed the same logic. Fidesz, he said, must serve the “national resistance.”

“Fidesz must now operate as a service centre, an incubator and, if you like, a nursery,” he said. “Fidesz must help the groups and organisations of freedom-loving people.”

Even in opposition, Orbán cannot imagine Fidesz as an ordinary political party.

It remains the organisation that defines the nation, selects its leaders, nurtures its communities and determines which governments possess legitimacy. The party has lost office, but Orbán’s sense of ownership remains intact.

In his worldview, Hungary belongs to Fidesz. Other governments occupy it.

The promise of future “redress” completed the warning.

Once democracy had been restored, Orbán said, “the victims and those who have suffered losses will receive full redress.”

The resistance is already keeping names.

Officials investigating former Fidesz figures have been put on notice. Loyalists are promised restoration; suspects are told they may yet be recast as victims in a future dispensation.

Orbán fears the legal system now moving against his circle, and already imagines the one he might one day turn upon its investigators.

The anger this speech provokes lies in its demand that Hungarians unlearn their own experience.

They are asked to hear the architect of captured institutions denounce capture itself, to watch a man who rewrote the rules of competition declare democracy dead the moment those rules cease to serve him.

Corruption inquiries become a dictatorship. Electoral defeat becomes national disfigurement. Millions of voters are reduced to naïveté, as if they had mistaken their own judgment.

Orbán offers himself absolution and disperses blame outward.

Defeat becomes persecution. Accountability becomes revenge. The electorate is recast as a bewildered audience in a history he still claims to author.

He concedes he no longer governs, but refuses the verdict that removed him.

His democracy is now stripped to its essence: a political order that returns Viktor Orbán to power. Anything else becomes, by definition, betrayal, madness, or tyranny.

Viktor Orbán has finally discovered democracy.

He found it within the narrowing perimeter of his own threatened authority.

Source: Viktor Orbán’s Tusványos speech and question session, July 25, 2026; Telex, National Election Office; OSCE/ODIHR; the European Commission; Human Rights Watch; US National Archives and USAGov.

On the eve of America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Zohran Mamdani sat behind George Washington’s desk at New York City Hall. Recently naturalised Americans stood around him. The desk belonged to the first president. The people beside it had crossed the slow terrain of visas, interviews, declarations and official stamps, and emerged with the right to help decide what the country would become.

“The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place,” Mamdani said.

He turned towards the new citizens and spoke of their “power to determine what America means.”

From Barcelona, those words landed with surprising force.

For far too long, the US has reached me through scenes organised around Donald Trump: a motorcade cutting through empty streets, a ballroom of gold surfaces and fixed smiles, pardons signed with theatrical impatience, immigration agents moving through neighbourhoods with covered faces. Billionaires piling behind him with the vacant expressions of men standing over a butchered republic. In that imagery, America is not a shared project but a stage on which Trump performs ownership, while the rest of the country is reduced to an audience as he claims the right to define the nation.

To my American readers, I should be honest. I have watched Trump with dread, anger and disgust.

The vulgarity catches the eye. The political project beneath it is even more repellent. Trump has turned the presidency into an extension of his grotesque appetite. Federal authority becomes a loyalty test, with agencies and officers pushed to perform submission in public; cruelty is treated as spectacle, law as personal property, and humiliation is directed at people with far less power.

His government has made domination look like a national purpose. Every raid, threat and pardon carries the same message: the powerful may act freely, provided they remain useful to the man at the centre.

From Europe, Trump has made America look smaller, meaner and exhausted. He occupies so much of the frame that the country behind him can disappear.

Then, at Washington’s desk, came Mamdani.

He spoke about immigrants, workers, tenements, hospitals and public institutions. His America remained open to revision. The new citizens beside him had entered its history with full voices.

I had nearly forgotten that an American politician could describe the country without first reciting a litany of enemies.

The speech carried weight because its language was grounded in concrete policies and administrative outcomes. America has produced enough noble sentences to carpet continents. Mamdani’s words lead towards childcare applications, rent renewals, unpaid wages, bus routes and the cost of remaining in New York. His patriotism has a municipal address. It passes through a school form, a housing inspection, a labour settlement, and the morning journey to work.

Watching him, I recognised a political shape I had seen closer to home.

I wrote earlier this year, in The Mayor Who Kept Budapest Open, that Budapest under Gergely Karácsony became “what Hungary looked like when the system failed to completely shut down a place.”

City Hall gave Karácsony no means to dismantle Viktor Orbán’s political order. Instead, his work became one of preservation: keeping part of the country open.

That became unmistakable during Budapest Pride in June 2025. Orbán’s government had rewritten the law to make the march bannable and authorised the use of facial-recognition technology against participants. Police prohibited the event. In the face of all this, Karácsony declared Pride an official municipal celebration, invited people to attend and walked at the front.

Hundreds of thousands filled the streets. The march became the largest Pride gathering in Hungarian history and one of the clearest public refusals Orbán’s government had faced.

For several hours, the state looked smaller than the crowd.

Prosecutors later charged Karácsony and sought a fine. He called himself a “proud defendant.”

“It seems that in this country, this is the price you pay if you stand up for your own freedom and the freedom of others.”

The charges were finally dropped in June 2026, after the European Court of Justice found that the legislation behind the ban violated European Union law.

Pride changed something in me, too. I watched for hours, unable to look away. For the first time in years, pride in Hungary no longer felt absurd. I began writing again soon afterwards. Observation no longer felt sufficient.

Karácsony had turned the city into a form of counter-power. Budapest showed that Orbán’s state could menace, prosecute and bluster without gaining complete control over public life.

Before Hungary could change, some part of it had to remain open enough to imagine change. Budapest kept me open, too. I have lived away from Budapest as well, but sometimes distance can give you clarity. It has always been a home for me, even during the years when Hungary itself became harder to recognise.

Mamdani’s New York carries a related possibility. Budapest preserved democratic space beneath a hostile national government. New York is using municipal power to fill that space with services, organisers and candidates.

The material is aggressively ordinary.

Mamdani’s campaign spoke through the arithmetic of urban life: a rent notice slid beneath a door, a childcare invoice opened at the kitchen table, a bus crawling through traffic, a grocery receipt inspected twice, a wage payment that never arrives.

He won the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary with 573,169 votes in the final round. Andrew Cuomo received 443,229. A margin of 129,940 votes made the familiar description of a lucky insurgent slipping through a crowded field difficult to sustain.

The campaign’s field operation resonated as much as its message. More than fifty thousand people volunteered. Canvassers knocked on 1.6 million doors and held 247,000 doorstep conversations. The videos gave Mamdani visual confidence, and the conversations gave him a city.

I recognise something here from Hungary. Tisza also built political momentum through town squares, railway stations, village halls, handshakes and the slow accumulation of people who realised that their private frustration was shared.

Politics begins to move when it leaves the screen.

The campaign invited ordinary New Yorkers into politics. City Hall now has to repay that invitation in daily life.

New York has opened applications for its first 2,000 free childcare places for two-year-olds. Most will operate from eight in the morning until six in the evening, 260 days a year. The programme has crossed the boundary between a proposal and a public service. It now has providers, opening hours, and a date by which parents can expect an answer.

Suz Kroeber, a mother from Washington Heights, had previously described spending roughly $29,000 a year on childcare after her family failed to receive a public 3-K place.

“Instead of pinching every penny just to cover daycare, we can start thinking about saving for college or retirement,” she said.

Childcare policy lives in quiet territory. It determines whether a parent returns to work, accepts more hours, plans another child or watches a salary dissolve into invoices.

It returns time.

Mamdani’s administration has also completed bus-lane projects serving more than 150,000 daily riders. The plans had stalled before he entered City Hall. His team restarted and completed them.

A few minutes saved on a commute will never dominate cable news. Repeated twice a day, those minutes become meals eaten at home, children collected without panic and sleep recovered from the failures of the city.

Labour enforcement returns something equally concrete.

In January, New York announced settlements worth $5.195 million involving Uber Eats, Fantuan and HungryPanda. The violations affected more than 49,000 delivery workers. Uber also agreed to reinstate workers who were improperly removed from the platform, potentially affecting 10,000 people.

The investigations began before Mamdani took office. Governments inherit laws, civil servants and unfinished cases. Leadership is evident in the decision to move that bureaucracy, especially when the people waiting for it have little money, weak bargaining power, and no easy route into City Hall.

Delivery workers carried New York through storms and a pandemic as app companies controlled their pay, their access to work and their dismissal through a screen. The settlements gave rights written into legislation, the more persuasive form of money returned.

Housing provides the most physical measure of this governing instinct.

Diana De La Pava has lived with her daughter for more than thirteen years in a rent-stabilised building in Jackson Heights. She described failing heat and hot water, termites, collapsing surfaces and an elevator that remained broken for months. Elderly and disabled residents were effectively trapped inside their homes during one outage.

Her building became part of a settlement covering fourteen properties. The owner was required to correct more than four thousand violations and pay $2.1 million.

For De La Pava, public power reveals itself through the temperature of an apartment in winter and whether the lift reaches her floor. A landlord can reshape a person’s life by declining to repair a boiler. A city earns authority when its orders carry enough force to make the boiler work.

The rent freeze approved by the independent Rent Guidelines Board carries this policy into approximately one million rent-stabilised homes. Its effects will arrive with leases beginning in October. For millions of tenants, the largest monthly household expense has entered the realm of democratic choice.

Care in government requires power. It reallocates road space, compels landlords to make repairs, recovers stolen wages and raises money for childcare. It depends on inspectors, contracts, databases and public servants whose work rarely attracts a camera.

Mamdani called this “defiance through compassion” at an interfaith breakfast in February. His executive order protecting immigrant New Yorkers used the phrase 'an administrative shape.' It directed city agencies to examine their dealings with federal immigration authorities and promised protection “regardless of immigration status.”

The order described federal tactics as creating a “culture of fear” around city services. That fear is the intended product of Trump’s immigration policy.

The administration’s revived public-charge rule gives immigration officers broad discretion to consider an applicant’s use of public assistance when deciding permanent residency cases. The uncertainty enters ordinary life, where a parent hesitates before visiting a clinic and a food-assistance form remains unfinished, until a hospital, school or city office begins to feel dangerous.

That same governing morality appears in Trump’s use of presidential power. On his first day back in office, he granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6, including defendants convicted of violent attacks on police officers. He called them “hostages.”

That decision captures what I find most repellent about Trumpism. Clemency becomes the payoff for loyalty, law becomes a weapon for enemies and institutions are humiliated in public so that one man can prove that they exist at his pleasure and can be degraded at will.

Mamdani’s first city budget revealed another use of authority.

He campaigned for higher taxes on millionaires and corporations, measures requiring approval from Albany. Governor Kathy Hochul rejected those proposals. The final $125.8 billion budget preserved services, avoided a broad property-tax increase and added $350 million to the general reserve. A narrower tax on expensive second homes replaced part of the revenue he had originally sought.

Mamdani failed to secure his preferred tax system. He protected the direction of his programme and accepted a compromise whose durability will be tested in later budgets.

New Yorkers appeared willing to grant him time during his first hundred days. A Marist poll found 48% approval and 30% disapproval. An Emerson College survey found that 59% believed he was focusing on issues important to them. The same share said the city remained on the wrong track.

That combination feels recognisably democratic. People can value the direction of a government and remain angry about the city they encounter every day.

Mamdani’s influence is spreading beyond City Hall, showing how endorsements can turn electoral success into a political infrastructure that keeps a movement durable.

In June, all three congressional candidates he endorsed won Democratic primaries. Brad Lander defeated Representative Dan Goldman. Claire Valdez won an open-seat contest. Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated five-term Representative Adriano Espaillat.

A movement becomes durable when it produces more people capable of winning. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez contributes national attention, fundraising strength and congressional experience. Mamdani contributes City Hall, an electoral mandate and an organising network built through millions of conversations. Tenant groups, unions and allied local organisations provide much of the patient infrastructure beneath them.

The appetite for political independence extends beyond New York. Amish Shah defeated a candidate backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in an Arizona battleground. In California, Randy Villegas overcame the committee’s preferred candidate. The DCCC later welcomed him into its Red to Blue programme, an institutional manoeuvre sometimes known as joining the parade after locating the front.

These candidates belong to different ideological traditions. Their victories express a common impatience with political choices that arrive from Washington already packaged and approved.

The United States has seen this municipal politics before. Milwaukee’s early twentieth-century socialists became known as sewer socialists because they concentrated on sanitation, clean water, public housing and honest administration. Their doctrine acquired authority through functioning drains.

Mamdani belongs to that American tradition. His tools are childcare portals, labour settlements, housing courts and bus lanes. Their political meaning grows from their use.

From Europe, this America feels familiar and newly visible.

Gergely Karácsony remains central to my understanding of Mamdani. Budapest preserved another idea of Hungary as the national government tried to narrow the official one. Karácsony kept streets open and insisted that people targeted by the state retained a claim on the city.

Mamdani is giving that municipal defence an economic shape. New York tells immigrants, tenants and workers that they belong, then begins the more formidable work of making belonging useful.

Budapest became a shelter that Hungary's Orbán could not erase. New York may be becoming a workshop for the America that Trump cannot swallow.

The choice facing the United States is visible in how these men use public power.

Trump asks Americans to admire domination. His government rewards allegiance, cultivates fear and turns public institutions into extensions of one personality.

Mamdani asks New Yorkers to examine what government returns to their lives: time, wages, security, mobility and a place in the city. His work is unfinished; nevertheless, its direction is clear.

Trump remains President. I cannot pretend that his grip on the country is either superficial or fleeting. He commands immense power, a loyal following and an administration willing to convert his instincts into policy. The damage is real. Some of it will outlast him.

My hope comes from the America he has failed to consume.

I see it in people knocking on doors, workers recovering wages, parents applying for childcare and tenants organising inside buildings that powerful owners assumed they could neglect. I see it in candidates winning without backing from Washington and in cities insisting that citizenship should be experienced through something more substantial than a flag and less frightening than an immigration file.

Many of you reading this live inside that America. You know its failures, cruelties and contradictions more intimately than I ever could from Barcelona. You also know the neighbourhood groups, unions, teachers, organisers, public defenders, civil servants and local candidates who keep it alive when the national picture becomes unbearable.

From across the Atlantic, Mamdani has made something visible that Trump works constantly to obscure.

The United States remains capable of political invention, generosity and collective effort.

Budapest taught me that a country can remain alive inside a city as national politics solidifies around it. New York suggests that a city can organise that life and transmit it outwards.

America is still there.

At street level, it is getting to work.

A photograph of Péter Magyar and Judit Polgár at a chessboard acquired a second life on Sunday evening.

Magyar had posted it earlier in July. At the time, it appeared to record an encounter between Hungary’s new prime minister and its most famous chess player. Once sixteen figures from Hungarian science, culture and sport proposed Polgár as the country’s next president, the image began to look like a clue.

Magyar endorsed the proposal on July 19. Hungary needed “unity, peace and a president of whom every Hungarian can be proud,” he wrote. He described the presidency as “the highest form of service” and said he would ask Polgár to serve until Hungary adopted a new constitution.

The following day in parliament, Magyar enlarged the argument. The next president, he said, should belong to the whole country, guard national unity and constitutionalism, listen to opposing views and understand the weight of public language. A career in law or party politics was unnecessary. Polgár emerged as the clearest expression of that idea.

Her authority predates Tisza and Magyar’s political ascent. It was accumulated through achievement rather than appointment. She belongs to no obvious faction, carries little of the bitterness attached to Hungary’s established political class and is immediately recognisable abroad. Polgár offers Magyar something rare in Hungarian politics: public authority he can borrow without having created it.

That makes her a persuasive symbolic choice, but it opens another reflection: whether the presidency might actually benefit from a newcomer. Hungary knows Polgár’s achievements in unusual detail, yet her constitutional instincts have no precedent. Could inexperience be an advantage?

A career beyond the categories

Polgár’s public life began with a refusal to accept the category assigned to her.

Born in Budapest in 1976, she was raised with her sisters, Susan and Sofia, inside the educational experiment devised by their father, László Polgár. He believed exceptional ability could be cultivated through intensive education. Chess became the family’s chosen field, and the daughters became its evidence.

Judit soon moved beyond women’s competition. She won the boys’ under-twelve world championship in 1988 and the boys’ under-fourteen title two years later. At twelve, she entered the world’s top hundred players. In 1991, at 15 years and 4 months, she became the youngest grandmaster in history, surpassing the record once held by Bobby Fischer.

According to FIDE’s career profile, she became the only woman to enter the overall world top ten. She reached eighth in the rankings and a peak Elo rating of 2735. Her official press materials record that she remained the highest-ranked woman for 26 years.

The usual language of female exception understates the record. Polgár entered the same tournaments, rankings and title system as the male elite. FIDE lists victories over eleven current or former world champions, including Anatoly Karpov, Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov.

The Kasparov victory came in Moscow in September 2002 during the Russia versus the Rest of the World match. The game used rapid time controls, and Polgár won in forty-two moves. It was a competitive victory over the reigning world number one, though it was not a classical game. Even so, the result carried lasting pride in Hungary, then and now.

Its cultural force exceeded the format. Kasparov had once spoken dismissively about women in elite chess. Polgár later said: “Suddenly, it was clear it is possible for a woman to beat the world champion.” Of the resistance she faced more broadly, she recalled: “I had to play against each of these players and beat them so that they would admit that I was one of them.”

Kasparov endorsed her possible presidency on Monday. He praised her “outstanding intellectual ability,” her worldwide recognition, and her capacity to represent Hungary abroad. He has known her for thirty-eight years and called her an ideal candidate for the transitional period.

His intervention captures the appeal of the choice. Polgár has spent decades representing Hungary before audiences that may know little about Hungarian politics. She carries national prestige without requiring the government to manufacture a biography around her.

Chess also has clear limits as political evidence. It tells us something about her discipline, competitiveness and composure under scrutiny. Though it gives little guidance on how she would handle a dispute between parliament and the Constitutional Court, use presidential powers during a crisis or respond to pressure from the government that nominated her. Her temperament is well documented. Her temperament is well documented, but her constitutional judgment remains untested.

The public figure after chess

Polgár’s work since retiring from competitive play in 2014 bolsters the case that she brings more than celebrity.

She founded the Judit Polgár Chess Foundation in 2012 and became its professional leader. The foundation developed educational programmes, trained teachers and established the annual Global Chess Festival. The foundation says its methods reach more than 50,000 children each year, involving more than 4,000 trained teachers and more than 1,000 institutions. Those figures describe an operation with far greater substance than the usual post-career foundation.

Polgár became a UN Women Planet 50-50 Champion in 2016 and an honorary vice-president of FIDE in 2018. Her public work has concentrated on education, youth and the structures that narrow girls’ ambitions before their abilities can be tested.

“You’re talented, so why not become the best you can?” she has said, summing up the message adults should give girls. She has also called for “a safe environment where girls can feel comfortable among boys and men.”

This is a serious civic record. It shows institution-building, international representation, and a sustained interest in public education. But it leaves unanswered the questions that most divide Hungarian politics: executive power, constitutional limits, the EU, Russia, minority rights, and the design of the state. That absence is not incidental but is part of her usefulness.

The political value of an unwritten record

Polgár has rarely spoken at length about Viktor Orbán, Tisza, Hungary’s conflicts with the European Union, Russia’s war against Ukraine, minority rights or the design of the state. Her public arguments concern education, gender and opportunity. Political doctrine was never part of her job.

The absence allows several versions of Polgár to coexist. Conservatives can recognise discipline, family and individual excellence. Liberals see a woman who dismantled one of international competition’s most persistent gender hierarchies. International audiences encounter a Hungarian success story detached from Orbán’s political brand. Tisza supporters see a public figure with no history in the old opposition.

Each reading is based on her life. Each also fills the space that Polgár has left open.

The presidency would narrow some of the space that Polgár has occupied, but it would also reveal strengths that her public life has only hinted at. Returning a law to parliament, referring legislation to the Constitutional Court, or signing a disputed amendment are all acts that require not just caution, but judgment, restraint, and a sense of constitutional proportion. Even silence in an institutional conflict can be an act of discipline if it preserves the office’s credibility.

Polgár’s distance from politics has protected her independence; the presidency would test whether that independence can become a source of authority. Far from disqualifying her, the office could show that she is capable of defining it in a way that commands respect across political lines.

The office Magyar has in mind

Hungary’s Fundamental Law says the president “expresses the unity of the nation” and “guards the democratic operation of the state organisation.” Polgár fits the first duty with unusual ease. The second would reveal capacities that her public career has not yet required.

The president may return legislation to parliament, refer laws and constitutional amendments to the Constitutional Court, initiate legislation and referendums, and propose or appoint several senior office-holders. A determined parliamentary majority can often prevail, though a president can impose delay, scrutiny and political cost.

Public standing changes the force of those acts. An objection from Polgár could carry unusual weight because her reputation does not depend on Tisza. The same independence that makes her attractive to Magyar could give her greater room to disappoint him.

Magyar has invoked Árpád Göncz, Hungary’s first post-communist president, to argue that the office need not belong to a lawyer. Göncz’s public authority grew from his life as a writer, translator, former political prisoner and participant in the democratic transition. László Sólyom supplied another model: the constitutional lawyer who treated the presidency as an active legal office.

Polgár resembles neither man exactly. She could bring Göncz’s civic legitimacy without his political biography. She lacks Sólyom’s jurisprudential record. Her nomination suggests that Magyar values character, judgment, and national standing as sufficient foundations for learning the constitutional part of the role.

The transitional setting strengthens that case. Magyar has framed the appointment as lasting until a new constitution is adopted, while the current legal framework provides a five-year term. Any earlier conclusion would depend on the transitional provisions of the future constitution. The arrangement could give Hungary a respected figure during a period when the permanent rules remain unsettled.

Magyar’s outsider wager

Polgár’s nomination fits a more expansive ritual in Magyar’s approach to public office. Tisza brought many professional newcomers into national politics, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, businesspeople and public administrators. Its 2026 victory delivered 53.18 per cent of the party-list vote and 141 of parliament’s 199 seats. Voters gave a dominant majority to a movement whose claim to renewal depended partly on people formed outside the established party system.

Polgár would be the most visible expression of that philosophy. Her standing exists independently of the governing party. She could broaden the symbolic reach of the new order and represent Hungary abroad with an ease that few political nominees could match.

Polgár’s symbolic independence is part of what makes the choice compelling, but it also raises questions about how quickly she emerged. Tisza’s MPs were elected to carry out Magyar’s programme. A president may need to delay a law, request constitutional review or force the government to defend a decision publicly. The office gains substance through its capacity to create friction.

The discussion over the speed of Polgár’s emergence should be recorded without swallowing the article. Magyar asked the public for recommendations, then embraced Polgár within hours of the sixteen-person letter. He later said that Tisza had requested names rather than promised a formal consultation, adding that at least ten serious candidates had been proposed. That clarification is constitutionally sound: parliament chooses the president. A brief, transparent consideration of the alternatives would still strengthen a candidate intended to represent the whole country.

Tisza has no electoral need to seek opposition support. It has a political reason to do so. A president whose authority reaches beyond the governing majority would enter office with more room to use it.

The first costly decision

The photograph of Magyar and Polgár across a chessboard now invites more interpretation than the facts can bear. It may have recorded an ordinary game. Its significance may have emerged only later, when a group of prominent Hungarians transformed Polgár from an admired public figure into a plausible constitutional candidate.

The image still captures the logic of the choice. Magyar entered politics by breaking with the system that produced him. Polgár accumulated her authority beyond that system. He is now asking her to carry it into the state.

Her achievements explain the proposal’s instantaneous sway. They offer limited guidance about the decisions that would define her tenure. Presidents face few constitutional tests while receiving ambassadors or representing the country abroad. The difficult moments arrive when a government with a strong mandate wants speed, loyalty or silence.

Polgár would enter office with unusual public admiration, and that standing would matter only if she used it to slow, question, or complicate the majority’s wishes. That is the real trade-off: Magyar wants a president with no political allegiance, and that independence could make the office a more credible check on power. Without partisan baggage, she may have more room to act with judgment and restraint, which would make that independence a strength rather than a weakness. In that sense, Polgár’s appeal may be less a liability than the very source of her authority and exactly what Tisza has long promised.

Source: Telex; HVG; FIDE; Judit Polgár and the Judit Polgár Chess Foundation; UN Women; Hungary’s Fundamental Law; National Election Office.

At midnight tonight, Tamás Sulyok’s presidency ends.

His final consequential act was to sign the legal measure that discharges him from office.

The announcement came in a recorded address released on Saturday evening. Sulyok spoke about law, institutional dignity and arbitrary power, subjects that had rarely shaped his public conduct during his two years at Sándor Palace.

“For me, all power can only be understood within the framework of law,” he said. He described the decision as “the final seal of my respect for the institution.”

Then he signed.

During the previous week, Sulyok had called the Seventeenth Amendment a “breaking point” in Hungarian constitutional history. He said it violated democracy, the separation of powers and the principles of a state governed by law. In his account, the legal order established after the collapse of communism had reached its end.

His formal analysis left little scope for resistance. Hungary’s head of state may challenge defects in the procedure used to alter the Fundamental Law. The office lacks the authority to reject the content of a procedurally valid revision. Once Parliament approved the text, Sulyok concluded that refusal would violate his own obligations.

Viktor Orbán’s institutional design had reduced the presidency’s capacity to restrain a government commanding a two-thirds majority in Parliament. That design now governed Sulyok’s departure.

His term expires automatically at the beginning of Monday, July 20. Ágnes Forsthoffer, the Speaker of Parliament, will exercise the powers of the head of state until lawmakers choose a successor. Hungary will have no vacancy in the presidency. The authority will be peacefully transferred at midnight.

The vote

Parliament approved the amendment on Monday evening, July 13. The final count was 139 votes in favour, six against and no abstentions. Mi Hazánk supplied the six opposing votes. Fidesz and KDNP boycotted the sitting. Fifty-four members did not participate.

Fidesz had shaped Hungary’s foundational law throughout its period in government. On Monday, the party declined to defend that architecture from the parliamentary benches. Orbán was already travelling to the United States for the final stages of the football World Cup. Mi Hazánk registered the only formal opposition.

The package passed through a chamber in which Tisza controls 141 of 199 seats, and its reach extends well beyond the change at Sándor Palace.

The new provisions terminate Sulyok’s term and reinstate an age ceiling that will remove four sitting Constitutional Court judges on September 1, including the body’s president, Péter Polt. They alter the selection of senior judicial leaders, restore review over significant tax and budget legislation, and remove the Budget Council’s authority to prevent adoption of the state budget.

Nineteen references to two-thirds legislation have been deleted or rewritten. Large areas of policy will return to ordinary parliamentary control. The text also grants formal standing to the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, which the administration intends to use to recover public property and funds transferred during the Orbán period.

The independent Parliamentary Guard will disappear. Future presidents of the Kúria, Hungary’s Supreme Court, and the National Office for the Judiciary will receive shorter terms. New Constitutional Court judges will serve for 9 years. Members of the Court will select their own president for a term of three years.

The revision reopens bodies that Fidesz had shielded from electoral turnover.

Polt’s departure carries particular symbolic weight. Before moving to the Constitutional Court, he served as chief prosecutor and led an office repeatedly criticised for its treatment of corruption involving senior figures around Fidesz.

To many Hungarians, his position represented an assurance that politically sensitive cases could be delayed, narrowed or lost inside the procedure. Prosecutions will depend on investigators, prosecutors and courts. His departure still ends an arrangement closely associated with the former governing elite’s protection.

The provision that has attracted the greatest controversy establishes a lifetime limit on parliamentary service. Anyone who has completed twelve years as an MP or won election three times will become ineligible to stand again. Previous service counts. Current members may finish the present term.

A European Parliament review published in 2025 found no equivalent limit in any of the European Union's national legislatures. Term limits remain rare across parliamentary democracies. Systems that use them generally focus on consecutive service instead of permanent exclusion.

Hungary’s clause counts the time accumulated before the rule existed. Its immediate effect falls heavily on politicians from the defeated governing parties.

Péter Magyar defended the measure with a phrase drawn from property law. “A parliamentary seat is not an entail,” he said, referring to an inheritance designed to remain within one family.

I can’t say that I disagree with that statement.

The first consequence

Before the vote began, Gergely Gulyás resigned as leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group.

Gulyás has served as an MP since 2010. The revised eligibility rule prevents him from standing in the next election. He will retain his current seat and remain a member of Fidesz. He said the largest opposition caucus needed a leader capable of taking it into the next campaign.

His resignation provided the first immediate political consequence of the new limitation.

Only nineteen of Fidesz’s forty-four MPs remain eligible to lead the caucus into the 2030 election under the new rule. Senior KDNP politicians and several members of Mi Hazánk are also affected. Tisza entered Parliament only this year, leaving its entire caucus untouched.

Orbán’s previous service places him beyond the new ceiling. He declined his seat after the April election. The revised clause prevents a return at a later date.

The administration presents the rule as generational renewal. At the next election, voters will be unable to return dozens of current MPs regardless of their local support.

Gulyás described the package as “the end of constitutional democracy and the start of tyranny.” The statement marked a striking reversal for a politician who had repeatedly defended Fidesz’s use of parliamentary sovereignty to reshape the state.

Eligibility rules determine which choices reach voters. A lifetime restriction based on prior service bars an entire class of candidates from campaigning before it begins.

Orbán’s political order had been designed to survive electoral defeat. That history explains the pressure for rapid change.

The president who rarely said no

Sulyok’s defenders now describe him as an independent constitutional guardian removed for political reasons. His record offers limited support for that account.

No consolidated official tally has been published showing every law he signed, returned or referred to the Constitutional Court. Available evidence depicts a head of state who occasionally objected to narrow defects and generally accepted the direction set by the governing majority that selected him.

He approved the restrictions on Pride demonstrations and publicly defended his decision. During other institutional disputes, he relied on a narrow interpretation of presidential jurisdiction and procedural review.

His use of the pardon power was exceptionally limited. He granted none in 2024, four during the first half of 2025, and none during the second half.

Sulyok approached the presidency as a lawyer with a narrow interpretation of its authority. He occasionally returned documents for correction. His tenure produced few confrontations over the concentration of state power.

That record gives his farewell address unusual resonance. The reasoning that governed his caution eventually required him to authorise his own removal.

“The rule of law over arbitrariness,” he said, describing the principle that should govern political authority.

Sulyok invoked it with new urgency as his own term approached its end.

Constitutional surgery

Hungary’s Fundamental Law may be revised by a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Tisza won that majority in a democratic election. Judicial review of such changes is largely confined to procedural defects. The president cannot exercise a substantive veto without an express legal power.

The need for institutional intervention is substantial. Orbán’s governments appointed loyal officials to long terms, placed ordinary policy behind supermajority requirements and preserved political influence beyond the life of a particular Parliament. Without revisions, the elected administration would remain unable to direct large parts of the state.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has accepted that democratic reconstruction may require replacing captured officeholders. Amnesty International Hungary summarised its concern in one sentence: “The goal is good, the tools and methods are not always.”

The principal legal difficulty arises from personalisation.

The text ends the term of one identifiable president. It displaces serving judges under a restored age rule. It counts prior service by known political figures when determining future eligibility. For many Hungarians, foundational law has become a means of managing immediate personnel changes.

European courts have examined related methods with caution.

In Baka v. Hungary, the European Court of Human Rights found that the premature termination of the Supreme Court president’s term through judicial restructuring violated his rights. The European Court of Justice reached a related conclusion after Hungary ended the term of data protection commissioner András Jóri. The same court ruled against the abrupt reduction of the retirement age for judges, prosecutors and notaries.

Those precedents do not decide Sulyok’s case. Hungary’s president is elected by Parliament and occupies a distinct legal position. The judges affected in September will leave at 70, the earlier national threshold, rather than the sharply reduced age used during Fidesz’s judicial purge.

They show the vulnerability created when structural change is tailored around particular officeholders, though they can also be read as a sign of something rare in democracies: that these laws will apply to Tisza as well.

The package restores fiscal review, changes judicial appointments and removes entrenched vetoes. Parliament has also enlarged its authority over individual terms and access to future elections. Both consequences will shape public judgment of the transition.

A political class disperses

The revision removed one official and shortened the political future of dozens more. Elsewhere, members of the former governing elite were beginning to choose their own exits.

On Wednesday, Péter Szijjártó resigned from Parliament and began working for BYD, the Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer whose Hungarian expansion he had championed as foreign minister.

His portfolio covers international external relations and the development of new business divisions. BYD describes the appointment as a global group position. His salary, benefits, contractual terms and regular workplace remain undisclosed.

Szijjártó helped negotiate and announce the subsidies, infrastructure and political support that made BYD a flagship of Hungary’s China strategy. He appeared alongside company executives, promoted its factories and research plans, and presented its investments as evidence of successful economic diplomacy.

Known public commitments connected to BYD projects total approximately HUF 92 billion, around $290 million.

The sum includes HUF 925 million for the original Komárom bus plant, HUF 3.1 billion for a later expansion, roughly HUF 1 billion for the Fót battery-assembly operation, HUF 46 billion for infrastructure around the Szeged industrial park, HUF 21 billion for site preparation and HUF 20 billion in planned support for the company’s Budapest headquarters and research centre.

The direct subsidy for the Szeged passenger-car factory has not been disclosed. The HUF 92 billion total combines grants, planned assistance and public infrastructure. It reflects the scale of the Hungarian state’s financial commitment to BYD’s expansion.

The appointment raises obvious revolving-door concerns. Szijjártó helped construct the policy framework that brought BYD into Hungary. He now works for the company that benefited from it.

The Russian file

The following day, the administration confirmed that it had begun reviewing Szijjártó’s relationship with Russia.

Magyar said officials were examining classified Foreign Ministry material and documents held elsewhere in government.

The existing record gives officials extensive material to examine.

Szijjártó received Russia’s Order of Friendship from Sergei Lavrov in December 2021. He continued visiting Moscow after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with international reporting counting sixteen trips by the middle of this year. He handled negotiations with Gazprom, promoted the Russian-financed Paks II nuclear project and intervened repeatedly in European debates over sanctions.

Further allegations concern the handling of sensitive information. Reports have suggested that Hungarian officials transmitted details from European Union discussions to Lavrov. Direkt36 documented extensive Russian penetration of the Foreign Ministry's networks and reported that senior officials had been informed of the compromise.

Szijjártó denies serving Russian interests or sharing classified European material.

Orbán in America

Orbán followed the week’s events from the United States.

He departed Hungary on Monday, travelling through Frankfurt toward the closing stages of the World Cup. Video confirmed his attendance at the France-Spain semifinal in Dallas, where he appeared with relatives and close associates. His planned itinerary also included the England-Argentina semifinal in Atlanta and Sunday’s final in New Jersey.

From the United States, Orbán posted a black-and-white image bearing the words “Democratic Hungary, 1990-2026.” After Sulyok signed, he wrote: “Tyranny is no longer a threat but a reality.”

At the height of his authority, Orbán could convert political decisions into legal text. This week, he responded through social media as a new parliamentary majority altered the system he had created.

The documented sequence needs little embellishment. Fidesz boycotted Parliament. Szijjártó joined a Chinese corporation. Gulyás resigned from the caucus leadership. Sulyok approved the provision ending his own presidency. Orbán watched football in America and posted his objections online.

Hungary’s former heart of power was scattered across airports, stadiums, corporate offices and farewell videos.

Following the money

The legal changes unfolded alongside a growing collection of criminal complaints, administrative audits and formal inquiries.

Transparency International Hungary filed a complaint regarding HUF 281.2 billion ($887 million) invested through the Baross Gábor Capital Program. The organisation argues that the structure of the investments could leave public money beyond meaningful scrutiny for an extended period.

The Education Ministry submitted a 40-page complaint regarding KRÉTA, Neptun, and the Poszeidon records system. According to the government, expenditure on the three platforms has exceeded HUF 100 billion, approximately $316 million, since 2019.

Officials allege that competitors were gradually excluded, that the use of the systems became compulsory, that intellectual property rights accumulated in private hands, and that contracts increasingly proceeded without meaningful competition. Nearly HUF 20 billion in additional agreements was reportedly signed shortly before the election.

The companies say direct price comparisons ignore differences in modules, services and support purchased by individual universities and schools.

The operator of KRÉTA reported revenue approaching HUF 8 billion in 2024. At Budapest University of Technology and Economics, monthly support costs for Neptun reportedly increased from approximately HUF 18 million under an earlier arrangement to about HUF 67 million under a fifteen-month contract signed in December.

The Integrity Authority has filed a complaint concerning the Gondosóra program. The tax authority is investigating suspected budget fraud. Parliament has opened an inquiry into the central bank foundations and their property investments.

The growing paper trail already marks a change. Ministries, independent organisations, and investigators are producing referrals, audits and documentary records. Allegations of stolen wealth are entering the slower domain of contracts, source code, procurement files and bank transfers.

“What was stolen from the nation, the state will take back,” Magyar said when presenting the package.

The National Asset Recovery and Protection Office will play a central role. Its appointments, evidentiary standards and avenues for legal challenge will determine whether it earns public confidence.

The honeymoon

Public opinion gives the administration considerable latitude.

A 21 Research Centre survey of 1,500 respondents, conducted between June 23 and July 1, placed Tisza at 57 per cent among the total population and 67 per cent among decided voters. Fidesz registered 20 and 24 percent respectively.

Medián’s late-June survey produced a wider gap. Among decided voters certain to participate, Tisza stood at 73 per cent and Fidesz at 21 per cent. 67% of respondents said the country was moving in the right direction.

The surveys measured party support and the public’s view of the country’s direction.

The numbers align with a wider mood of relief. Bodies that had appeared immovable are changing. Senior officials protected by lengthy terms are losing their positions. Elections have begun to produce visible consequences again.

That relief grants the administration time and political authority. Procedural legitimacy will determine how long that confidence lasts.

The package allows the next president to serve until the adoption of a new constitution, subject to a maximum term of five years. Parliament has thirty days to choose Sulyok’s successor. A nomination requires forty MPs. The first ballot requires a two-thirds majority. A failed first round leads to a runoff between the two leading candidates. The winner assumes office eight days after the result is announced.

Tisza holds enough seats to determine the outcome. Consultation can still influence the quality and public standing of the eventual nominee.

A name for Sándor Palace

Magyar says the next president should serve “without any party-political past or affiliation” and draw moral authority from public trust. By that standard, my own wildcard pick would be Andrea Pető.

Pető is a historian and sociologist at Central European University and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her work examines women’s political history, fascism, sexual violence, anti-gender movements, academic freedom and the manipulation of national memory. She has spent her career studying the pressures that illiberal governments place on knowledge, equality and democratic institutions.

The presidency carries limited executive authority and considerable symbolic reach. Pető would bring scientific seriousness, a documented commitment to women’s equality, an understanding of anti-LGBTQ+ political mobilisation, and a willingness to confront flattering national myths. Her appointment would give Sándor Palace an independent intellectual voice at a moment when Hungary is rebuilding the public meaning of its institutions.

As I finish editing this article, Judit Polgár’s name has already moved into serious public circulation. Sixteen prominent figures from Hungarian science, culture and sport have written to Speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer, urging Parliament to elect the chess grandmaster, praising her strategic intelligence, international standing and independence from party politics.

Polgár may emerge as the consensus candidate. Pető remains my personal recommendation. She fits the presidency Magyar has described and the values I would like the office to represent: science, equality, intellectual independence and historical honesty. But Polgár would also be a more symbolic, unifying, and patriotic option.

Midnight

At midnight, Forsthoffer automatically assumes the powers of the presidency. No separate inauguration or oath is required. Another deputy Speaker is expected to handle her parliamentary duties while bills awaiting presidential action will pass into her hands.

Sulyok will leave Sándor Palace. Four Constitutional Court judges will follow in September. Gulyás will complete a parliamentary career that the new eligibility rule prevents him from extending. Szijjártó has already entered corporate employment.

Orbán remains the leader of Fidesz, supported by loyal media holdings, local organisations, private wealth, and experienced personnel. The Seventeenth Amendment has begun dismantling some of the legal guarantees surrounding his political network.

The governing bloc is restoring fiscal review, changing judicial appointments and removing entrenched vetoes. It has also claimed broad authority over serving officials and future electoral eligibility. The durability of Hungary’s democratic reconstruction will depend on how that authority is exercised after the present relief subsides.

Sulyok said his signature represented “the rule of law over arbitrariness.” At midnight, the officials who removed him inherit responsibility for those words.

The instruments that brought his presidency to an end remain in their hands.

The explanation that stayed secret

In May 2024, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Budapest to speak at Hungary’s National University of Public Service, commonly known as Ludovika.

The invitation was peculiar from the outset. Iran’s former president, who repeatedly denied the Holocaust while in office, had supposedly voyaged to Hungary to discuss “common values in the global environment.” The university offered little public information about the event and excluded journalists.

The choice carried particular weight in Hungary. Between May and July 1944, approximately 437,000 Jews were deported from the country, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Israeli Embassy condemned Ahmadinejad’s appearance, saying that it “gravely insults and tramples” the memory of Hungarian Jews murdered during the Holocaust, according to HVG’s contemporary account.

Hungarian reporters suspected that the lecture was a cover for a more consequential meeting. Ahmadinejad and his entourage reportedly used government VIP facilities at Budapest Airport. Diplomatic sources told HVG that Budapest may have been selected as a nominally neutral venue for an Iranian-Israeli matter. They considered it implausible that Hungary’s political leadership had been unaware of the visit.

The government’s response only exacerbated the mystery.

Gergely Gulyás, the minister overseeing Viktor Orbán’s prime ministerial office at the time, initially said that he would ask Ludovika’s rector, Gergely Deli, why Ahmadinejad had been invited. Two weeks later, Gulyás announced that Deli had given him a reassuring explanation but refused to disclose it.

“You should be reassured too,” Gulyás told reporters, according to HVG’s account of the press conference.

Two years later, that withheld explanation lies at the epicentre of a huge story.

A New York Times investigation by Mark Mazzetti, Julian Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi, and Ronen Bergman reported that Ahmadinejad’s visits to Budapest in 2024 and 2025 formed part of a multiyear Israeli effort to cultivate him as an intelligence asset and possible leader of Iran after the collapse of the existing government. The report drew on American and Iranian officials familiar with the operation, former American officials, Israeli defence officials, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and an interview with Deli.

According to the investigation, a senior Hungarian government official asked Deli to organise a climate conference and invite Ahmadinejad. The event would provide a public explanation for his presence while Israeli intelligence officers met him privately.

David Barnea, then the director of Mossad, reportedly travelled to Budapest in 2024 to meet Ahmadinejad personally. Mossad later informed the CIA that it had established contact with the former Iranian president. American officials also told the Times that Israel paid some of Ahmadinejad’s housing and travel expenses and met him in several countries.

Deli acknowledged that he understood the conference’s hidden purpose. He said that he accepted the risk to his own reputation because he believed that facilitating contact between enemies might save lives.

“You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it’s best to do what you can to make them talk,” he explained.

The operation’s precise ambition remains difficult to gauge. Israeli officials may have viewed Ahmadinejad as a source of intelligence, a means of dividing Iran’s leadership, a possible figure in a future political transition, or some strange combination of these. The reporting establishes sustained cultivation and high-level contact. It provides less certainty about how realistic Israeli officials considered the plan to install him in power.

Ahmadinejad returned to Budapest in June 2025 for an event reportedly titled “Sustainability in a Changing World.” His Iranian bodyguards later reported that he escaped their supervision on at least two occasions and disappeared into prolonged meetings. When confronted, he said that he had been meeting university professors.

Ahmadinejad’s office has rejected the Times investigation. It described the allegations as “completely false,” accused the newspaper of trying to fuel divisions inside Iran, and also denied reports that he had been placed under house arrest.

Mossad and Israeli officials presented no public confirmation, and public evidence still does not show who initiated the Ludovika arrangement or whether Orbán or Hungarian intelligence approved it.

The published reporting still places the Hungarian state inside the operation. A senior official appears to have arranged the academic cover, Deli understood what it was for, and Gulyás later received an explanation he found reassuring enough to keep secret.

Budapest had become a city for such meetings.

The Mossad contacts have a long history. Over two decades, Orbán made Hungary increasingly useful to Netanyahu through campaign networks, diplomatic obstruction, security cooperation, and legal protection.

The political method

During a 2005 visit to Israel, Orbán met Netanyahu for approximately 45 minutes at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. Both men were attempting political returns after losing office. According to Direkt36’s reconstruction, the meeting produced an immediate personal connection.

Netanyahu discussed his political recovery, his economic program, and his plans to return to office. Orbán appeared particularly interested in Israel as a country whose politics were organised around national survival, territorial defence, and security.

Several years later, according to political consultant George Birnbaum, Netanyahu introduced Orbán to Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein, two strategists from his political circle. They entered Orbán’s orbit as Fidesz prepared for Hungary’s 2010 election.

Their method combined extensive polling, disciplined repetition, and aggressive negative campaigning. Political fear worked best when attached to a recognisable person.

Institutions were too abstract to hate, whereas a face could be printed on a billboard.

After Orbán returned to office in 2010, his government developed a politics of permanent mobilisation. Brussels, migrants, foreign-funded organisations, independent journalists, and George Soros were presented as participants in an external effort to weaken Hungary. Each campaign supplied a new target while preserving the same structure.

Birnbaum later spoke openly about the construction of Soros as a political enemy.

“Soros was the perfect enemy,” he told journalist Hannes Grassegger in an account of the campaign’s development.

The contractual record remains incomplete, though. Birnbaum said that the consultants’ formal relationship ran through the Fidesz-linked Századvég Foundation. Fidesz later denied that he had advised the party. Public contracts, invoices, and internal campaign documents have never supplied a complete account of their work.

The political influence is easier to trace. Netanyahu’s world gave Orbán access to strategists who understood how to organise elections around a personalised threat. Orbán developed that approach into a system of government.

The relationship also helped him contain a recurring political liability.

Fidesz faced sustained criticism over its proximity to parts of the Hungarian right where antisemitic language and historical revisionism remained common. Orbán’s praise for Miklós Horthy intensified those concerns after he described Horthy as an “exceptional statesman.” The truth is that Horthy’s regime allied Hungary with Nazi Germany, enacted anti-Jewish laws, and participated in the persecution of Hungarian Jews.

The government’s campaign against Soros carried its own historical charge. It portrayed a wealthy Jewish financier as the hidden organiser of migration, civil society, and foreign political pressure.

Netanyahu’s public friendship gave Orbán a powerful defence. The Hungarian prime minister could invoke his close relationship with Israel’s leader while continuing to cast Soros as the embodiment of a foreign conspiracy.

The contradiction became visible before Netanyahu’s July 2017 visit to Budapest. Israel’s ambassador, Yossi Amrani, condemned the anti-Soros billboards and warned that they could encourage hatred. Israel’s Foreign Ministry then issued a clarification defending criticism of Soros, who funded organisations opposed to Netanyahu’s policies.

The clarification preserved the visit. Netanyahu’s arrival then gave Orbán high-level Israeli validation amid international criticism over Soros and Horthy.

The friendship reduced the diplomatic cost of those controversies, and hence Orbán could present Hungary as one of Israel’s closest European allies while attacking Jewish figures and organisations he classified as liberal, globalist, or politically hostile.

Netanyahu also benefited. Soros funded organisations that challenged Israeli policies concerning settlements, the occupation, and Palestinian rights. Orbán’s campaign targeted many of the same civil-society networks that Netanyahu regarded as adversarial.

The alliance converted a liability into a shared political resource. Orbán gained protection from international isolation over antisemitism. Netanyahu gained a European leader willing to attack institutions and organisations that opposed his government.

A veto in Brussels

Netanyahu initially offered Orbán political access and legitimacy. Hungary’s value to Netanyahu grew from its position inside the European Union.

The relationship became an overt state alliance during Netanyahu’s July 2017 visit to Budapest, the first by an Israeli prime minister in approximately three decades. Israeli cybersecurity and surveillance companies joined the business delegation, although NSO Group itself did not attend, according to Direkt36.

During Orbán’s visit to Jerusalem the following year, he promised that Hungary would work for “fair, balanced and unbiased decisions” concerning Israel in international organisations.

Hungary thereafter became a dependable obstacle to common European positions critical of Netanyahu’s governments.

In May 2018, Hungary joined the Czech Republic and Romania in blocking an EU statement opposing the transfer of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, according to Axios.

In November 2019, Budapest blocked a European statement criticising the Trump administration’s decision to stop treating Israeli settlements as inherently illegal, as reported by the Times of Israel.

The relationship became more direct during the Gaza war. In February 2024, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz personally called Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and asked Hungary to block two European statements concerning Israel’s planned military operation in Rafah, as reported by The Jerusalem Post. Hungary prevented the consensus statements and resisted proposed sanctions.

The call indicated that Israeli officials understood precisely how to use the relationship. They could approach Szijjártó directly when European consensus threatened Israeli interests.

Several months later, Katz and Szijjártó discussed convening an EU-Israel Association Council during Hungary’s rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. Israel’s Foreign Ministry presented the presidency as an opportunity to strengthen Israel’s standing within Europe.

Many significant European foreign-policy statements and sanctions require unanimity. Hungary could prevent the European Union from speaking collectively without persuading another government to support Israel’s position. A single member state could stop the other 26 from speaking as one.

Orbán’s government also resisted European sanctions against violent Israeli settlers. The measure passed only after Péter Magyar’s incoming government removed Hungary’s veto following Orbán’s electoral defeat.

Netanyahu later described Hungary’s service with unusual clarity.

“It defends us in the European Union and the UN,” he said after his April 2025 visit, according to the Israeli government’s transcript.

The arrangement extended to Washington. Direkt36 and Axios reported that Netanyahu’s associates helped Orbán regain access to the first Trump administration after years of strained relations under Barack Obama. Netanyahu’s office denied lobbying Washington on Orbán’s behalf.

By the end of the 2010s, Hungary had become an institutional asset, a kind of veto rental agency. Netanyahu could rely on Orbán’s government to intervene at the point where European unity depended on the consent of every member state, and Moscow had reason to appreciate the same service.

The spyware channel

The political alliance heightened when Hungary acquired Pegasus.

On October 11, 2017, the Hungarian Parliament’s National Security Committee approved a classified request from the Special Service for National Security to purchase advanced phone-hacking technology outside the ordinary public-procurement system. Direkt36 later identified the system as Pegasus, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group.

The transaction passed through Communication Technologies Ltd., a Hungarian intermediary, and an NSO-linked entity registered in Luxembourg. Sources familiar with the procurement placed its net price at approximately €6 million. Operational use began around 2018.

Pegasus can retrieve messages, emails, photographs, and other data from a compromised phone. It can activate the device’s microphone and camera. NSO sold the system to states and state agencies, while exports required approval from Israel’s Ministry of Defence.

Hungary gained access to a tightly controlled surveillance weapon during the same period in which Orbán and Netanyahu were establishing formal national security channels.

In February 2018, Orbán adviser József Czukor met Netanyahu and Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat in Jerusalem. According to Israel’s official account, the discussions covered regional developments, counterterrorism cooperation, and the deepening of bilateral diplomatic and security relations. Ben-Shabbat afterwards travelled to Budapest.

Public evidence does not establish an exchange of Pegasus for Hungarian diplomatic protection, even though Hungary's approval to receive one of the country’s most sensitive cyber capabilities came as relations between the two governments were rapidly deepening.

The Pegasus Project identified more than 300 Hungarian telephone numbers selected as possible surveillance targets. Inclusion in the leaked database did not prove that every device had been infected. Amnesty International’s forensic work confirmed successful infections in several cases.

The selected numbers belonged to investigative journalists, lawyers, media owners, opposition figures, former state officials, and people connected to conflicts within Hungary’s security apparatus.

The phones of Direkt36 journalists Szabolcs Panyi and András Szabó showed forensic evidence of infection. Numbers belonging to opposition mayor György Gémesi, Hungarian Bar Association president János Bánáti, and former government official Attila Aszódi also appeared in the selection data, according to Direkt36’s investigation.

The pattern indicated that Pegasus had become a tool for monitoring people whose work created political or institutional risks for the governing system. Direkt36 reported that the system’s cost and limited capacity meant deployments in priority cases required approval from senior officials.

The cybersecurity relationship extended further. An Israeli surveillance company that joined Netanyahu’s 2017 delegation later trained Bangladeshi intelligence officers in Budapest to use telephone-interception equipment. During testing, calls from people using Hungarian networks were reportedly intercepted, as per Direkt36.

The security relationship also expanded into conventional defence. Hungary ordered Israeli-developed radar systems in 2020 and placed a major order for Israeli loitering munitions in 2023.

Pegasus was part of a larger security ecosystem. Hungary became a regular customer for Israeli-controlled technology. Orbán’s government acquired surveillance and military capabilities that strengthened the state and concentrated sensitive powers close to the political centre.

Sanctuary

The relationship became publicly unambiguous in April 2025.

The International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Hungary remained a party to the Rome Statute and was required to cooperate with the court.

Orbán invited Netanyahu to Budapest and promised that the warrant would have no effect in Hungary. Netanyahu arrived during the night of April 2 and 3 and received full state honours.

As it happened, I was in Budapest that week for my brother’s bachelor party, staying in Buda a few hundred meters from some of the official venues. Security was unusually visible, and several streets had gone quiet.

At the time, the visit looked like another Orbán confrontation with an international institution. The geography now seems equally important: Budapest had become a place where Netanyahu could arrive beneath the protection of ceremony, remain beyond the court’s reach, and leave without consequence.

The visit had been prepared in advance. ICC records show that the court contacted Hungary in March after reports indicated that Netanyahu might travel there. The Registry attempted to arrange consultations with Hungarian authorities before his arrival.

On April 3, several hours after Netanyahu landed, the court transmitted a formal request for his provisional arrest. Hungary did not respond and requested no consultation while he remained in the country until April 6.

That same day, Orbán’s government announced that Hungary would begin withdrawing from the ICC. The withdrawal could take effect only in June 2026, leaving Hungary bound by its treaty obligations throughout Netanyahu’s visit.

The court later found that Hungary had “failed to comply with its international obligation” by allowing Netanyahu to leave without arrest. The July 2025 decision referred to Hungary’s noncompliance with the Assembly of States Parties.

Netanyahu used Budapest to demonstrate that the warrant had failed to isolate him. Orbán used the visit to challenge an institution he had portrayed as politically compromised.

Hungary granted a protected territory within the European Union to a leader facing an international arrest warrant.

The visit retained the economic and security dimensions of the relationship. Netanyahu met Szijjártó and Hungarian business leaders to discuss economic, technological, and security cooperation. He also said that the governments had discussed cooperation in munitions production.

Netanyahu acknowledged Hungary’s value directly. He praised the country for defending Israel in the European Union, the United Nations, and the ICC. Hungary’s withdrawal announcement, he said, “greatly assists the State of Israel,” according to his official statement.

Orbán had previously protected Netanyahu through votes and vetoes. In April 2025, that protection became physical and legal. Budapest provided a European territory where the Israeli prime minister could travel, receive honours, and depart despite the warrant attached to his name.

The Ludovika cover

Netanyahu visited Ludovika during the April 2025 trip, where the university honoured him. The institution had hosted Ahmadinejad the previous year and would receive him again several months later.

At the time, the appearances seemed to belong to separate stories. Later reporting placed both men inside the same institutional setting and political relationship.

The alleged Mossad meetings required more than a convenient city. Ahmadinejad needed an invitation that could explain his travel to Europe. His arrival required protocol, security, and advanced awareness. The conversations required a setting where movement could be controlled and questions could be limited.

Ludovika was particularly suited to the purpose. The university has close connections to Hungary’s public administration, military, police, and national security institutions. An academic conference could supply legitimacy, facilities, and a public program from which Ahmadinejad might temporarily disappear.

The Israeli Embassy’s condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s first appearance remains an intriguing complication. The embassy may have known nothing about the operation. Mossad may have worked through a separate channel into Hungary’s political leadership. Intelligence services routinely restrict sensitive information, including from their own diplomatic institutions.

The stronger finding concerns the Hungarian state. The Times reported that a senior official requested the conference arrangement. Deli understood that the event would facilitate Israeli contacts with Ahmadinejad. Gulyás later said that Deli had given him a reassuring explanation and refused to disclose it.

Deli subsequently described his own role to the Times with a German word: “Strohmann,” meaning a frontman or puppet.

At least one senior Hungarian official appears to have played an active role in making the meetings possible.

The role’s boundaries remain unclear. The official may have provided little more than the invitation and institutional access. Hungarian services may also have handled protection, transport, counter-surveillance, or liaison with Israeli operatives. The published evidence cannot resolve these possibilities.

Budapest remained a logical venue. Orbán had demonstrated exceptional loyalty to Netanyahu. His government maintained close relations with Israeli security officials and defence companies, repeatedly protected Israel within European institutions, and acquired some of Israel’s most sensitive security technology.

The Ahmadinejad operation exposed another dimension of that trust. Hungary could offer an official setting where an avowed enemy of Israel might meet the head of Mossad under the cover of an academic discussion about climate change.

Retrospectively, the episodes resemble a system of reciprocal political services.

Netanyahu’s governments received a partner embedded within the European Union. Hungary could undermine consensus, weaken collective pressure, and serve as a friendly stage during periods of international isolation. Its defence purchases created commercial opportunities for Israeli companies. Its government could provide political cover, legal protection, and, according to the Ahmadinejad reporting, institutional assistance for a sensitive intelligence contact.

Orbán gained access to political consultants connected to Netanyahu’s world, public validation from an Israeli leader, assistance within conservative networks in Washington, and control over security technologies. Israel also offered an example of national politics organised around borders, external danger, military strength, and executive authority.

Orbán and Netanyahu shared ideological instincts, domestic adversaries, and strategic interests. Each government may have acted independently rather than under a standing agreement. Commercial contracts can arise from procurement needs. Vetoes can reflect foreign-policy conviction. Intelligence contacts often develop below the level of political leaders.

That interpretation explains part of the relationship. The cumulative pattern shows something more durable. Hungary repeatedly used scarce institutional assets on Israel’s behalf, while Israeli political networks and controlled technologies became available to Orbán’s government. The relationship functioned through services even without a written agreement describing it as such.

Direkt36’s reporting suggests that Orbán felt a deeper personal and ideological attachment to Netanyahu than Netanyahu felt toward Hungary. Israel’s interest appears more instrumental. Hungary possessed a vote in Brussels, access to European institutions, and a government willing to deploy those assets.

The alliance’s value can be measured in deeds: a blocked declaration, an approved export, an unenforced arrest warrant, and an invitation to a conference whose public subject concealed its true purpose.

After Orbán

The arrangement began to change immediately after Orbán lost power.

Netanyahu contacted Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar on April 15, three days after the election. During what Israel’s government described as a warm introductory conversation, Magyar promised to maintain close relations and invited Netanyahu to attend the October 23 ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which Netanyahu accepted.

Five days later, Magyar clarified the limits of the invitation. Hungary would remain a member of the International Criminal Court and would carry out valid warrants, meaning Netanyahu could visit Budapest while still facing the possibility of arrest. Israeli diplomats offered no immediate public response.

Hungary then halted Orbán’s attempt to leave the court. Parliament revoked the withdrawal before it could take effect. On May 29, the government formally withdrew its notification from the United Nations. Hungary’s membership of the Rome Statute remained uninterrupted. The ICC welcomed the decision on June 1.

The sequence preserved the bilateral relationship while ending the sanctuary Orbán had created. Under Magyar, an invitation to Budapest no longer carried an assurance that Hungary’s international obligations would be suspended for the guest.

The new government also removed Hungary’s veto on European sanctions against violent Israeli settlers. The speed of these changes shows how heavily the earlier arrangement depended on Orbán’s political choices and personal relationships.

The bilateral relationship has survived, but under Magyar, it looks less like a privileged channel. Hungary will continue cooperating with Israel, yet the automatic diplomatic shield and ICC sanctuary that Orbán once offered have faded.

Another Fidesz-era secret

The new government has inherited records that may reveal who approved Pegasus, protected Netanyahu from arrest, and arranged Ahmadinejad’s visit to Ludovika.

It is another strange, opaque chapter of the Orbán years: spyware, vetoes, legal sanctuary, and an academic conference reportedly used to conceal a Mossad meeting.

Gergely Gulyás said the explanation should reassure the public. Instead, it should be taken as a sign of how far this web of political loyalty, secrecy, and state power has spread, and why Tisza needs to uncover everything before democracy can be fully repaired.

Source: The New York Times; Haaretz; Direkt36; HVG; New Lines Magazine; the International Criminal Court; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Israeli and Hungarian government records; European Union and United Nations records; Rheinmetall; Associated Press; Channel 12; The Times of Israel.

The missing floor

On Monday, April 13, the day after Viktor Orbán lost Hungary’s parliamentary election, the country’s main public television channel began citing independent news organisations.

M1 referred viewers to Telex, 444, HVG, 24.hu and Partizán, publications it had spent years ignoring, denouncing or citing only when their reporting could damage one of the government’s opponents. It carried Péter Magyar’s international press conference with unfamiliar restraint. Political statements appeared without immediate correction from a government-aligned analyst. Reports had sources. Editors seemed to be deciding what belonged in the programme.

Inside the Budapest headquarters of Hungary’s public-media organisation, employees had a name for the unseen command layer above them: the “fifth floor.”

The building has four.

According to several MTVA employees interviewed by Telex, Zsolt Németh, the director of M1, known internally as “Pitbull,” left the control centre on election night. Senior managers also disappeared. Németh was reportedly unreachable until Wednesday.

For the next two days, the usual instructions failed to arrive.

Editors who had spent years working under close political supervision found themselves choosing which stories were newsworthy and which publications could be cited. Telex reported that the confusion became so severe that outside contributors were asked to help assemble programmes.

Hungary’s public broadcaster had acquired no new management, journalists or editorial charter. The people who normally told it what to do had simply gone missing.

The programmes changed at once.

The guest

On Wednesday, April 15, Magyar arrived at the public-media headquarters on Kunigunda Street.

At 7:33 a.m., he entered the studio of Kossuth Radio, where Orbán had spent years delivering his Friday interpretation of Hungary to a largely accommodating interviewer. At 8:10, Magyar appeared live on M1.

He had last been permitted to appear on public media on September 26, 2024. During the 2026 parliamentary campaign, the broadcaster did not interview him once, despite Tisza becoming the largest opposition party and the only organisation with a serious chance of defeating Fidesz.

“There is something strange about the fact that I was last here a year and a half ago,” Magyar told the radio presenter, Tamás Kakuk L. “It took the votes and authorisation of three million people for you to let me back in.”

He then told the broadcaster what his incoming government intended to do with it.

“One of our first steps after forming the government will be to suspend the news service of this propaganda media.”

The interviews carried a peculiar tension. Orbán’s appearances had generally followed the rhythm of a government statement read aloud. Magyar faced presenters suddenly determined to demonstrate their independence, at the precise moment when aggression towards the opposition had stopped protecting the governing party.

On M1, the presenter, Bea Csete, challenged Magyar’s plan to suspend the news service. The media law, she said, required public broadcasting to provide news. Magyar replied that the same law required balanced coverage, an obligation the institution had spent years ignoring.

He accused the presenters of reading questions delivered through their earpieces and repeating allegations from government-aligned media.

Csete replied with the morning’s most revealing line.

“I have been a reporter for thirty-three years,” she said. “A reporter, do you understand?”

Her indignation exposed the problem that would soon confront the entire organisation. MTVA had operated as a coordinated political institution. Its employees continued to understand themselves as individual professionals.

Some had designed the system. Some had enforced its instructions. Some had presented its claims on air. Others edited cultural programmes, operated cameras, produced weather forecasts or remained because leaving would have cost them their livelihoods.

A broadcaster can issue a collective apology. Responsibility is not shared evenly among the people involved.

“There is no resentment in us,” Magyar told Csete, “but this factory of lies will end after the government is formed. We will suspend its news service.”

The interview produced M1’s largest audience in years. Nielsen figures published the following day showed that 5.6 per cent of Hungary’s total population watched it. Among people watching television at the time, the channel’s audience share reached thirty-six per cent. Médiapiac said M1 had not recorded a comparable result in sixteen years.

The public broadcaster had spent the campaign refusing Magyar an interview. Three days after his victory, he delivered one of its strongest ratings in more than a decade.

Afterwards, approximately half a dozen employees applauded him in a corridor. The footage circulated as evidence that the institution had welcomed its liberation. Six employees in an organisation employing thousands offered a narrower picture. Their motives remain unknown.

Magyar later claimed that a manager had filmed those present so disciplinary proceedings could follow. The allegation has not been independently confirmed.

By then, the fifth floor had returned.

Rest your objectivity

Several MTVA employees told Telex that Németh returned to work on Wednesday morning and said Magyar had to be “destroyed” so that the incoming government would collapse quickly.

The same internal accounts reported that the presenter who had covered Magyar’s Monday press conference with relative neutrality was removed from the screen and instructed to pihenje ki az objektivitást.

Rest your objectivity.

The phrase was mordant enough to sound invented. The broadcaster’s output soon supported the substance of the account.

After airing Magyar’s interviews, M1 summarised his appearance under the headline:

“Péter Magyar threatened public media inside public media.”

The institution had briefly permitted him to speak. It then converted his criticism of propaganda into a story about his hostility towards journalists.

That afternoon, Németh held a staff meeting. He reportedly told employees that nothing would change during the month before the formal transfer of power. Anyone unable to contain their feelings about the election result could take leave or reduce their workload.

A recording obtained by Telex captured employees challenging him over censorship. One journalist said government officials had discussed whether particular reports could be published and that “helpful suggestions” sometimes arrived from the level of a deputy state secretary.

Another asked why the names of Antal Rogán, Orbán’s communications minister, and Attila Várhegyi had been removed from a report that morning.

The discussion described an editorial system of names removed, stories approved, phrases prescribed and officials consulted.

More than a hundred employees of MTI, Hungary’s national news agency, then signed a letter demanding the restoration of independent and impartial reporting and the removal of Németh’s supervisory authority.

They asked to choose subjects based on news value, determine the structure of their own reports, and stop submitting copy outside the newsroom for approval.

Their demands formed an inventory of the freedoms they had lacked.

How the orders travelled

Orbán’s public media system had been built through legislation, funding, and personnel.

After returning to office in 2010, Fidesz concentrated public television, radio, the national news agency, production, assets and much of the workforce within a central structure dominated by MTVA. Duna Media Service remained the formal public-service provider. MTVA controlled most of the operational substance.

By 2026, the public media system had an annual budget of roughly 155 billion forints, or around $430 million. It operated within a much larger political media economy that included the KESMA foundation, national and regional newspapers, commercial television, radio, websites, and government-funded online personalities.

Reporters Without Borders estimates that Fidesz-linked interests still control around eighty per cent of Hungary’s media landscape.

The public broadcaster occupied a paramount position because it could give political messages the authority of the state. Private outlets repeated and expanded them.

The process was neither abstract nor especially subtle.

In November 2019, Orbán’s press chief, Bertalan Havasi, emailed Németh and asked MTI to write an article from information he had provided, with Havasi cited as the source.

“Hi, could you write an MTI news item from this, citing me as a source? Thanks!”

Documents obtained by Direkt36 showed that internal guidance also required ministry statements and announcements from companies associated with Orbán ally Lőrinc Mészáros to be published with minimal alteration. Sensitive stories were passed to senior managers who maintained contact with the government’s communications operation.

During the 2026 election campaign, emails obtained by RTL showed Németh selecting major subjects and telling colleagues to find “right-wing analysts” to discuss turnout data because, as he wrote on election morning, “only the left-wing narrative is running.”

He supplied the name and telephone number of an analyst at the government-aligned Center for Fundamental Rights who would be “definitely available.”

Another chain of messages concerned a document presented as Tisza’s energy plan. Editors were told to make it a central subject and use the phrase “Tisza energy plan” consistently. The resulting coverage associated a future Magyar government with fuel shortages, rationing, the end of household energy subsidies and economic damage.

Analysts were then invited to discuss the consequences of a premise generated by the same political communications system that arranged their appearance.

The mechanism was circular and effective. A political claim became a news subject. The public broadcaster gave it official weight. Aligned analysts confirmed its seriousness. Private government media repeated the conclusion.

The system also controlled attention through silence.

Magyar received no public media interviews during the campaign. Opposition events were reduced or excluded. Government scandals disappeared quickly. According to internal sources, independent publications could be placed on lists requiring special permission to cite, then quoted freely when their reporting could be turned against Tisza.

The government’s account arrived first and returned most often, backed by public money.

The private network

Orbán’s defeat disturbed the wider propaganda economy before Magyar’s government passed a media law.

Megafon, the lavishly financed operation that trained and promoted pro-Fidesz online personalities, assured employees on election night that its work would continue. It soon carried out a group redundancy affecting close to sixty people, emptied its offices and sold its furniture. Media1 reported that the organisation’s final employee was due to leave at the end of June.

Mediaworks announced that Magyar Nemzet and twelve county newspapers would stop appearing as daily print publications and become weeklies from August 1.

Prominent staff left Mandiner. Origo replaced its editor-in-chief. TV2 announced that it would retire the name of its long-running news programme, Tények, meaning “Facts”, and replace it with a new format.

The precise financial picture remains incomplete. Existing contracts, allied owners and Fidesz-controlled foundations may sustain parts of the network for years. The speed of the cuts was consistent with a system facing the loss of political protection and state-directed revenue.

Hír TV continued broadcasting throughout the transition. When M1 later suspended its news service, Orbán directed supporters there.

The public broadcaster could be reorganised through legislation. The private network would have to be confronted through ownership, competition and money.

The slow shutdown

Magyar’s promise of an immediate suspension proved harder to carry out than it had sounded in the studio.

On May 18, the government began a full audit of MTVA, examining its contracts, finances, procurement, management decisions, employment practices and editorial operations. Magyar later acknowledged that restructuring public media could take weeks or months.

Dániel Papp, MTVA’s chief executive, resigned on June 5.

On June 23, Parliament adopted a fifty-four-page amendment to the media law. The legislation ended the mandates of the existing public-media leadership and Media Council and began replacing the MTVA-Duna structure with a new Hungarian Radio and Television company and a separately constituted Hungarian News Agency.

It also established an Independent Public Media Board. Government parties would nominate three members, opposition parties another three, and professional media organisations the remaining three. The board would supervise editorial independence, finances and high-value contracts.

The architecture improved on the structure it replaced. It also left political parties responsible for selecting six of the board’s nine members. The president of Hungary’s main journalists’ association argued that professional representatives would need a majority to provide a credible guarantee of independence.

The process had another weakness. The government had promised broad professional consultation. The legislation arrived before that consultation took place. Judit Grósz, the commissioner responsible for the reform, described the law as a rapid and necessary institutional measure and promised a wider consultation before further changes in the autumn.

The European Media Freedom Act requires transparent, objective procedures for appointing public-service media leaders, protection against arbitrary dismissal, and adequate, predictable funding. The permanent Hungarian structure will eventually be judged against those requirements. For now, the transitional process has depended heavily on the authority of the new parliamentary majority.

On July 2, Parliament’s cultural committee appointed the lawyer András P. Horváth as interim chief executive of MTVA and Duna Media Service. Horváth had no public media experience. His task was legal and financial: to audit the organisation and prepare its replacement.

The committee voted without questioning the candidates in person. Tisza members said the appointment had to proceed quickly because the organisation and its broadcasts needed functioning leadership. Fidesz and Mi Hazánk members criticised the speed and lack of scrutiny.

The following day, Horváth centralised external communications and halted most payments and investments beyond everyday operations pending review.

On Tuesday, July 7, Horváth arrived at the headquarters with an interim management team. Németh was relieved of his duties. Other senior executives, editors, and presenters were summoned to human resources or removed from their roles.

Public reporting identified several of those affected. No individual criteria were published alongside the announcements.

The apology

At four o’clock that afternoon, the advertising block before M1’s scheduled news bulletin ended.

The news did not begin.

The screen turned black. White text appeared:

“Public media must not lie. We apologise for having done so for many years.”

The message promised that the broadcaster would be renewed as an independent and credible service. News programming, it said, was temporarily suspended.

The same notice appeared on Hirado.hu. Kossuth Radio began carrying classical music from Bartók Radio.

Magyar called it a historic day.

“They lied at night, they lied during the day, they lied on every wavelength. That is now over.”

Orbán called the suspension another example of “Tisza tyranny” and told anyone interested in “the truth” to watch Hír TV.

The screen remained black until 7:56 p.m. M1 then resumed broadcasting Péter Bacsó’s The Witness, a 1969 satire of Hungary’s Stalinist dictatorship that remained censored for years after its release.

The choice appeared intentional, preserving just enough plausible deniability to pass for programming.

One of the film’s best-known lines is uncomplicatedly relevant:

“The facts are stubborn things.”

Who was “we”?

The black screen offered a clean image of rupture.

“We apologise.”

Who was included in that pronoun?

The managers who transmitted political instructions? The editors who converted them into running orders? The presenters who delivered them? The MTI employees who demanded editorial independence? The technicians and cultural producers who had little influence over political coverage?

The apology spoke for thousands without explaining who wrote it, who approved it or what evidence would guide the treatment of individual employees, even as the Hungarian public yearns for specifics of the propaganda machine.

Within days, news began returning in limited form. M1 carried a text ticker, and short radio bulletins resumed. Live political programming and Kossuth Radio’s established schedule remained suspended.

The transition was still operating through temporary instructions.

When the picture returns

The most revealing episode came before the audit, the legislation, the dismissals and the apology.

It came during the two days when the fifth floor disappeared.

The same journalists remained at the same desks. They used the same cameras, studios and editing systems. No new board had been appointed. No editorial charter had been written.

The instructions stopped arriving, and the journalism changed.

Hungary now has to build a public broadcaster capable of preserving that freedom when the fifth floor is occupied again.

All translations from Hungarian are the author’s.

By the end of this week, Hungary’s audit had acquired case numbers.

On 9 July, the Prime Minister’s Office announced five criminal complaints concerning an alleged HUF 106 billion ($340 million) in public losses. The following day, the government submitted legislation creating the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office. Brussels approved Hungary’s entry into the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, while EU finance ministers approved a revised recovery plan covering €10 billion in grants and loans.

Parliament also prepared the release of communist-era state-security files. The Defence Ministry began reviewing contracts signed since 2022. Public news broadcasts were suspended while the state broadcaster was rebuilt. At NATO’s Ankara summit, Hungary joined a commitment that could eventually place defence and security expenditure at 5 per cent of GDP.

For months, Hungary has counted what the Orbán government left behind. This week, that counting turned into action.

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The first five complaints

The government says its review of inherited documents has uncovered five cases involving a combined HUF 106 billion in possible damage to the state. These are allegations submitted to investigators. No court has yet established criminal responsibility.

Seven organisations received HUF 1.52 billion, around $4.9 million, between 2021 and spring 2026. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, their personnel and finances overlap, with former Fidesz parliamentary candidate Nóra Király appearing across all seven.

OBSERVER Médiafigyelő received media-monitoring contracts worth HUF 30.9 billion, about $99 million, between 2020 and 2026. The government says the price rose sharply without an evident expansion of the service.

A separate HUF 40 billion programme distributed around 15 million data erasure codes via veglegestorles.hu. Officials suspect that payments may have covered cases in which no corresponding service was performed.

Another complaint concerns HUF 34.3 billion, about $110 million, and three properties transferred to the Hungarian Orthodox Exarchate despite records the government describes as incomplete or contradictory.

The final case reaches into Fidesz’s post-election campaigning. One of the black-clad men accused of confronting protesters during Viktor Orbán’s tour reportedly appears in a document as a party contact, complete with a fidesz.hu email address.

That is the sort of detail that makes you put the coffee down.

It draws a troubling line between one participant and the former governing party. It does not establish that Fidesz organised or directed the confrontations. Investigators will still have to determine exactly what the connection means.

The files span civic grants, media monitoring, digital services, church property and campaign organisation. Contracts expand. Documentation thins. Personnel overlap. The state pays, and the public purpose becomes harder to reconstruct.

A press conference names a sum. A prosecution must prove it.

The office designed to see the whole picture

The government submitted the bill creating the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, or NVVH, on 10 July.

Its proposed powers are broad, and Magyar has been quite direct about why he believes they have to be.

Public wealth under the Orbán government rarely moved through one obvious transaction. Money could begin in a ministry, pass through a tender, enter a foundation or private company and disappear behind several layers of contracts, ownership and financial arrangements. One authority might see the tender. Another might see the tax records. A third might encounter the company years later, once the money had already travelled.

The NVVH is designed to assemble those fragments.

Under the published proposal, the preliminary unit could examine bank accounts, state registers and official records before a criminal proceeding formally begins. It could draw on the police, prosecutors, and the National Tax and Customs Administration, enter premises connected to an investigation, and inspect contracts, servers, and financial accounts.

The government’s argument is straightforward: another office capable only of writing reports would leave Hungary with a thicker archive and the same missing money. The new body is meant to trace the route, assemble the evidence, and carry viable cases to court and for recovery.

Magyar has called it one of the strongest offices of its kind in the European Union. Tisza presents it as a permanent safeguard against the misuse of public wealth, including by future governments. Its own account of the proposal says asset recovery, judicial independence and the rebuilding of the democratic state were central promises that now have to become law rather than remain campaign language.

The office would report to Parliament rather than to the government. Its president and four deputies would be elected by a two-thirds majority for six-year terms. Three deputies would be prosecutors. Staff would be barred from party membership and political activity, while the leadership would receive continuous police protection.

This remains a proposal, and Parliament may still alter its design. Clear appeal rights and judicial review would strengthen the office by making its decisions harder to dismiss as political commands.

For now, the logic is clear, though. Tisza knows the Orbán state scattered information across institutions while wealth moved freely between them. The NVVH is its attempt to see the full arrangement rather than one suspicious contract at a time.

If it works as promised, Hungary will finally have an institution built to follow the money all the way home.

Europe returns via prosecutors and institutions

On the same day the NVVH bill entered Parliament, the European Commission approved Hungary’s participation in the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

EPPO investigates and prosecutes fraud, corruption, money laundering and serious cross-border VAT offences affecting the EU budget. Orbán’s governments repeatedly refused to join, leaving Hungarian cases involving European funds largely dependent on domestic prosecutors.

That refusal is now over.

Hungary became the twenty-fifth participating member state. It must nominate three candidates for the post of European Prosecutor, from whom the Council of the European Union will choose one. The government must also establish offices for European Delegated Prosecutors inside Hungary.

Membership has been approved. The Hungarian operation now has to be built.

The next important decision will be whom the government nominates, and whether those prosecutors can use their independence to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

EU finance ministers also approved Hungary’s revised recovery plan on 10 July. It covers around €10 billion, including €6.5 billion in grants and €3.5 billion in loans.

The Council said approval “should allow” the money to be disbursed. The Hungarian government said it would “certainly” arrive.

Hungary must still complete reforms and investments, submit payment requests and satisfy the Commission that the required milestones have been met. The broader €16.4 billion figure cited by the government also includes cohesion and other funding routes.

Brussels now looks less like a stage prop and more like an institution. The money comes with milestones, and fraud involving EU funds can reach prosecutors outside Hungary’s domestic hierarchy.

The oldest files receive a due date

Hungary has spent thirty-six years arguing over the files of the communist state-security services.

This week, Parliament approved another attempt to open them by a vote of 188 to zero. The law’s preamble admits that justified public disclosure “has not yet been fully realised.”

The first publication is scheduled for 22 October 2026, the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. The release is expected to include the so-called Hatos Karton records and unclassified information recovered from magnetic tapes.

A 13-member advisory committee will examine files that the security services still want to keep classified. Five members, including the chair, will come from or have expertise in national security. Six will be historians, archivists or lawyers nominated by the culture minister. Two will be proposed by opposition groups.

The committee can recommend declassification. The formal classifier retains the final decision, and the government will appoint all thirteen members for an indefinite period.

Hungary’s oldest unresolved archive received its first deadline in the same week that its newest files produced criminal complaints.

The screen goes dark

At 4 pm on 7 July, M1 interrupted its news service.

“Public media should not lie. We apologise for having done so for many years. Public media is currently being transformed so that in the future it can operate credibly and independently. News services are temporarily suspended. Please stay with us.”

For the first time in years, Hungarian public media admitted the obvious: it had lied.

Kossuth Radio’s news output also stopped, while some frequencies carried Bartók Radio’s classical music. Other programming continued.

For more than a decade, public media operated as an extension of government communications, with ministerial claims presented as news and critics attacked or excluded. Hungarian viewers paid for a broadcaster that had turned journalism into government messaging.

The apology addressed a real abuse. Watching the state broadcaster admit that it had misled the country is a symbolic yet historic moment for us Hungarians.

At 7:56 pm, M1 resumed broadcasting with A tanú (The Witness), a 1969 satire of Stalinist Hungary that remained banned for a decade.

It was a superb programming choice, though the bar had admittedly been lowered by years of government propaganda.

Magyar called the shutdown “a historic day.” Orbán called it “Tisza tyranny” and directed viewers to Hír TV, where the reassuring absence of self-reflection remained available around the clock.

For a few hours, the old newsroom vanished, and no one yet knew what, if anything, would take its place.

Five per cent

At NATO’s Ankara summit, allies reaffirmed a commitment to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security-related requirements by 2035.

Five per cent is the kind of number that looks tidy in a summit declaration and enormous in a finance ministry.

The target includes at least 3.5 per cent for core military requirements and up to 1.5 per cent for resilience, infrastructure and related expenditure. It will shape future procurement, borrowing and domestic investment.

Additional security spending will compete with hospitals, schools, railways, housing and debt reduction.

The government argues that the wider category can include health capacity, transport links and civilian infrastructure with security value.

The pledge arrived as the Defence Ministry launched a review of contracts signed between 2022 and 2026. The internal working group can examine completed and active agreements, demand documents, and conduct hearings. Its report is due by 31 December, though publication is not required.

Hungary is reviewing one defence-spending wave while preparing for a much larger one.

The former rulers discover restraint

On 9 July, Fidesz held a “Stop Tyranny” demonstration outside Sándor Palace. Former president János Áder spoke. Viktor Orbán promoted the event and stayed away, remaining the absent guest of honour.

The target was the proposed Seventeenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law, which would end Tamás Sulyok’s presidential mandate and impose term limits on parliamentary seats. It would also restore Constitutional Court powers, narrow the reach of two-thirds legislation and reduce the Budget Council’s authority over an elected government.

Public institutions should remain capable of surviving their occupants.

Fidesz now warns that constitutional power is being used too aggressively. Its own record is the reason that warning lands as hypocrisy.

The party adopted a new constitution after 2010 and amended it 15 times. It ended Supreme Court president András Baka’s mandate more than three years early after he criticised judicial reforms. It terminated the term of Data Protection Commissioner András Jóri when it replaced his office. It lowered the judicial retirement age from 70 to 62, forcing hundreds from office.

European courts later ruled against Hungary in each area.

At Thursday’s rally, Fidesz MP János Pócs said the party’s amendments had always served “the interest of the country.”

The sentence contains the central Fidesz theory of constitutional law. Its own use of power represented the nation. Another majority using similar authority becomes a tyranny.

That history does not excuse sloppy constitutional work. The government should publish the full case against Sulyok and explain why the existing removal process is inadequate.

I support much of the amendment. Restoring the Constitutional Court’s authority, reducing the reach of two-thirds laws and preventing parliamentary seats from becoming lifetime possessions are defensible reforms. The government will strengthen its case by explaining the most controversial provisions with the same confidence it uses to defend the broader package.

Elizabeth Tóth, one of the speakers, called the 12 April election “the Trianon of the Hungarian nation.” A democratic transfer of power had become territorial dismemberment.

Fidesz spent years merging party, state and nation into a single political identity. Defeat acquired the emotional form of national loss.

The full rally deserves its own account. I wrote about its Stalinist warnings, improvised history, and accidental Örkény satire in “Fidesz Holds a Protest Against Fideszism”.

The following day, around a thousand people joined Mi Hazánk’s “Family Pride March.” László Toroczkai declared:

“Today, we are the oppressed.”

The march was presented as a celebration of families. Most speeches concerned LGBTQ+ people, same-sex couples and adoption.

The political right now speaks in the language of grievance, even as its institutions and preferred definition of family remain deeply entrenched. Power is being recast as injury.

Sulyok’s travel also became part of the dispute.

Magyar accused him of spending twelve days in the United States between 26 February and 10 March at a public cost reportedly exceeding HUF 120 million, around $385,000.

The itinerary included diaspora events, official commemorations and tourist sites, including Southfork Ranch, made famous by Dallas. Sulyok’s son accompanied him.

The Palace says the son’s costs were settled in accordance with the rules.

That answers the accounting, but not the itinerary.

The prime minister enters the comments

By Saturday evening, Magyar had moved from NATO, EPPO and constitutional conflict to Reddit, where he negotiated his height down by two centimetres.

Holidaying in Turkey, he held an Ask Me Anything session that drew around 6,600 comments.

“In theory, 178, but many people dispute that, so let’s agree on 176. Seventy-eight. Okay.”

Measurable reality is now part of the government’s consultation process.

Asked about false reporting on Hír TV, Magyar said press-correction rules and sanctions should be tightened.

He is right that deliberate falsehoods should carry consequences. The rules still have to apply to every broadcaster and every future government, including his own.

Asked about the detention of a politician, he replied:

“We cannot interfere in the administration of justice.”

That sentence should become ordinary in Hungary.

An employee of the National Development Centre described poor morale, absent communication and fears that experienced staff were leaving. Magyar replied that he would investigate.

Government reform still depends on civil servants who process claims, prepare contracts and understand the institutions inherited from the previous administration. Political change may arrive through constitutional amendments, though somebody still has to answer the email and upload the form correctly.

Magyar also promised to publish the 63-point list he says hangs in his office to prevent power from going to his head. Other answers produced commitments involving direct presidential elections, reduced VAT on medicines and asbestos removal.

It was open, lively and distinctly Magyar. It also produced a substantial set of promises that his government will now be expected to keep.

The ordinary state

The government also repealed the Orbán-era teacher performance-assessment regulation. No assessments will be carried out during the 2025–26 academic year while a replacement is designed.

Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs said health workers require a pay rise of at least 20-25 per cent. At Budapest’s Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Hospital, patients were meanwhile waiting in air-conditioned military tents outside the emergency department.

Penalties for continued use of paper medical referrals were postponed because the electronic system remains unreliable.

This is the fainter part of governing, though it is usually the part people notice first. A constitutional court may protect democracy. A functioning referral system ensures that someone reaches the correct doctor.

The purpose of recovering public money is to return it to the hospitals, schools and public services people actually depend on.

Tomorrow, the amendment goes to a vote

Tomorrow will be the most significant political day of the week.

On Monday, 13 July, Parliament is due to vote on the Seventeenth Amendment. The package would end Sulyok’s presidential mandate, introduce parliamentary term limits, restore powers to the Constitutional Court, narrow the reach of two-thirds laws and weaken some of the institutional locks Fidesz left behind.

The slogans heard outside Sándor Palace will meet the voting board inside Parliament.

With Tisza holding a two-thirds majority, the amendment is expected to pass without much hassle. The details will still be worth watching closely: whether the government accepts any final changes, how opposition MPs vote and what Sulyok does once Parliament has acted.

The wider agenda also includes teachers’ right to strike, school autonomy, public health measures, and medicine subsidies. The NVVH’s final powers, budget and appointments deserve close attention. So do Hungary’s nominees for European Prosecutor, the first payment request under the recovery plan and the editorial charter of the rebuilt public broadcaster.

The government inherited missing records, captured institutions and contracts whose public purpose is now disputed. This week, it began acting on what it found.

The files are opening. European prosecutors are arriving. Public money that once disappeared behind opaque contracts is moving back within reach.

The harder work is institutional: building bodies that can investigate allies, admit mistakes and survive changes in government.

The audit now has case numbers.

Tomorrow, constitutional repair reaches a vote.

Source: Prime Minister’s Office; official NVVH bill and consultation materials; Tisza Party; European Commission and Council of the European Union; NATO; Magyar Közlöny 2026/88; Hivatalos Értesítő 2026/30; Telex; 444; Átlátszó; the Sándor Palace; and Péter Magyar’s Reddit AMA. Dollar conversions use approximately USD 1 = HUF 311.67.

Viktor Orbán spent several days conjuring Hungarians to a demonstration against tyranny. On Thursday, the loyal supporters showed up, while Orbán stayed at home; perhaps it is easier to stage defiance from behind a screen.

Bertalan Havasi, his communications director, later explained that the former prime minister feared his presence would divert attention from President Tamás Sulyok, whose removal the protest had been organised to oppose.

His modesty proved administratively demanding. It required an official explanation, a stream of Facebook posts and a promise that Orbán’s own appearance would come soon enough.

Even Orbán’s absence had to be carefully handled.

Throughout the evening, he praised the speakers, disputed Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s estimate of the crowd and shared footage of the demonstration. He remained its absent guest of honour, an eclipse photographed from every angle.

By Friday morning, Orbán was posting that tyranny had taken over Hungary and that the age of csengőfrász was returning. The term refers to the fear people felt during the Stalinist era when hearing the doorbell, as it could mean the secret police had arrived.

Orbán governed Hungary until April. By July, he was pretending he had been hiding from a dictatorship instead of running one.

Thursday’s gathering outside the Sándor Palace, the official residence of the Hungarian president, was called “Stop Tyranny.” Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People’s Party organised it against the proposed 17th amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law.

The amendment would end Sulyok’s presidential mandate, impose limits on parliamentary service, restore an upper age limit for Constitutional Court judges and return important review powers to the court. It would also reduce the reach of two-thirds legislation, curb the Budget Council’s authority and establish a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office.

I myself am inclined to support the amendment.

Hungary cannot repair institutions built to keep Fidesz in control after it lost power if it leaves those instruments in place. Orbán’s government used long fixed terms, loyal appointees, and two‑thirds voting rules to retain influence over courts, regulators, and public bodies even after leaving office. The amendment starts removing those specific arrangements.

The government has not fully explained why Sulyok’s removal cannot be handled through existing constitutional procedures, though special times may call for special measures. It should still specify the failures it attributes to him and why they justify intervention. The proposed asset recovery office also needs clear safeguards: who appoints its leadership, how decisions can be challenged, and what prevents political misuse. Finally, the consultation period was brief, but it did at least amount to a real consultation in Hungary for the first time in decades, with people invited to share their thoughts and opinions, even if meaningful public scrutiny of this amendment remained difficult.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. Even so, the broader case for institutional reform is still compelling. Tisza secured 53.18 per cent of the party-list vote and 141 of Parliament’s 199 seats after campaigning on rebuilding the state and replacing Orbán-era appointees. Turnout was close to 79 per cent. Today, the polls show even stronger support for Tisza than on election night, with Fidesz down to historic lows.

Magyar has described the purpose of the amendment with exceptional clarity. Its provisions, he said, should ensure that “the Hungarian state can never again be captured.” He promised to “free Hungarians from the political and economic mafia” and declared that “what was stolen from the nation, the Hungarian state will take back.”

It is an ambitious programme. Against Thursday evening’s offering, it seemed more like a well-run ministry than a fever dream: communist terror, fascist terror, BlackRock, Pride, Tinder, the abolition of counties and the renewed partition of Hungary.

Trianon, rescheduled

Elizabeth Tóth, a recently emerged pro-Fidesz TikTok creator introduced as a civil activist, informed the crowd that “the Trianon of the Hungarian nation” had occurred on April 12.

The Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920, removed roughly two-thirds of historic Hungary’s territory and left millions of ethnic Hungarians outside the country’s new borders. Its consequences remain embedded in Hungarian politics, family memory and national identity.

April 12, 2026, was an election.

Tisza won it decisively. Tóth interpreted this exercise in popular sovereignty as a form of territorial dismemberment.

Trianon had apparently been rescheduled. The new instrument of national mutilation was a counted ballot.

The comparison was historically unhinged and politically incoherent. Fidesz spent years fusing party, state and nation into a single identity. Orbán led the “national government.” His supporters belonged to the “national side.” Favoured businesses became “national capital.” Critics were cast as foreign agents, cosmopolitans or servants of Brussels.

Within that political vocabulary, Fidesz became something larger than a party seeking office. It claimed custodianship over Hungary itself.

Electoral defeat, therefore, acquired the emotional shape of amputation. Fidesz lost power, and its supporters were told that Hungary had been taken away with it.

April 12 was recast as Trianon. Magyar’s appearance alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy was construed as treason. Efforts to scrutinise public wealth were denounced as communist terror. Even the substitution of the archaic administrative term vármegye with the standard Hungarian word for county was portrayed as a threat to local identity's continuity.

Tóth warned that without the vármegye structure, Hungarians risked losing the bonds holding their communities together.

Hungarian identity survived Ottoman occupation, Habsburg absolutism, two world wars, state socialism and several decades during which counties were simply called counties. It may finally meet its administrative Waterloo at the hands of a new order.

Tóth also accused Magyar of behaving improperly on Tinder, of silencing conservative newspapers, of destroying Orbán’s achievements, and of betraying Hungary at the NATO summit. Within minutes, the constitutional status of the presidency had become entangled with utility prices, dating profiles, Ukrainian diplomacy and municipal signage.

The rally brought together a broad range of Fidesz-aligned grievances, placing disparate concerns side by side without resolving their contradictions.

A civil demonstration, organised by the party

Several attendees described Thursday’s gathering as a civil event.

Its organisers were Fidesz and KDNP, and Orbán himself lent it prominence through his political channels. The stage was occupied by a familiar cast: Fidesz MPs, former Megafon figures, Orbán’s communications director, a pro-Fidesz influencer, and János Áder, a former president elevated to office by a Fidesz parliamentary majority.

It was civil society in the expansive Fidesz sense: a spontaneous expression of public sentiment equipped with party organisation, parliamentary speakers and a professionally assembled stage.

Before the speeches began, an elderly woman sprinkled holy water around the square. Some of it landed on a Telex reporter’s ankle. I bet that reporter felt cleansed of her sins after reporting the truth for years.

Father Zoltán Osztie then took the stage and moved through BlackRock, hidden global powers, fascist terror, communist terror, Pride, gender ideology and the spiritual condition of the Tisza government. He announced that the crowd embodied love, dignity and reconciliation. He later described Pride as an event staged “in the name of hatred” and warned that international financial forces stood behind governments.

Within hours, the Esztergom-Budapest Archdiocese clarified that Osztie had appeared without its authorisation. Its priests were reminded that their mission concerned the Gospel and the service of their communities.

Even the Church seemed surprised to find itself among the scheduled performers.

The sound system displayed similar serendipity. People toward the back could barely hear the speeches. At one stage, the chant nem halljuk, meaning “we cannot hear,” merged with nem hagyjuk, meaning “we will not allow it.”

For several minutes, it was impossible to tell whether the crowd was mounting a heroic stand against tyranny or politely petitioning for someone who knew how to operate a soundboard.

A man then arrived carrying a sign reading “Stop Örkény,” a pun that replaced the Hungarian word for tyranny with the name of István Örkény, a Hungarian writer known for his dark, absurdist satire of political life.

Protesters surrounded him, shouted at him and drove him from the square.

A demonstration against intimidation had paused to intimidate a man carrying a literary pun.

Örkény would have had a hard time improving the scene.

The museum of newly discovered principles

The protest’s allegation was that Tisza had used its two-thirds majority to change constitutional rules, replace public officials and restructure independent institutions.

Fidesz has considerable experience in all three areas.

After returning to government in 2010, it wrote a new constitution and later amended it 15 times. At Thursday’s protest, Fidesz MP János Pócs acknowledged this record and explained that those amendments had served the national interest.

This contains the complete Fidesz theory of constitutional law.

A Fidesz amendment is presented as the voice of the nation itself, while a Tisza amendment is cast as an act of tyranny. The votes behind them carry the same legal weight; still, their meaning is made to hinge entirely on who casts them, as if legitimacy were a matter of political allegiance rather than law.

Fidesz now regards the early termination of Sulyok’s mandate as an attack on institutional continuity.

In 2011, its judicial restructuring ended the six-year mandate of András Baka, president of the Supreme Court, more than three years early. Baka had publicly criticised the government’s judicial changes. The European Court of Human Rights later found that Hungary had violated his rights to access a court and freedom of expression.

The same government terminated the mandate of Data Protection Commissioner András Jóri when it replaced his office with a new authority. The Court of Justice of the European Union later ruled that Hungary had violated EU law.

Apparently, fixed mandates enjoyed a lengthy sabbatical.

Fidesz is equally outraged by the proposal to restore the retirement age for Constitutional Court judges to 70. In 2012, Orbán’s government reduced the retirement age for judges, prosecutors and notaries from 70 to 62, forcing hundreds from office. European judges found the measure discriminatory.

Seventy has enjoyed a lively career in Hungarian constitutional thought. It was once too old for judges. It later became perfectly acceptable for Constitutional Court members. By Thursday evening, it had acquired the dignity of a principle handed down somewhere between the Golden Bull and the Ten Commandments.

The amendment would also restore powers that Fidesz removed from the Constitutional Court, including the power to review budget and tax legislation in full. It would allow the court’s members to choose their own president and narrow the field of cardinal laws binding future governments.

Magyar has said the Constitutional Court should once again become “the guardian of the laws.” He described parliamentary office as neither “an entail, a noble rank, or a way of life.”

These reforms are sensible.

A member of parliament does not acquire a hereditary title through repeated placement on a party list. A Constitutional Court performs little constitutional judging after its jurisdiction has been hollowed out. A Budget Council should not possess the means to force an elected government into dissolution. Public institutions should remain capable of surviving their occupants.

Sulyok presents the most delicate case.

Fidesz selected him after Katalin Novák’s resignation. He was one of several Orbán-era officeholders Tisza promised to replace after the election. His continued presence would leave a central constitutional office in the hands of a figure chosen by the previous government during the transition toward a new settlement.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has described his removal as a personalised intervention while accepting that such measures can be permissible during constitutional restoration when no less restrictive option exists. They also argued that Sulyok repeatedly failed to perform his constitutional duties and that the government should explain those failures in greater detail.

That is close to my view.

The government would do well to set out, with precision and candour, the case against Sulyok, and to explain why the existing removal procedure falls short. Having done so, it should proceed with the amendment.

A political system designed to preserve one party’s control should not become untouchable merely because that party has finally lost office.

Ninety-nine per cent clean

Havasi provided the rally’s most concentrated dose of incidental comedy.

He called Magyar a “pocket dictator.” He warned of police officers arriving at dawn, of hostile algorithms, and of punishment for expressing political opinions. Then he announced that Fidesz’s political community was “99 per cent clean.”

The one per cent, presumably, was already on the run in the United States or the UAE.

The figure was wonderfully precise. It suggested that someone had inspected the party, checked behind the foundations, opened the concession agreements and found only a light film of oligarchy around the edges.

Havasi then promised that nothing would be forgotten, everything would be recorded, and everything would eventually be settled.

The speech against political intimidation concluded with an assurance of future reckoning.

Other speakers invoked the return of the secret police. Fidesz MP Gábor Szűcs compared the proposed Asset Recovery Office to the ÁVH, Hungary’s Stalinist political police. He suggested that ordinary families could face investigation simply because they had received state assistance.

According to the proposed amendment, the office would investigate the illegal use of public property, cooperate with judicial authorities, and represent the prosecution in relevant proceedings. Its leaders would require a two-thirds vote in the parliament, while its staff would be prohibited from party membership and political activity.

Its powers need close scrutiny. Hungary has ample experience with supposedly independent bodies that have turned into political weapons.

The comparison with the ÁVH still reveals a peculiar understanding of who should fear an investigation into missing public assets.

Magyar directed his warning at “the janissaries of the Orbán system” who treated Hungary’s common property as spoils of war. Shell companies, proxies and hurried transfers would offer little protection, he said. “What was stolen from the nation, the state will take back.”

Fidesz responded as if such investigations would target ordinary Hungarian families.

That reaction suggests it interpreted scrutiny of public assets as a threat to its own network.

The opposition's debut

At the end of the rally, the speakers returned to the stage, and the crowd sang the national anthem. The organisers had supplied an instrumental recording without vocals.

It was an oddly exact conclusion. Fidesz provided the melody of national resentment, leaving the audience to fill in the words.

Orbán remained elsewhere, posting.

He praised Sulyok, celebrated Áder and ridiculed Magyar’s claim that only 150 or 200 people had attended. One commenter asked where the former prime minister had been. Another observed that the boss appeared to be the only person who had forgotten to turn up.

Orbán’s absence exposed Fidesz’s cowardice and intellectual bankruptcy.

The party now pretends to resist the very system it engineered. It gutted independent institutions and packed them with loyalists, reduced public media to a propaganda arm, and rewrote the constitution whenever it suited its immediate interests. What it calls principle today is the wreckage of its own design.

Its conversion is not just late; it is cynical. Constitutional arguments do not become credible simply because those who dismantled the system now claim to defend it.

Tisza should set out, with full clarity and precision, the grounds for Sulyok’s removal and establish firm, credible safeguards governing the Asset Recovery Office.

It should then proceed with the amendment, not as an end in itself, but as a measured step toward the restoration of a more resilient and genuinely democratic constitutional order.

Hungary cannot repair a captured state while preserving every device designed to keep it captured. Voters endorsed institutional change with rare clarity. Magyar has defined the work ahead as ensuring that the state can never again be seized by one political network. That is a legitimate use of constitutional power, provided the resulting institutions are stronger than the government that created them.

Thursday’s protest made it painfully clear that Fidesz still has no idea what this distinction even means.

An election was recast as Trianon, asset recovery as Stalinism, and even routine administrative reform was framed as a threat to the nation’s identity. Orbán’s absence was presented as an act of public service, while a priest spoke of reconciliation through BlackRock conspiracy theories, and a crowd gathered in defence of political freedom drove out a man for carrying a pun.

Fidesz showed up to protest the same methods it used while in power.

It arrived one constitution, 15 amendments and a lost election late.

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Source: National Election Office; draft 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law; Hungarian government; Telex; 444; Hungarian Helsinki Committee; European Court of Human Rights; Court of Justice of the European Union.

Most nights, walking home is so ordinary that it barely registers as an experience.

I cut through side streets with headphones in, music flooding my ears, hands in my pockets, my mind moving between tomorrow’s obligations, geopolitics, an unfinished sentence, and the article waiting for me at home. I rarely rehearse what I would do if a car slowed beside me. I rarely scan shop windows for a shadow behind me. I rarely send a message to confirm I have made it home alive.

For years, I have mistaken that absence of calculation, that unthinking ease, for the natural shape of ordinary life.

Women are instructed to anticipate the possibility of men long before men are taught to recognise themselves as a possible threat. Their movements, tone, and decisions bend around this expectation in ways men often fail to see, because the cost is paid quietly. A route home becomes something to choose carefully. A passing glance becomes a calculation. A moment of hesitation becomes instinct. Over time, vigilance settles into the body until it feels almost expected.

When women describe this constant negotiation, it is often dismissed as exaggeration.

Patriarchy turns women’s survival strategies into private anxiety, while men mistake their own lack of fear for common sense.

I am a white heterosexual man. My life has had its share of trouble, as most lives do. Being white, male, and straight means those troubles are usually treated as private misfortunes, rather than consequences of my race, sex, or sexuality. I move through the world with a lower chance of being sexualised, racialised, or punished for who I am.

That disparity is easy to overlook. Many men hear the word privilege and immediately point to their own pain: depression, failure, rejection, strained families, financial struggle, loneliness, humiliation. None of this is invented. Men die by suicide at significantly higher rates than women, and many live with an isolation that leaves them ashamed of needing care. Boys are still trained, in too many ways, to translate fear into anger.

Those hardships are real. They come from the same order that grants white straight men priority while demanding emotional suppression, competition, and detachment in return. Women’s rights, queer rights, and racial equality did not create men’s emotional poverty. They made it harder for men to demand that other people manage it quietly.

This is the bargain men are still being sold: priority in exchange for starvation. A little status, a little permission, a little space to move through the world untouched, in return for a life spent cutting away tenderness, fear, dependency, softness, need. We are told this is strength. Look where it has brought us. Men lonely, men furious, men unable to name their grief without turning it into someone else’s punishment.

Privilege means certain burdens were never placed on you, even when life hurt.

For me, the street can remain only a street. I can walk at night, barely noticing the air on my face or the rhythm of my steps, without tensing at the sound of someone behind me. My voice can fill a meeting without being translated into hysteria or aggression. My anger stays my own, rather than standing in for an entire category. Love, for me, does not have to argue for its legitimacy. My body is not summoned into public debate whenever someone needs a stage.

My ease is never solely mine. It exists inside a system that requires others to do more work.

I see this most clearly when I look back at school. I was not an exceptional student. In secondary school in Ireland, I skipped more days than I attended. I spent too many afternoons roaming around town with friends, treating school as something I could drift in and out of. At the time, it felt like an ordinary teenage mess. Looking back, I am less sure. I wonder how much patience was extended to me because I was seen as a white boy with potential, rather than an issue to be handled. I wonder how many second chances came to me without anyone naming them as such.

The same question pursues me into adulthood. I work hard, but I also navigate a brutal job market with credibility I did not earn from scratch. I can be underqualified and still seem promising. I can be uncertain and still sound thoughtful. I can arrive imperfectly prepared and still be read as someone who might grow into the task. That is one of privilege’s quieter gifts: it turns potential into a story other people are willing to believe.

Privilege rarely arrives as something you can point to or hold up as evidence. It is felt in what never interrupts you. It lives in the quiet continuity of moving through the world without being asked to justify yourself, anticipate doubt, manage danger, or translate your own experience into something others will accept as real.

It feels like neutrality because the world is arranged to make it feel that way.

Patriarchy gives men advantages and teaches them to experience those advantages as fairness, competence, romance, leadership, humour, and common sense. It teaches others to treat the extra work they do to survive around men as private caution, personal sensitivity, or overreaction.

The pattern leaves receipts. A white name on a résumé can open a door that a Black name cannot. A man’s pain is more likely to be treated as physical, while a woman’s is more likely to be doubted. Harassment changes the way women move through cities. In many countries, queer intimacy is still treated as a crime. The architecture is hidden, but it shows up in hiring callbacks that never come, complaints quietly dismissed, police stops that escalate, landlords who suddenly have no vacancies, and small repeated denials that accumulate into a pattern too consistent to ignore.

A straight white man can move through all of this and mistake a system built to favour him for the natural order of things.

Many straight white men have little power. Many struggle with poverty, trauma, disability, illness, or loneliness. Privilege can coexist with hardship. It means fewer obstacles were added to it.

Some doors are closed to me. Others open before I understand there is a handle.

This is where male resentment begins to curdle. Some men experience equality as a personal insult because they once experienced priority as ordinary treatment. They were never accustomed to thinking of themselves as men moving through gendered space. They were simply people. Everyone else had an identity. Everyone else had an issue. Everyone else was political.

I have met this man everywhere, though he rarely announces himself. He blends into offices and classrooms, corridors and group chats, any space where silence is more comfortable than confrontation. Naming him disrupts the day, so the day goes on. He shifts shape when needed: loud when it serves him, charming when it protects him, forgettable when it excuses him. He does not think of himself as cruel, and that is precisely how he continues.

Often, that is part of the problem.

He thinks of himself as ordinary.

He is the man who talks over women, then calls them sensitive when they push back. The man who treats competence from women as a surprise and ambition from them as attitude. The man who makes a joke sharp enough to wound, then hides inside humour when someone notices the hurt. The man who knows exactly which lines can be crossed because the people around him would rather smooth things over than call him what he is.

One of the strange privileges of looking like an ordinary straight man is that other men often assume you are a safe place. I experience this, and it comes with a kind of horrible inside knowledge. They lower their guard around me. They make the joke they would avoid if a woman were present. They describe a woman’s ambition as arrogance, a gay man’s confidence as performance, a girlfriend’s boundary as manipulation. They test the atmosphere with a comment, wait to see who laughs, then continue if no one stops them.

I see this in offices, schools, universities, workplaces, sports teams, group chats, and after-work conversations where everyone knows the behaviour is ugly, but nobody wants to be the person who makes the day difficult. That is where patriarchy becomes ordinary, taking shape through the quiet permissions men give each other before anyone else has a chance to object.

I have been closer to this than I would like to admit. There are times I let a comment pass because challenging it changes the temperature around me. There are times I tell myself that refusing to laugh is enough, that leaving is enough, that privately disagreeing is enough. It is easier to confuse discomfort with action.

Then the refusals begin to gather weight. Women stop laughing off hands that linger too long and stop treating the walk home as a gamble they have to manage alone. Queer people step into daylight without apology, holding hands where that simple act still feels like a dare. People of colour speak about the suspicion following them into shops, interviews, hospital corridors, and police encounters, as if it were stitched into their skin.

None of this is extravagant. It is the bare minimum of dignity, the kind that should pass unnoticed because it is already guaranteed. Instead, it is treated like a demand for special treatment. When these realities are named, some men flinch as if struck. They hear harm and translate it into accusation. They hear a request for fairness and feel something being taken from them. They hear the word equality and, for the first time, recognise the absence of the advantage they have mistaken for normal.

What is lost is automatic deference.

One of the oldest habits of unequal institutions is to make the person naming the problem sound like the problem. The woman who complains is difficult. The queer person who asks to be safe is political. The person of colour who names bias is divisive. The man who never has to complain calls himself reasonable.

Unequal institutions rarely admit what they are doing. They hide behind caution and procedure, suddenly obsessed with nuance the moment a woman asks to be believed. The machinery becomes exquisitely sensitive to timing, tone, motive, memory, and reputation. His future becomes delicate. Her truth becomes negotiable.

I include myself in this. I have been slower than I should have been. At times, I treat proximity to these conversations as understanding, and distance from certain spaces as a kind of exemption. It is easier to stand near the critique than to recognise how much of it still applies to me.

Leaving does not change the culture that made leaving necessary. It only lets me feel cleaner at a distance. I am still learning that part of the work is staying, speaking, and being willing to make those conversations uncomfortable.

It is uncomfortable to realise that confidence can be built by spaces that open before you arrive. It is more uncomfortable to realise that other people enter the same spaces already tired, already doubted, already braced for the disgraces polite institutions know how to hide.

Harmlessness is a low bar. A harmless self-image does not change the reality beyond a man’s immediate perspective. His presence either interrupts the pattern or helps preserve it.

Men should be wary of those who claim that feminism, queer rights, or racial equality are responsible for male suffering. That claim is one of the oldest traps still being sold to lonely men. It tells them their pain comes from women asking for safety, queer people asking to live openly, people of colour asking to move through the world without suspicion. It gives men a false enemy and spares them from looking at the system that trained them to be lonely in the first place.

Feminism did not create men’s emotional poverty. It ended the expectation that women manage it for them. Much of what harms men comes from the same system that privileges them: emotional deprivation, fear of vulnerability, the drive for dominance, and the shame attached to needing care.

The same order that damages men still gives priority to men over many others.

That is the part we keep trying not to see.

I do not think my life is easy. I think it is protected in ways I am trained not to recognise. I move through openings that remain open because nobody asks why I am there. I cross streets without fear because my body does not carry the same warning. I enter spaces where my anger sounds serious, my confidence sounds natural, and my silence is not mistaken for stupidity.

That is luck. Structural luck. The kind that feels like nothing because it is built to feel like nothing, until you hear from those who have to survive without it and realise how much of your life is carried for you.

The least we can do is stop calling that neutrality.

Harmlessness is still passive. The silence reveals itself when someone less protected begins to speak. Do we stand there like a quiet barrier, soft-voiced but unmoving, asking about tone, timing, and motive? Or do we change the conditions around her, so that her words can enter whole, without having to brace for disbelief or soften themselves to survive?

The insult is how long we are allowed to mistake silence for proof that nothing is there.

We reveal ourselves when other men mistake us for permission.

By the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule, Hungary had become better armed and harder to trust.

That captures the core tension in Hungary’s NATO story. Orbán kept Hungary inside the alliance. He raised defence spending, bought modern equipment, allowed allied deployments, and kept Hungarian forces present in NATO missions. The military file improved while the political file deteriorated.

The Zrínyi 2026 Defence and Force Development Programme, the Orbán-era military modernisation plan announced in 2016, was the centrepiece. It was worth roughly 3,500 billion forints, about $11.3 billion at the current exchange rate. Its main acquisitions included Leopard 2A4 and 2A7+ tanks, PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers, Lynx KF41 infantry fighting vehicles, NASAMS medium-range air defence, Airbus H145M and H225M helicopters, and KC-390 transport aircraft. European Security & Defence has described this procurement drive as a major reshaping of Hungary’s force structure, while NATO’s defence-expenditure data shows the budgetary side of the same shift.

According to NATO, Hungary’s defence spending rose from 0.86 per cent of GDP in 2014, or 281.4 billion forints, to 2.05 per cent of GDP in 2023, or 1.54 trillion forints. It remained above the alliance’s 2 per cent threshold in 2024 and 2025. In the narrow accounting sense, Orbán could claim that Hungary had become a more serious defence spender.

The spending had operational consequences. Hungary contributed to NATO’s multinational battlegroups and eastern flank deterrence, hosted one battlegroup, participated in exercises such as Steadfast Defender, and allowed NATO Response Force deployments in western Hungary after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Budapest also authorised the transit of NATO troops and weapons across Hungarian territory to other allied states, while banning direct lethal-weapons transit to Ukraine.

That is where the simple version of the story falls apart. Hungary became an ally, with new hardware and a dwindling reserve of confidence.

A useful ally with a veto habit

Orbán’s NATO adversity began with a formula.

From 2017 onward, Hungary tied NATO-Ukraine relations to the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, the western Ukrainian region bordering Hungary with a significant ethnic Hungarian population. This followed Ukraine’s education and language laws, which affected minority-language rights.

Orbán’s approach turned the issue corrosive.

His government repeatedly used NATO formats to press a bilateral dispute. Hungary blocked high-level meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission and later opposed NATO-Ukraine Council arrangements. Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, said Hungary would continue blocking NATO-Ukraine Council meetings until Ukraine restored minority rights as they had existed before the 2017 education law. In October 2019, Hungary vetoed a joint NATO statement on Ukraine because it lacked language on ethnic Hungarian rights. Szijjártó said Hungary “had no other choice than to veto.” Diplomats accused Budapest of “holding NATO’s relations with Ukraine hostage.”

In 2022, Hungary also blocked Ukraine’s accession to the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn. Telex later reported that the Hungarian veto had prevented the move before Budapest eventually gave its consent. The symbolism was grim for a NATO member, already facing questions about its own cyber and intelligence exposure, that blocked Ukraine from a cyber-defence institution while Russia waged war next door. All the while, allegedly passing sensitive material to Russia through the unusually suspect close relationship between Szijjártó and Lavrov.

A similar pattern emerged in Sweden.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO in May 2022. Most allies ratified rather quickly. Turkey and Hungary became the holdouts. Budapest repeatedly delayed parliamentary votes while claiming to support enlargement. The official explanation was a grievance dressed as a procedure. Zoltán Kovács, the government spokesman, linked the delay to Swedish criticism of Hungary’s rule-of-law record. Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, said Swedish political, media and NGO criticism had raised concerns among Hungarian MPs.

Hungary ratified Finland’s accession in March 2023. Sweden had to wait until early 2024. By then, Budapest was the last NATO member withholding approval. After Turkish ratification, U.S. pressure and Jens Stoltenberg’s direct engagement, Viktor Orbán told the NATO secretary-general that his government supported Sweden and would urge parliament to vote “as soon as possible.” The U.S. ambassador, David Pressman, told The Guardian that Washington was “disappointed” and that Hungary was “really alone.” Hungary’s parliament finally approved Sweden’s accession in February 2024, removing the last obstacle to Sweden’s membership.

This was Orbán’s NATO method, as we all came to know it. Hungary stayed within the rules and used them as levers. Procedure became bargaining.

The art of staying inside

Hungary’s Ukraine policy after 2022 heeded an identical logic.

Budapest kept NATO logistics open enough to preserve alliance discipline. It allowed NATO forces and equipment to move through Hungarian territory to other NATO states. At the same time, it banned direct lethal-weapons transit to Ukraine, refused to send weapons, and built domestic messaging around the claim that Western allies were trying to drag Hungary into war.

In 2024, Stoltenberg secured a compromise ahead of the Washington summit. Hungary agreed to allow NATO’s long-term support package and security framework for Ukraine to move forward. In exchange, it opted out of funding, personnel, and the use of Hungarian territory for those activities. The Associated Press reported that Orbán insisted Hungary would provide neither money nor military personnel, while Stoltenberg stressed that Budapest would not block NATO decisions shared by other allies.

Orbán rarely broke the alliance, but he made it bend to his will.

That was the deeper innovation. Hungary met targets. It hosted allied forces. Yet many consensus decisions became conditional. Budapest’s position had to be managed before the alliance could move.

The Russian exposure problem

Russia turned Hungary’s NATO issue from a procedural nuisance into a strategic concern.

Orbán’s government spent years framing Hungary’s foreign policy as one of sovereignty. In practice, Hungary became increasingly exposed to Russian influence in several strategic sectors. Paks II was the centrepiece: two new reactors at Hungary’s main nuclear plant, financed and built by Russia’s Rosatom. Nuclear Engineering International notes that the Paks II project was launched under a Hungarian-Russian intergovernmental agreement, with Rosatom supplying two VVER-1200 reactors and a Russian state loan financing most of the project. Alongside Gazprom gas contracts and Hungary's heavy reliance on Russia's crude oil, Paks II gave Moscow a durable foothold in Hungary’s strategic infrastructure.

Hungary repeatedly sought and obtained exemptions from restrictions targeting Russian pipeline oil. It also fought to protect Paks II. When Budapest agreed to the EU’s 14th sanctions package against Russia, it did so after securing assurances that the package would not threaten the nuclear project. Nuclear Engineering International reported that the EU exempted Paks II from the package after Hungary had demanded protection for the Rosatom-built project.

For NATO allies, this created a problem larger than energy. A member state with Russian nuclear contracts, gas dependence, political contact with Moscow, and leverage over sanctions could still sit inside NATO rooms. It could still receive intelligence. It could still shape consensus. It could still slow the bureaucracy.

The International Investment Bank brought that concern to light. In 2023, the United States sanctioned a Russian-controlled bank headquartered in Budapest and several of its senior officials. The U.S. Treasury described the IIB as a Russia-controlled financial institution and said its presence in Budapest allowed Russia to increase its intelligence presence in Europe, open the door for Kremlin influence in Central Europe and the Western Balkans, and serve as a means for corruption and illicit finance. For Washington, this was a public security warning aimed at an ally.

Pressman put the matter in unusually blunt terms. In a speech marking Hungary’s twenty-fifth anniversary in NATO, he described Hungary as an ally “that behaves unlike any other.” He warned that Hungary’s expanding relationship with Russia raised “legitimate security concerns,” language later reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He also called Hungary’s use of NATO to press bilateral minority-rights disputes “untenable.”

Orbán responded with the language of peace. He described sanctions as harmful and characterised Western governments as supporters of military escalation. In his telling, Hungary represented sobriety and restraint.

That message worked at home, for a while anyway. Hungary sits next to Ukraine, remembers great-power violence, and has little appetite for direct military involvement. Abroad, the same language corroded Hungary’s standing, recasting allied support for Ukraine as recklessness.

By 2026, Hungary could point to modernised forces and rising defence budgets. Beneath the equipment, the vulnerabilities were plain: Russian energy dependence, repeated vetoes, cyber exposure, Russian-linked finance in Budapest, and a foreign policy that made allies ask what Hungary would demand before the next decision.

What Magyar is really promising

This is what Péter Magyar inherits.

Tisza’s governing programme offers something more revealing than a new NATO doctrine: an attempt to rebuild the state behind the uniform.

The programme’s opening diagnosis says the outgoing government “wages a political war against the country’s Western allies” and has pushed Hungary into “dangerous dependence” on Eastern autocracies. It promises to restore Hungary’s international standing and its place in the Western alliance system, arguing that sovereignty will be strengthened through alliances. Tisza treats damaged alliance relations as evidence of weakened sovereignty.

Among its first measures, Tisza promises to restore Hungary’s international relationships with its traditional allies, naming the Visegrád Four, the European Union and NATO. It also pledges to prepare a report on “the extent of non-allied foreign influence” in national-security and economic terms. That sentence points to the hidden NATO issue: exposure.

The programme's security section provides further detail. Tisza says Hungary will again become a “useful, credible, respected, active and constructive” member of the European Union and NATO. It states that Hungary will look for friends in Europe, restore good relations with all neighbouring states, and strengthen traditional Visegrád cooperation, the regional grouping of Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia. It also states that Hungary will maintain its place in “traditional European and North Atlantic alliance systems.”

There is no hawkish flourish here. The same passage says there will be no conscription and no Hungarian soldiers sent to the Russia-Ukraine war or any other war. The position is that there will be no conscription in Hungary in the future, and Hungarian soldiers will not be sent to the Russia-Ukraine war or any other war.

Magyar leans towards a pro-NATO stance, faces west, and is cautious about sending troops. He offers steadiness instead of spectacle.

The state behind the uniform

The most interesting part of Tisza’s NATO position is the critique of the defence state.

The programme accepts the new defence-spending reality. It says Hungary has been among the NATO states that already met the 2 per cent GDP defence-spending requirement, while NATO countries must raise this toward 5 per cent by 2035. NATO’s own explanation of the Hague defence commitment divides the new 5 per cent target into at least 3.5 per cent for core defence and 1.5 per cent for defence-related security and resilience. Tisza promises to increase Hungarian defence spending to meet that expectation by 2035. It presents this as a serious fiscal challenge, while arguing that well-planned defence spending can support sectors such as health care, transport and industry.

Magyar’s NATO reset is about more than exclusively tone. Tisza accepts a more expensive alliance. A 5 per cent defence target would force hard choices. Defence spending would compete with health care, education, tax relief and infrastructure. The programme tries to soften this by calling defence spending industrial policy, meant to support domestic growth.

Tisza’s more pungent argument is aimed at the Orbán model itself. The programme acknowledges that Hungary bought hardware. It argues that the real defence system has weakened elsewhere. It says the Hungarian Defence Forces face recruitment and retention problems, infrastructure remains poor, and morale suffered after politically motivated purges. It also says defence development under Orbán focused too heavily on procurement, while human resources were weakened.

Orbán could point to tanks and other hardware. Magyar is asking allies to inspect the procurement, cybersecurity, and intelligence systems behind them.

Tisza also points to breaches affecting the Foreign Ministry and the Defence Procurement Agency. The programme treats those incidents as warnings about the state’s ability to protect procurement files, classified communications and operational data. That is where NATO confidence is built. The alliance needs Hungarian systems capable of handling sensitive information. It needs procurement that cannot be read through foreign eyes. It needs ministries that do not treat allied secrets as instruments of domestic politics.

Energy is a security policy

Energy is another hidden front.

Tisza promises to end dependence on Russian oil and gas by 2035 and diversify Hungary’s energy supply. The programme links sovereignty to self-sufficiency in energy, water, food, public services and critical infrastructure. In Hungary, energy dependence has never been separate from security policy. Paks II, Gazprom contracts, Russian oil exemptions and sanctions bargaining have all shaped allied perceptions of Budapest. A Hungary less dependent on Russian energy would give Moscow fewer pressure points and give allies fewer reasons for suspicion.

The timeline signals direction while acknowledging constraint. Hungary has binding multi-year contracts for Russian energy and ongoing commitments to Paks II. Its infrastructure and regional supply routes also limit the pace of reversal. Reducing dependence on Russian oil and gas will be gradual, shaped by prices, contracts, infrastructure and logistics.

Magyar’s argument is modest while realistic. Diversifying energy will take years. Hungary can take steps now to reduce exposure. The path is slow, but it exists.

The Ukraine constraint

Tisza offers Kyiv no shortcut. It rejects accelerated EU accession for Ukraine, insists that every candidate meet the same criteria, and promises a binding Hungarian referendum after the accession chapters are closed. It also keeps the defence of Transcarpathian Hungarian language and cultural rights inside the programme. Public summaries of Tisza’s foreign-policy plans have noted the same line: support for NATO and EU alignment, caution on Ukraine, no troops to Ukraine, no conscription, and a referendum on Ukraine’s EU membership. Reuters’ summary carried by MarketScreener captured that balance neatly.

Under Magyar, the change will be procedural, not emotional. The minority-rights issue will outlast Orbán; the difference is in how it is used. Orbán turned it into a lever inside NATO. Magyar’s programme points to bilateral talks, EU accession, neighbourly diplomacy, and legal conditions. Kyiv will be irritated. NATO allies will find it easier to live with.

Under Orbán, Hungary treated NATO membership as insurance, leverage and domestic theatre. The alliance protected Hungary. Hungary used the alliance’s procedures to extract attention. Each veto and delay became national defiance at home. Each Western criticism became proof that Budapest was under attack. Each accommodation from NATO showed that the system could be pressured from within.

Tisza’s agenda offers a different theory of sovereignty. Hungary’s security depends on restored alliances, reduced foreign influence, lower energy exposure, stronger cyber defence, better military personnel policy and a functioning legal state. In this view, sovereignty is built through institutional credibility rather than performed as an obstruction.

The inheritance

Magyar inherits both Orbán’s hardware and the damage Orbán left behind.

He can quickly change tone, stop surprise vetoes, and reopen regular NATO-Ukraine formats. He can coordinate with Poland, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Germany, France, and the United States. He can order reviews of Russian-linked exposure and make Hungary unremarkable again at NATO tables. Here, unremarkable would be an achievement.

Deeper repair will take time. Restoring confidence will require consistent voting, responsible intelligence management, credible oversight of procurement, gradual reductions in Russian energy dependence, and timely participation in joint exercises. Under Orbán, Hungary conditioned cooperation on extracting concessions from its allies. Magyar must show that agreements will be honoured without having to bargain as the price of entry.

Hungary’s place in NATO was never lost on paper. That was the trick. Orbán kept the signature, the seat, the flag. The seat became less trusted, the signature less certain.

NATO will know Hungary is back when Budapest’s yes no longer requires an audit.

Source: NATO defence expenditure data; NATO Hague defence commitment; Tisza 2026 programme, A működő és emberséges Magyarország alapjai; Euractiv; Telex; The Guardian; Associated Press; U.S. Treasury; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Nuclear Engineering International; Reuters via MarketScreener.

On 4 July, Péter Magyar’s government submitted the 17th Amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law, the Orbán-era constitution adopted in 2011.

Its most important sentence is also the simplest.

The mandate of the sitting president shall cease on the day after the amendment enters into force.

The sentence leaves Tamás Sulyok unnamed. It does not need to name him. In this amendment, the office itself identifies the target.

Hungary’s new government is pushing to exit a captured constitutional order through the legal channels left by that order. That is the central dilemma of this month.

The amendment is written as a transitional instrument: immediate repairs now, a new Constitution later, after broad social and professional consultation. The government’s consultation page says citizens were invited to submit opinions on the draft, and Magyar has argued that this process already marks a break with the constitutional habits of the Fidesz era.

Hungary was evidently captured by spectacle and paperwork.

The 17th Amendment is therefore doing several jobs at once. It restores full Constitutional Court review over budget and tax laws. It broadens the constitutional understanding of public money. It narrows the reach of cardinal laws, the two-thirds laws that Fidesz used to shield ordinary policy from ordinary democratic change. It removes the Budget Council’s veto over the central budget. It creates a new National Asset Recovery and Protection Office. It also ends the mandate of the sitting president and affects Constitutional Court judges over 70.

These are not identical measures. Some restore scrutiny. Some clear blocked offices. Some create new instruments for accountability. Together, they show a government trying to make the state governable again after a system designed to survive electoral defeat.

That is the right starting point. Hungary elected a government into a state still populated, shaped and fenced by the previous order. Like a weed, it needs to be pulled out by the roots for a full removal.

A brief note, before I go on.

This work is slow. It means analysing hundreds of pages of legal texts in Hungarian, following the language of parliament, and monitoring for the small changes in how a government speaks about itself. It means translating not just words, but the logic behind them. Most of what appears here is the result of weeks, sometimes months, spent tracing the lines between law, institution, and daily life.

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The president as proof

Tamás Sulyok is not an accidental figure in this story.

He was elected president by the previous Fidesz-dominated Parliament after Katalin Novák’s resignation. His mandate, like so many high offices in Orbán’s Hungary, was built to outlast the political moment that produced it. That was the point. Orbánism placed people and powers beyond the reach of the next election.

So when Magyar’s government looks at Sulyok, it sees more than a president. It sees what remains of the old constitution.

The amendment’s solution is candid. Once it enters into force, the sitting president’s mandate ends. Parliament then elects a new president, whose term lasts until the new Constitution enters into force, for no more than five years.

Magyar is already speaking in dates. He has said he expects the amendment to enter into force in roughly a month, and that Sulyok will “certainly” no longer be president around 20 July. He has also promised a new president before 20 August. If Sulyok refuses to sign the amendment after Parliament passes it, Magyar says a deprivation procedure could be launched against him. In that case, Sulyok would temporarily lose his powers, and the Speaker of Parliament, Ágnes Forsthoffer, would exercise them.

This is a removal schedule aimed at the republic's most symbolic office.

There is a political logic here. A president elected by the previous order may slow a government elected to dismantle it. He can send legislation for review, shape appointments and give the transition a hostile constitutional face. If the office is meant to represent national unity, Sulyok’s position has become difficult to sustain.

Sulyok has given the objection its cleanest form. In an interview with the Polish conservative weekly Do Rzeczy, he said he had no reason to resign and that Magyar had not found a public-law basis for removing him. His point is textual: the amendment deals with the sitting president in one sentence, and because it applies to the current office-holder, he called it person-specific legislation.

That objection deserves a response. It should also be set alongside Sulyok’s own conduct.

Sulyok told the public that he had asked the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s constitutional law advisory body, to assess his removal, and that the Commission would examine the matter under an urgent procedure. TASZ, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, then asked Sándor Palace to release Sulyok’s request and the Venice Commission’s reply. The president’s office refused.

The National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has now opened an investigation. More importantly, it has already indicated its legal view: the question of Sulyok’s resignation and the surrounding circumstances are of high public interest, the documents are public-interest data, and there is no future presidential decision that these papers could be said to prepare.

That gives the Sulyok case a more competent advantage. If the president invokes European constitutional expertise as part of his defence, the public should know what he asked and what answer he received. Constitutional restraint and constitutional transparency go hand in hand.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has offered the most useful standard. In its opinion on the draft amendment, it says the removal of certain constitutional office-holders can be acceptable for the restoration of the rule of law, while asking the government to provide fuller reasons and stronger justification. Amnesty International Hungary’s submission makes a similar point on due process.

That should not freeze the reform but should strengthen it. The stronger the reasons, the smoother the transition.

People inside the rules

The president clause is the most unmistakable example, though it is not the only one.

The amendment speaks in general terms, yet many of its provisions land on specific people, offices and veto points.

It restores a 70-year age limit for judges serving on the Constitutional Court, Hungary’s highest body for constitutional review. Sitting judges who have already reached that age would lose their mandate once the amendment enters into force. According to 24.hu, this would affect Péter Polt, the former Prosecutor General who now serves on the Court, as well as three other judges over 70.

Péter Polt was one of the most important figures in the legal insulation of the Orbán era. His move from the prosecution service to the Constitutional Court showed how the old system converted office into endurance.

The submitted text also improves on Magyar’s earlier design. He had spoken of six-year Constitutional Court terms with one possible re-election. The filed bill sets a nine-year non-renewable term for the 15 judges.

That is a superior constitutional design. Judges should not have to think about pleasing the majority that may later re-elect them. A single long term creates more distance between the Court and the governing party of the day.

This is where the appointments that follow become decisive. The amendment can open the Court. The new majority must then prove that it wants judges, not replacements with a different party's memory.

Captured institutions are captured through people. A serious transition has to touch appointments, mandates and veto points, or the election changes the government while the state’s deeper wiring remains intact.

The point is simple: appointments made to survive voters are now meeting voters.

The moral centre: public wealth

The National Asset Recovery and Protection Office is the part of the transition most Hungarians will understand instinctively.

They do not need a seminar on constitutional design to understand asset recovery. They have lived the consequences of public wealth drifting into protected private hands. They have seen hospitals struggle, schools weaken, wages lag, public services deteriorate, and friendly fortunes grow with astonishing calm.

The government has presented the office as a central instrument of recovery. According to the official government description, the office would receive powers to recover national wealth acquired through power, unlawful means or morally questionable arrangements, and to prevent similar abuses in the future. The draft legislation reported by Telex gives the office-wide access to information, including bank account data and official registers, with assistance from the police, prosecutors, and the tax authority.

This is a major constitutional step, and politically, it may be the most comprehensible.

Orbánism was also an economy. It was contracts, land, foundations, media holdings, construction firms, concessions, banks, private equity structures, advertising flows, and public procurement. The political order created a business order around itself. If that money is not followed, the transition remains partial.

A country can remove a prime minister and still leave his system alive in the records of ownership.

Magyar’s language around this has been deliberately severe. He has spoken of the “janissaries” of the Orbán system, those for whom Hungary’s common wealth had been war booty. The heat of that language is understandable. The office will need technical competence equal to the public anger.

This is where the new government’s promise becomes concrete. Millions of Hungarians voted on whether public wealth could be returned to the public.

Public money, public speech

Orbánism understood the usefulness of boring law.

A poster fades. A slogan expires. A two-thirds threshold waits. A budget veto waits. A narrow definition of public money waits. A captured board with a long mandate waits. By the time voters arrive, the decision has often moved somewhere else.

The 17th Amendment goes after several of those places.

It narrows parts of the cardinal-law system. Cardinal laws are two-thirds laws, meaning they require a two-thirds parliamentary majority to pass or amend. Used carefully, they can protect constitutional essentials. Used excessively, they make elections more diminutive than they should be.

It restores the Constitutional Court’s full ability to review budgetary and tax laws. One of the early acts of Orbán’s constitutional order was to restrict the Court’s fiscal-review powers. That placed parts of public finance beyond normal constitutional scrutiny.

It also removes the narrow constitutional definition of public money. In Hungary, that phrase is anything but dry. Public money was repeatedly routed through structures designed to blur public and private control. Narrow the definition, and money becomes easier to hide.

These are among the strongest parts of the amendment. They return scrutiny to public finance and give the elected government room. They also show how much of Orbán’s system lived in clauses that sounded too dull for ordinary politics.

The media account belongs here because it reveals the same principle in full public view.

Orbán’s public media created a daily discipline of political reality, repeated through public television, regional papers, state advertising and friendly outlets until dependence felt like common sense.

One exchange on Hír TV said more than a month of commentary. When the presenter Stefi Déri asked who should keep the right-wing media ecosystem alive if Fidesz no longer saw it as its task, Bertalan Havasi answered: the owners. “We are on the market,” he said. Déri replied: “It is very hard to live from the market.”

There it was, almost too honest. A press system trained on state advertising had just met market gravity.

TASZ’s June proposal on restoring public speech shows how wide the repair has to be. The group’s media-freedom plan points to arbitrary restrictions on journalists’ physical access, police obstruction, weak remedies for parliamentary reporting, GDPR-based pressure on reporting, missing journalistic exemptions, the delayed implementation of EU anti-SLAPP rules, and the need to rebuild the independence of the media authority and public broadcaster.

That is the right scale. Public media will not be repaired by changing the voice from above. It will be repaired when institutions, funding, access and legal remedies no longer point in one party’s direction.

The old media ecosystem is learning what remains when the state stops issuing purchase orders.

The first month of repair

Fidesz will cast this as retribution. That is the easiest label for a party discovering procedural restraint.

After years of long mandates, loyal appointments, constitutional shortcuts and institutions built to survive elections, Orbán’s party now wants to speak as the injured custodian of legal continuity. The performance is brutal, and, even by Fidesz standards, polished.

The more serious reading is that Hungary is in the first month of constitutional repair. Early repairs are rarely elegant. They occur within the legal structures that enabled the damage. They require speed because entrenched offices can still act. They require care because every new instrument teaches the state how power may be used.

That is why the next decisions will carry more weight than the slogans around them.

Who replaces Tamás Sulyok? How are new Constitutional Court judges chosen? Who leads the asset-recovery office? How transparent will the constitution-making process be? How independent will public media be once ownership, funding and regulation change?

These are the substance of the transition.

The 17th Amendment should be judged as the opening act of a larger settlement. Much of it moves in the right direction. It restores public scrutiny of public money, weakens legal entrenchment, confronts offices built to outlast voters, and begins to translate the election result into state capacity.

That is no small thing for us Hungarians.

Hungary now has to show that the dismantling of a captured state can produce a freer one. The standard is clear enough: build rules that can withstand power outages. Recover public wealth without creating selective justice. Repair public media without building a new microphone for the winners. Replace entrenched office-holders through processes that make the next offices stronger.

There is no clean exit from a captured constitutional order. There is only method, evidence and restraint.

The first act is a sentence. The work ahead is a republic.

Three flags hang above Berehove’s town hall. One is Ukrainian. One is Hungarian. The third belongs to the European Union. Together, they describe the argument this town has been forced to live inside.

In Budapest, the flags are claims. In Kyiv, they are loyalties to be balanced within a country under strain. In Brussels, they become lines in a file. In Moscow, a fracture to be widened.

For those who live beneath them, abstraction is a luxury. The questions are immediate. The consequences are personal.

They keep schools open even as war empties villages and pulls families apart, the front line drawing men away and leaving parents to weigh what language their children will need to survive, whether for university, for work, for the chance of staying, or the necessity of leaving. In this uncertainty, they learn to speak Hungarian without drawing suspicion and Ukrainian without surrendering themselves, raising children in a place where history is never safely behind you.

I have not stood beneath those flags during this war. Like most Hungarians outside Transcarpathia, I know the region at a distance, through second-hand accounts and official narratives. Transcarpathian Hungarians are spoken about more often than they are heard, and their daily realities resist easy understanding.

For years, Transcarpathian Hungarians have lived inside several political stories.

In Budapest, they have been presented as proof that the Hungarian nation extends beyond Hungary’s borders and that the state has a duty to defend them. In Kyiv, they have become part of the effort to strengthen Ukrainian statehood after decades of Russification and, since 2022, a full-scale Russian invasion. In Brussels, they have appeared as one of many unresolved questions on Ukraine’s path toward European Union membership. In Moscow, they have been watched for any fracture that can be widened.

None of these stories begins where the people themselves do.

Their questions are not theoretical. Can a child learn Hungarian without losing the future that Ukrainian offers? Will a school have enough pupils to survive another year? Will the next generation remain after the war, or scatter to Budapest, Vienna, Prague? Can someone be fully Hungarian and fully Ukrainian, or must they always be asked to choose?

As we all know, Viktor Orbán claimed to defend this community from Kyiv’s language policies. He used classrooms and minority rights as tools to oppose Ukraine’s integration with NATO and the EU. While some grievances were real, Orbán ultimately turned them into instruments of his own political agenda.

The classroom he used as an argument may be better protected by the process he resisted.

The inheritance Orbán used

I grew up in a Hungarian political culture where places like Transcarpathia rarely existed on their own terms.

Zakarpattia. Transcarpathia. Kárpátalja. Even the names suggest a place claimed through different maps.

The area has had Hungarians for centuries, and borders that moved more often than most people’s homes. In 2001, around 150,000 people in the region declared themselves ethnic Hungarians. Current estimates are much lower. OSW, the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw, has put the remaining Hungarian community at around 60,000 to 70,000. The Kyiv Independent has reported a broader estimate of roughly 70,000 to 80,000.

No one knows the exact number as there has been no recent census, and the war has made counting harder still, as people leave, families divide, and the sense of permanence erodes. What Budapest often treats as a fixed, symbolic community is in reality ageing, thinning out, and uncertain about what comes next.

You see the decline in schools.

Berta Katona-Mironova, principal of a Hungarian school in Nagydobrony, said in 2024 that Russian aggression had significantly reduced the Hungarian population in Transcarpathia. The war, she said, was affecting family life, private life and the local economy. Her hope was practical: peace, legal security and the possibility that those who remain would not leave after the war.

“If there is legal security,” she said, “people will feel they have a future in Transcarpathia.”

For a minority community, that can mean the difference between a school that survives and one that closes. Between Hungarian remaining a language of the classroom or retreating to kitchens, churches, and grandparents’ voices.

Orbán used this terrain. He saw that Hungarians beyond the border could be mobilised through memory, money, institutions and fear. He saw how the language of protection could slip into the logic of ownership.

I do not want a liberal Hungary that simply reverses the old reflex and treats Transcarpathian Hungarians as embarrassing leftovers from Fidesz nationalism. That is another way of not listening. They deserve better than to be owned by one side and ignored by the other.

Ukraine’s language laws brought the issue into focus.

The dispute began in earnest with Ukraine’s 2017 Law on Education. The law expanded Ukrainian-language instruction in minority schools after the early grades. The dispute continued with the 2019 state-language law, which strengthened Ukrainian in public life. Kyiv argued that minority students needed full proficiency in Ukrainian to succeed as citizens. Hungarian organisations argued that the laws narrowed Hungarian-language education, especially in secondary schools. International bodies broadly accepted Ukraine’s right to strengthen the state language. They also urged Kyiv to protect minority schooling.

Too much Hungarian commentary treated Ukraine’s language policy as if it existed only to injure Hungarians. The truth is that it did not. The same laws affected Romanians, Poles, and Russian speakers. Ukraine’s language policy after 2014, and especially after 2022, was shaped by Russian imperial violence. In a country fighting for survival against a neighbour that weaponises language, culture and passports, the state language becomes a tool of governance and national cohesion.

Wartime sovereignty does not erase minority rights, and Ukraine can defend Ukrainian while also recognising that loyal minorities should not feel squeezed out of their own schools.

Orbán left little room for balance, turning it into something that could be used for political ends.

He distilled genuine anxieties within a complex legal context into a single, simplified narrative: Hungarians in Transcarpathia were victims whose rights had been stripped away, Budapest was their only defender, and everyone else, Kyiv, Brussels, the accession process, became adversary or obstacle until Hungary’s demands were met.

Some grievances were real; the louder the politics grew, the harder they were to resolve.

One of the most explicit sentences from the region came from Zoltán Babják, the mayor of Berehove, speaking to The Guardian in 2023.

“We are citizens of Ukraine, but we want to be able to speak our native language,” he said. “We are not tourists here.”

The sentence pushes back against the roles others keep assigning. It speaks to something personal and more familiar, the feeling of belonging to more than one place at once. That kind of belonging needs space to exist without being forced into a single, simplified identity.

The school timetable is politics

A school timetable reflects political decisions in concrete form.

In Mukachevo, Pál Popovics, a teacher at the II Rákóczi Ferenc Hungarian Secondary School, described the school’s struggle under new Ukrainian-appointed leadership in stark terms. He said that after a timetable initially acceptable to staff, a new version “accidentally” omitted all Hungarian history lessons. The school pushed back. A new timetable followed. Then another dispute. The tug of war continued for weeks.

“We constantly fight, there is no cooperation,” he said, accusing the new leadership of carrying out the school’s “death sentence.”

The account came through Magyar Nemzet, a pro-Fidesz government Hungarian outlet, and should be read with that in mind. The paper has long had its own political mission, and in 2026, its daily print edition was discontinued and folded into a weekly format under Mediaworks. But even allowing for the source and its dramatic language, the dispute points to where the argument becomes real: inside a timetable, inside a school, inside decisions about which language carries history, authority and future opportunity.

It is also worth remembering that these tensions do not exist in a vacuum. Ukraine is trying to hold together a state under immense pressure, while also reshaping institutions that were long uneven and sometimes exclusionary. That does not excuse every decision, but it helps explain why implementation can be inconsistent, and why minority communities sometimes feel the strain. Hungary, too, has its own unresolved struggles with minority inclusion, including the treatment of Roma communities, where rights on paper do not always translate into equal experience in daily life.

This is why the issue has always been more serious than Orbán’s use of it allowed. By turning Transcarpathian Hungarians into a tool, he made it harder to address their concerns honestly. The politics made honesty expensive.

Under Orbán, Hungary poured money into Hungarian communities abroad, including in Zakarpattia. VSquare reported that between 2011 and 2019, the Gábor Bethlen Fund approved at least €1.1 billion in grants to Hungarian minority organisations abroad. This money supported cultural organisations, churches, schools, kindergartens, media outlets and football clubs. Some support helped real institutions survive. It also built a political infrastructure that tied minority life to the ruling party in Budapest. National solidarity became a form of control.

For Transcarpathian Hungarians, this was never cost-free. Orbán’s Russia-friendly posture heightened Kyiv’s suspicions about Hungary’s role. The Guardian reported in 2023 that there were fears in Kyiv that the Hungarian community in the west could become a smaller mirror of the Russian-speaking community in the east, with a hostile foreign power using rights claims to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty.

That fear is unfair when applied to ordinary Hungarians. It is not difficult to see why Ukraine carried it.

Orbán gave Kyiv reasons to mistrust Budapest. Local Hungarians then had to live with the suspicion.

He took people with genuine concerns and wrapped them in a geopolitical project that served him first. He did not protect them by fostering Ukraine’s distrust of Hungary. He did not protect them by making Hungarians in Zakarpattia look like leverage. He did not protect them by building a politics in which every real grievance had to pass through Fidesz loyalty before it could be heard.

A community that needed careful protection became a prop. Its complexities flattened into a single, useful story.

A reset, with caveats

Péter Magyar’s government has a chance to do something different.

In June 2026, Hungary and Ukraine reached what OSW called a “comprehensive agreement” on expanding minority rights. Reuters reported that, according to the agreement, Ukraine would restore a system of schools for ethnic minorities and allow children to use their native language in all school settings. The agreement also reportedly covers the use of Hungarian symbols and flags during celebrations, Hungarian-language exams, translation of legal acts and broader public use of minority languages.

It is progress, but the kind that only matters once it reaches schools.

The text of the agreement has not been fully published. According to OSW, while certain provisions would permit minority languages in educational settings, Ukrainian law currently mandates that core subjects such as history and geography must be taught in Ukrainian, and existing legislation allows students to take final exams in a minority language only until 2030. Further legal amendments are required to fully implement the agreement’s provisions, both by integrating them into Ukrainian domestic law and reflecting them in the country’s EU accession action plan. The Ukrainian parliament may alter or dilute specific measures.

Some rights already existed. That slightly complicates Magyar’s victory line. But more so exposes how far Orbán stretched the truth when he claimed Transcarpathian Hungarians had been left entirely without basic rights. The reality is more measured: specific educational, language, cultural and administrative rights were restricted, contested and unevenly applied, then repeatedly inflated into political symbols, most aggressively by Budapest.

For the first time in years, Budapest appears to be using the minority issue to open a door rather than slam one shut.

The strategic shift is real. Hungary is no longer treating Ukraine as an enemy to be blocked by default. Minority rights are now a problem to be negotiated inside Ukraine’s European future.

That is promising, but it should not be romanticised. It is still early days, and the gap between announcement and implementation in Ukraine can be wide. Magyar is a politician. He will want a victory line. If this becomes another Budapest slogan before it becomes a legal reality in Ukrainian schools, then nothing fundamental has changed, and the people in Transcarpathia will have been used again, only with better manners. Ukraine needs the European Union, but the European Union needs Ukraine more than it admits. That imbalance should translate into leverage for real, enforceable minority protections, not another round of symbolic politics.

The European frame

Orbán spent years pretending that Ukraine’s European future threatened Hungarians in Transcarpathia. The opposite may be closer to the truth. The future he warned against may be the one that protects them.

Without Europe, their rights depend on what Budapest can extract from Kyiv. Inside accession talks, those rights return again and again: in school law, language rules, Commission reports, Venice Commission opinions, and, finally, the instructions that reach a classroom. In practice, that can shape the subjects taught in Hungarian, the exams a child is allowed to take in her mother tongue, and whether Hungarian history is treated as a normal subject or a concession.

Ukraine does not yet meet all EU standards. It still has profound work to do on corruption, courts, media freedom, wartime civil liberties, and minority protections.

Accession also creates pressure.

That is what Orbán’s politics obscured. If Hungary wants to protect Hungarians in Ukraine, Ukraine’s European future is one of the strongest tools at its disposal. It will not save every Hungarian school in Berehove or Mukachevo or reverse demographic decline, but it can anchor minority rights in a process that demands clear commitments and real consequences.

For a child in a Hungarian school, that may sound distant. It is not. It determines whether history and geography are taught in Ukrainian or Hungarian, whether final exams can still be taken in Hungarian after 2030, whether Hungarian-language textbooks are approved, and whether a school director can schedule Hungarian history as a regular subject rather than squeezing it into optional hours.

This is one of the measures by which Magyar will be judged. He has inherited a relationship with Kyiv corroded by years of antagonism, saturated with anti-Ukraine rhetoric, and burdened by a genuine dispute over minority rights. His caution is therefore intelligible. Yet caution, if allowed to harden into timidity, risks becoming merely a more polished iteration of Orbán’s trap.

If the goal is to improve the lives of Transcarpathian Hungarians, Ukraine’s European path must be treated as part of the solution. Orbán claimed to protect them while blocking the process that could make their rights more enforceable. Magyar has a chance to break that logic.

The measure is not Budapest’s ability to claim a diplomatic victory but whether Hungarian children in Ukraine find themselves in safer schools, with clearer rights, and a credible chance to build their lives at home. The future hinges on whether departure remains the only horizon for the next generation. No speech will decide it. The outcome is decided in everyday lessons and lived experience.

Ukraine’s case for Europe should not rest on suffering alone. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable case, a country that has been fighting on behalf of Europe for many years now, resisting a larger aggressor while attempting to reform itself. That reality warrants recognition and support, but it cannot come at the expense of rights, standards or accountability. Accession should still rest on whether it can make rights, reforms and obligations harder to evade, even as Europe continues to support and strengthen Ukraine in that role.

Ukraine has not earned automatic membership, but has earned a serious path free of cynical obstruction.

Hungary shows the flaw from the inside: a member state can weaken courts, prosecutors, media regulation and public money controls at home, then use its EU seat to bargain over Ukraine’s future.

In Transcarpathia, this contradiction plays out not in Brussels debates but in classrooms, where it takes the form of a timetable in Berehove.

The Hungarians inside Ukraine’s war

Transcarpathian Hungarians are not peripheral to Ukraine’s war; they are deeply enmeshed within it.

Transcarpathian Hungarians have also served and died in Ukraine’s army. In April 2023, Telex reported that eighteen families from Transcarpathia had received emergency aid from Hungary’s foreign ministry after a relative of Hungarian nationality or Hungarian roots died while fighting in Ukraine.

This cuts through years of cheap talk. It is the cost, counted in lives.

It is easy in Budapest to use Transcarpathian Hungarians as a symbol of national grievance. It is harder to listen to a Hungarian Ukrainian soldier talking about the dead. It is easy to say “this is not our war,” as some older villagers in Zakarpattia told The Guardian. It is harder to hold that sentence beside the fact that other Hungarians from the same region have served, fought, and died in Ukraine’s army.

Both realities exist.

Some Transcarpathian Hungarians feel remote from the war in the east. Some resent Kyiv. Some admire Orbán. Some distrust Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Some want only to be left alone. Others identify strongly with Ukraine. Some fight for it. Some want their children to learn good Ukrainian because they know that without it, their future will be smaller. Some fear that too much Ukrainian in school will make Hungarian disappear. Some want Hungary’s support. Some fear becoming Hungary’s excuse.

Taken together, this is what a plural community in the 21st century should and could look like, layered, contradictory, capable of holding more than one loyalty without collapsing into suspicion. If Hungary truly wants to secure rights for Hungarians in Ukraine, it should recognise that their future is tied to Ukraine’s European path. With so many Hungarians living there, supporting Ukraine’s accession to the EU is not a concession but a practical way to anchor those rights in a system that makes them harder to ignore.

Karolina Darcsi, editor of the Kárpátalja weekly, said in a 2022 interview that many Hungarians were serving in the army and that estimates of Hungarian casualties were approaching one hundred, though no precise figure was available. In the same interview, she described Transcarpathian Hungarians as a strong community with faith and identity, one that had survived border changes, forced labour and the Soviet system.

Survival here is not a museum piece. It is not Kárpátalja embalmed in subsidies, church plaques, and speeches from Budapest. It demands a harder, less comfortable truth: Hungarians in Ukraine are not relics to be preserved but people who live, change, and claim their place without asking permission.

Budapest must stop treating every Hungarian community abroad as an extension of its own politics. Protecting minority rights cannot mean inflating numbers, spreading unverified claims, or turning local teachers and children into pieces in a fight with Brussels. It certainly cannot mean using Transcarpathian Hungarians to justify a policy that weakened Ukraine while Russia bombed it.

A Hungary that supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and defends Hungarian minority rights is what Hungarian policy should have been from the beginning.

Three flags again

In Berehove, the flags still hang above the town hall.

Ukrainian, because Transcarpathian Hungarians are citizens of Ukraine.

Hungarian, because their language and history are not foreign to the land beneath their feet.

European, because that is the future they have chosen, rightly, rather than capitulating to Russia, and they deserve respect for it, even admiration, the kind that makes you want to go there, to see it for yourself, and meet the heroes who are living that choice every day.

In Bucsuta, a village of about 200 people in western Hungary, the campaign against Viktor Orbán arrived in a mailbox as a newspaper.

The paper was called Tiszta Hang, or Clean Voice. It looked modest: folded paper, ink, something to be held at a kitchen table, then left on a counter where someone else might pick it up. It was organised by Tisza, the party that formed around Péter Magyar, a former insider who broke with Orbán’s system, became the most credible challenger the prime minister had faced in sixteen years, and went on to lead Tisza to a landslide on 12 April 2026. On 27 December 2025, according to Válasz Online, an activist described delivering copies house by house, slipping them into mailboxes across the village.

The scene is easy to miss if you think of campaigns as rallies or television ads. Picture a narrow street at dusk, the kind where you can hear a gate latch from two houses away. A volunteer walks it slowly, stopping at each mailbox, placing the paper inside, moving on. There is no guarantee anyone will read it. There is only the possibility that, in a place where opposition rarely dares to set foot, someone opens their mailbox and realises they are less alone than they thought.

This can be read as just a small action. But it worked in Hungary because it was not just about one leader directing it. Hungarians themselves found each other through these acts, turning scattered frustration into something shared and visible. A movement that began in scandal and fury, with crowds filling public squares, was distilled into a task: take the paper, walk the street, leave it where someone might find it, and, in doing so, make it easier for others to recognise they were not alone.

Tisza later claimed tens of thousands of activists and thousands of local Tisza Islands, referring to volunteer groups.

America’s anti-Trump coalition has no shortage of resources or energy. What it lacks is a way to turn all of that into a coordinated campaign.

From 1 July through 3 November, there are 124 calendar days. There are 124 opportunities until the 2026 midterms. That number is a calendar, but it can also be a schedule of weekends, filing deadlines, early-vote windows and canvass shifts that will either be filled or left empty. It is enough time to build discipline out of what already exists. It is enough time to identify who owns each precinct, who is responsible for each voter file, which weekends are for registration drives and which are for ballot chasing. It is enough time to turn sign-ups into lists, lists into repeated contact, and volunteer interest into assigned work.

All 435 House seats are on the ballot. Democrats need a net gain of three to take the majority, a margin small enough that a few districts, and within them a few thousand votes, will decide control. In the Senate, 33 regular seats and two special elections are up; Democrats need four seats to flip the chamber. Around those headline races sit governorships, state legislatures, judicial contests and ballot measures that will shape how policy is written and how future elections are run. The remaining time until the midterm requires a working plan.

The anti-Trump coalition enters this stretch with real advantages. Trump is weak. In June, AP-NORC put his job approval at 37 per cent in a national poll of 3,040 adults, with most Democrats and independents disapproving of his handling of major issues.

Still, Democratic weakness sits beside Trump’s. AP-NORC found in February that Democrats’ favourable view of their own party had fallen from 85 per cent in September 2024 to 67 per cent in October 2025, with no clear recovery despite special-election wins. The party simultaneously has a mobilisation opportunity and a trust problem.

Young voters sharpen this problem. Harvard’s Spring 2026 Youth Poll found Democrats leading Republicans among young registered voters, but only 35 per cent of young Americans said they would definitely vote in November. Only 33 per cent said they trusted that the 2026 elections would be conducted fairly. That is favourable terrain for Democrats only if campaigns treat distrust as a practical obstacle. A voter who distrusts the process may still vote. They may also miss a deadline, ignore a reminder, or decide that the system has already made their choice irrelevant.

Hungary’s case is valuable here because Tisza showed how private dissatisfaction can be made public and put to use. It changed what those thresholds meant.

Magyar’s rise began in 2024, after a pardon scandal badly damaged the Orbán system and forced the resignation of then-President Katalin Novák. Magyar had been close enough to the governing world to make his break hard to dismiss. At first, his weapon was visibility. Large rallies in Budapest gave a fragmented opposition a new place to stand. Tisza then built forms around that visibility: local groups, volunteer tasks, printed material, candidate selection, digital tools and a country tour that entered territory Fidesz had claimed as extremely loyal strongholds.

The unadorned version says Magyar toured, voters saw him, and Tisza won. The evidence is more applicable than that. Good Authority notes that Tisza targeted rural and competitive districts while largely skipping places where it was already strong, including Budapest. More visits did not mean bigger swings. Districts with no Magyar visits swung about 35 points toward Tisza; those with four or five visits swung about 32. The likely explanation is strategic targeting. Tisza spent time in the more challenging areas.

That caveat strengthens the comparison. Magyar’s tour should not be treated as a singular solution. It was a way of contesting public space. It made momentum legible in places where opposition had often been private. But even that is not the full story. The deeper shift was that Magyar made a claim about Hungary itself: that it belonged to its people, not to its government, not to a party, not to a system that divided citizens into loyalists and outsiders.

He expressed that idea in a line that became one of the campaign’s most effective refrains: “nincs jobb, nincs bal, csak a magyar”, meaning “there is no right, there is no left, only the Hungarian.” In Hungarian, the phrase rhymes and carries a cadence that made it easy to repeat and remember. It resonated widely by shifting the focus toward a shared political community, inviting voters to see themselves as part of the same whole regardless of past affiliations.

Telex tracked Magyar’s 80-day tour from 15 July to 23 October 2025. It began in Tokaj and ended in Budakalász. The stops were scattered across smaller municipalities, places where a campaign visit is an event because it rarely happens. Telex calculated 128 municipalities where Magyar gave a speech or held a substantive voter meeting; Magyar later claimed 158. Nearly half of those places had fewer than 10,000 residents. The smallest, Tiszabábolna, had 277 people, small enough that a campaign stop is more of a gathering than a rally, where everyone recognises everyone else.

To add to this, Magyar went to Arló, a Borsod village of about 3,400 people, where Fidesz had taken 70.33 per cent in the 2024 European Parliament election, the last national election in Hungary before that year’s parliamentary elections. Tisza organisers held an event in Tiszadada, where Fidesz had won 69.92 per cent. He travelled to Nyíradony, a town of roughly 7,000 in the political orbit of Fidesz MP László Tasó; Telex noted that one local precinct had given Tasó nearly 90 per cent of the vote in 2022. Out of the 128 municipalities Telex examined, only eight had backed Tisza over Fidesz in the previous European election. These were places where opposition voters, if they existed, were used to being quiet about it.

Tisza was entering places where many opponents of the government had reason to feel alone. And in those places, Magyar’s message was more than just anti-Orbán; it was healing and connective. It told people that whether they were from Budapest or Pilisjászfalu, whether they had voted left or right, whether they had once supported Fidesz or never had, they were part of the same country. Hungary was not the government speaking at them. It was the people standing next to them.

Telex later followed Tisza activists in Tengőd, a Somogy County village where Fidesz had taken 68 per cent in the previous European election. The activists knocked on doors and handed out Tiszta Hang. Ernő Csatári, a local Tisza organiser, said the work mattered even when few people approached the table. The whole village knew they were there. That was already useful to Tisza and also served as a planted seed among even Fidesz voters.

In nearby Zamárdi, Telex found something closer to defection. One local entrepreneur said he had once voted for Fidesz and had gradually turned against Orbán’s politics. Another man described his own Fidesz vote as the biggest mistake of his life. These were private revisions becoming spoken public positions.

Those revisions happened because people started to identify with a broader political movement and recognise shared goals with others. Tisza built connections between individuals, helping them see themselves as part of a coordinated effort rather than isolated voters.

By March, Telex was reporting on Tisza campaigns that resembled field operations more than protest movements. In one district, campaigners were trying to reach 15,000 voters, about a fifth of the electorate. In another, a source said 60 to 80 regular volunteers could knock 300 to 400 addresses a day. A western Hungarian organiser put the strategy more bluntly: political victory was in their legs.

That line is true, but incomplete. Victory also lay in their ability to make people feel they belonged to the same political community again.

I hear this response constantly from the many thousands of readers who follow my work on The Hungary Report. The phrase comes back most often from Americans: “Take note, America.” The line is right, but only if the note is precise. Hungary offers no hero to import. It does, however, offer a sequence to study: visibility, affiliation, and work. And within that sequence, it offers something harder to replicate: a unifying claim about who the country belongs to.

That is the element that travelled like the wind in Hungary. The useful note for America is not just whether anti-Trump politics can become visible in conservative counties, exurban churches, union halls, campuses, school board rooms, public libraries, county fairs, ballot-measure offices and local campaign launches. It is whether that visibility can carry a message that cuts across the divisions that campaigns often reinforce.

Some of this is already happening. In South DeKalb, Georgia, Jon Ossoff joined more than 100 field organisers and volunteers at the opening of the Democratic Party of Georgia’s first coordinated campaign field office of the 2026 cycle, according to his campaign. The event also served as a canvas launch.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, more than 10,000 people lined Seminole Trail for a March 28 No Kings protest, according to local organisers cited by The Cavalier Daily. The signs stretched for roughly 900 yards. Organisations set up booths encouraging voters to support candidates and initiatives. Supporters of Tom Perriello collected ballot-access signatures. One University of Virginia student told the paper: “For me, this is one way to be civically engaged and resist [the Trump administration] in any way I can.”

The protest created a place to act. The more acute measure is what happened after people went home.

In Charlottesville, that bridge began to appear. C-VILLE reported that local organisers used the No Kings crowd to circulate May Day flyers and recruit people into further action. Kathryn Laughon of Indivisible Charlottesville said she was “blown away” by the response when she moved through the crowd talking about May Day. She later put the point plainly: one day was not the end of the work.

In Texas, Powered by People used No Kings rallies as canvassing sites, asking volunteers to check voter registrations, recruit new volunteers, identify future hosts and enter new contacts into REACH, a relational organising app. That is the campaign version of protest: count the people who came, find out where they live, assign them a next task, and decide who will call them back.

In Jackson, Tennessee, about 400 people turned out for a No Kings protest, according to News From the States. Cindy Boyles, an Indivisible organiser, said it was “empowering” to see that Jackson was not as deeply red as people assumed. Rachel Breslin, 27, described herself as “a blue dot drowning in a red sea.” Their value is psychological. In hostile territory, visibility can become permission. It tells people that private dissent has neighbours.

Visibility is the first act. The campaign begins when someone writes down the names.

Leah Greenberg of Indivisible has put the problem more bluntly: protest is a tactic; it is not a strategy on its own. Hahrie Han, the Johns Hopkins political scientist, offered the tougher warning about mass mobilisation: scale can look like power before it becomes power. That is the jeopardy of treating No Kings as a midterm signal. A crowd can show that people are willing to appear in public. It cannot, however, show, by itself, that anyone has been registered, trained, assigned a precinct or called back.

American opposition to Trump has shown remarkable energy and civic commitment, from legal challenges to large-scale mobilisations and sustained public engagement. However, the next 124 days call for a brutal, more exacting kind of effort: the patient work of assigning roles, tracking progress, and building lasting relationships with voters through repeated, thoughtful contact and relatable messaging.

But there is another gap as well. American campaigns often organise people as Democrats, Republicans or independents. Tisza organised people around a shared national situation. Magyar’s campaign began by asking them to see their political choices within that broader context.

The Democratic Party’s Local Listeners programme aims to reach over one million infrequent voters through volunteer training, phone calls, and grassroots events, reflecting a strategy of early, repeated local contact. The key question is whether it builds lasting capacity in the areas that matter most. Research supports this approach, showing that door-knocking can modestly boost turnout, about 1.5 percentage points on average in the U.S., especially among middle-propensity voters who are reachable but not yet committed.

But we should stay realistic. Research shows campaign ads and outreach rarely change minds in general elections, especially late in the race. What works is early contact and making it easier for people to actually vote.

The final stretch is not only about convincing large numbers of new people to change their minds, but neither is it purely about turning out those already committed. It is about both: expanding the coalition at the margins while ensuring that existing support actually shows up. Tisza’s campaign demonstrated that even in a polarised environment, some voters can be persuaded to cross over, including those who had previously supported Fidesz, when they are given a credible alternative and repeated, direct contact. But persuasion at that level still depends on the same infrastructure as turnout: people talking to people, answering questions, lowering the cost of switching, and making the act of voting feel immediate, patriotic and achievable.

That means contact that is specific and practical: a volunteer sitting with someone at a folding table and walking them through a registration form; a text that includes the exact early-voting dates for their county; a flyer explaining, in plain language, what a ballot measure would do; a campus organiser reminding students of deadlines before they leave for break; a neighbour offering a ride to a polling place; a follow-up call to fix a rejected ballot. It is repetitive, sometimes tedious work, but it is the difference between support that exists in theory and votes that are counted.

As of 30 June, 139 statewide ballot measures had already been certified across 39 states, each with its own campaign, volunteers, and voter lists. The danger is not a lack of activity but fragmentation: abortion rights, voter ID, citizenship rules and election administration fights running in parallel instead of reinforcing one another. Hungary’s lesson is not that America can copy Tisza’s structure, but that tools only matter when they assign work. Visibility must become affiliation, and affiliation must become repeated, local tasks. The American system is too large and complex for a single vehicle, but the question is the same: can anger be turned into an organised, countable effort before Election Day?

There are no guarantees. Democrats still face a profound deficit of trust, and the coming 124 days will reveal whether opposition energy matures into participation or fades into spectacle. The campaign that succeeds will rely on presence and persistence. This is how political change has always taken shape, through the accumulation of small, deliberate acts that bind people to one another and to a shared purpose.

I write this not from a campaign headquarters or a strategist’s office, but from my kitchen table in Barcelona, as one analyst trying to make sense of what is still possible. What I am attempting, in however modest a way, is to insist on a simple truth: people can be reached, systems can be altered, and even those that appear entrenched are not beyond challenge. There remains, despite everything, a reservoir of care that has not been exhausted. The clock is marking the space in which choices can still be made. And within that space, there is still time for concern to become commitment, for commitment to become action, and for action, sustained and shared, to shape the outcome.

In Parliament and government offices, the count moved through mandates, judges, public money, media offices, audit powers, EU conditions, bank records, company registers and the alleged transfer of state wealth into private hands. On the streets of Budapest, the count took another form: 50,000 people marching from the Opera to Vérmező in extreme heat, visible in a country where visibility had recently been treated as a threat.

Counting is the first act of post-authoritarian government. It is how a new state learns what was taken, what was bent, what was hidden and what still has force. It is also the first temptation. Once a government begins measuring the damage, it can start to believe that the scale of the damage justifies almost any instrument of repair.

This week circled around that problem like water going down the drain: inevitable, almost hypnotic, and dangerous if you looked away for too long. How do you repair a captured state without allowing the act of repair to become its own justification?

I have spent enough of my life watching Hungarian politics hide behind procedure to know that procedure is often the story. This week, it showed itself in the grains of power: how decisions are written, who signs them, where authority sits, and how easily it can be redirected without ever appearing to move.

The inventory begins

The week began on Monday, 22 June, in Parliament, where Péter Magyar framed the government’s programme as a systematic review of the decisions, contracts and institutions left behind by the previous regime. That framing carried directly into the government’s first major initiative of the week: Operation Tisztítótűz, a term that translates as purgatory and cleansing fire.

It borrows the language of purification and turns it inward, toward the state and what the previous system left behind in law, ownership and institutions. Rather than a single reform, it is a reset of how authority, property, and accountability work after years of blurred lines. Constitutional change, asset recovery and institutional repair are treated as one problem because the old system reshaped how power could be challenged. Hungary cannot simply break with that past. It has to review decisions, track resources, identify which legal arrangements still bind the present, and decide what can be undone without draining the state.

The draft 17th Amendment to the Fundamental Law is framed by the government as a correction of constitutional capture. The official consultation text says the Fundamental Law had become an instrument for implementing current party-political objectives. In more unadorned terms, the constitution stopped restraining power and started taking instructions from it.

The amendment reaches into the presidency, the Constitutional Court, Parliament and the definition of public money. It would end President Tamás Sulyok’s mandate after entry into force, require Parliament to elect a new president, end the mandates of Constitutional Court judges who have reached the age of 70, and give the Court’s members the power to elect their own president. It would also limit parliamentary mandates to 12 years, reduce the number of two-thirds laws, restore the Constitutional Court’s fiscal review powers, repeal the current constitutional definition of public money and create a constitutional footing for the new National Asset Recovery and Protection Office.

Hungary’s institutions were staffed, insulated, amended, prolonged and defined into obedience. Repairing them will demand more than appeals to continuity. The difficulty is that a constitutional amendment aimed at restoring institutional independence also removes named or identifiable officeholders. The risk sits inside the method.

Post-Orbán reconstruction faces a dilemma: undoing a system embedded in law requires strong legal action, while the challenge is to do so without recreating the same patterns under a new name.

The asset count

The National Asset Recovery and Protection Office gives that risk institutional form. The official consultation page claims that, by conservative estimate, HUF 60,000 billion, roughly $193 billion at late-June exchange rates, moved unlawfully from public sources into private pockets over the past two decades. The figure is vast, even by Hungarian corruption standards. It is also politically advantageous for Magyar because it gives asset recovery the scale of a national mission.

The public mindset around this is not hard to understand. Hungarians have spent decades watching wealth and power drift into friendly hands while being told that everything was legal, procedural and patriotic. Corruption is not an abstract idea for them. It shows up in daily life, in strained public services, failing infrastructure and a sense that the country’s future has been quietly traded away through legal manoeuvres.

The anger around this is not theatrical. Instead, it comes from a very ordinary experience: being told for years that the public could see the theft but could not prove it in a language the state would accept.

That is why the government is right to make asset recovery paramount. It would be reckless to make recovery sacred.

The proposed office is intended to trace those flows through the channels where Orbánism learned to conceal them: company structures, contracts, bank records, tax files, state registers, foundations and protected ownership arrangements. Its draft powers are expansive enough to signal the government’s ambition and the legal hazards that come with it. The office could draw on police, prosecutors and NAV (National Tax and Customs Administration), move cases forward itself, impose penalties, initiate proceedings to reclaim public assets, and, in certain situations, step into roles usually reserved for criminal prosecution.

If the government can trace and reclaim assets shifted through foundations, concessions and shell companies during the Orbán years, its reform agenda has a real chance to move beyond rhetoric. Changing leadership alone does not alter ownership structures. Without intervention, the same networks can continue to control the same resources under new political management.

The draft also raises legal questions. It would allow the office to handle sensitive data and access protected financial information. Certain investigations may fall outside standard administrative procedures, and in some cases, the office could assume a role similar to that of the prosecution, with limited scope for the usual authorities to intervene. Its company-supervision powers may also need clear limits to avoid overreach.

Here is where the public mood and the legal problem meet. People want the money followed, not in the abstract but through specifics, until the country can no longer pretend that what happened was normal. A serious recovery process must be strong enough to reach protected wealth and disciplined enough to withstand scrutiny, grounded in traceable decisions, identifiable public losses and evidence that can hold up under judicial review.

My own reading is that public appetite for recovery is real, justified and politically powerful. It will also become dangerous the moment it is treated as a substitute for evidence. But so far so good.

Hungary needs a serious asset-recovery mechanism whose powers are not justified only by the moral bankruptcy of the people it targets.

Operation Purgatory will have to become a legal project rather than a name for the public anger that made it possible. Magyar understands political symbolism and uses it without much discomfiture, repeatedly drawing comparisons between Fidesz and the Cosa Nostra to frame the previous system as a tightly bound network of power and loyalty. The language is deliberately severe, and it works because people recognise the structure it points to. Naming the old system is only the beginning. The opportunity lies in building rules and institutions strong enough to survive the week after the anger fades.

The audit state takes shape

The institutional count persisted through Tuesday, 23 June, when Parliament passed the media-law reform by 145 votes to 39. The law restructures public media, separates MTI, ends existing leadership mandates, creates a new public-media oversight body, reforms selection procedures and creates a press fund. Tisza and Mi Hazánk supported it. Not surprisingly, Fidesz-KDNP opposed it.

Public media sat at the core of Orbán’s design of control, shaping what could be heard and how it was framed. Reforming it is therefore an endeavour to reopen the state’s voice to pluralism. A government elected to dismantle propaganda must now prove that public media will not become a more polished dependency.

The EU-funds package followed the same institutional track, with the government outlining a set of legal changes intended to unlock access to EU funds. In Parliament, Justice Minister Márta Görög distilled the purpose of these efforts into a line that could stand as the week’s institutional motto: “a közpénz közpénz, a közvagyon közvagyon.” Public money is public money. Public wealth is public wealth.

That sounds unmistakable. In Hungary, even the conspicuous has had to argue its case.

Heat makes the state physical

Then the heat arrived, making governance physical.

Hungary moved from a second-degree heat alert to a third-degree nationwide alert beginning at midnight on Saturday, 27 June. A government decree ordered coordinated defence activity because of extremely high temperatures and placed coordination under the prime minister. By Sunday, officials were reporting water restrictions, rail speed limits, ambulance heat cases, vegetation-fire calls, mist gates, bottled-water distribution and reductions at Paks Nuclear Power Plant.

The heatwave stripped governance of abstraction. It showed up in places you could stand in: hospital wards waiting for functioning cooling systems, railway lines under speed restrictions, public taps under pressure, ambulance crews responding to heat cases, firefighters moving from one vegetation fire to the next, and at Paks, engineers reducing output because the Danube had grown too warm to cool the plant safely.

Heat is a useful enemy for a government because it has no party card and no media strategy. It exposes what actually works. But on the other hand, it exposes much more of what doesn’t work.

On Thursday, Magyar and Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs visited Uzsoki hospital. The government said more than HUF 3.6 billion, around $11 million, had been redirected to replace and develop hospital air conditioners, with work beginning at 32 hospitals. At Uzsoki, the first replacement was reported at more than HUF 130 million, while the hospital’s own account still pointed to unresolved problems in trauma operating rooms and oncology cooling.

Magyar understands the politics of the ladder photograph. He knows that an image of a prime minister inspecting hospital air conditioning travels faster than a procurement notice. But the photograph reveals less here than the chain behind it: funding, procurement, installation, maintenance, cooling and the basic fact of whether patients and staff can survive the heat inside a public hospital.

This is what state capacity looks like when temperatures rise.

The heat also became part of Pride.

Pride counts the public

The 31st Budapest Pride took place on Saturday, 27 June, under the third-degree heat alert. Organisers chose a shaded route from the Opera to Vérmező, coordinated drinking-water points, warned people to hydrate, advised against bringing pets and ended the march in green space. The march included 19 vehicles, six ambulances, roughly 40 participating civil organisations, groups and supporting companies, and a joint statement from 35 embassies, with cultural institutes also supporting it.

Organisers estimated roughly 50,000 participants.

The number sits inside a complicated political sequence. Last year, Pride gauged courage under threat, after Orbán’s attempted ban helped turn the march into one of the largest acts of public defiance in recent Hungarian history. This year, it reckoned with what remains after fear begins to loosen: a different public posture, still cautious in places, but harder to govern through intimidation, and most significantly, visibly free and happy.

The old muscle memory still appeared. Far-right protesters showed up. Eggs and vegetables were thrown. The march went ahead, crossed the city and ended at Vérmező. Police later described it as peaceful. On stage, Karácsony Gergely, the mayor of Budapest, said he wanted to marry the first same-sex couple in the capital. Annus Szabolcs Sammy announced the first Szeged Pride for next spring.

Legal protection still lags behind public fact.

That is why I read Amnesty International Hungary’s proposal closely. On 12 June, Amnesty published its submission to Magyar on how Hungary could become a more equal country, focusing on marriage equality and the unjustified legal distinctions that still separate registered partnership from marriage.

The polling cited by Amnesty is striking, with one important caveat. A Háttér Society-commissioned survey by Medián and Piackutató Intézet, conducted between 27 April and 2 May 2026, found that 68 per cent of respondents supported same-sex couples being able to marry and adopt children. The question bundled marriage and adoption. Amnesty’s chart gives 28 per cent in 2019, 49 per cent in 2025 and 68 per cent in 2026.

Public opinion has moved faster than the law. Amnesty’s proposal turns that shift into a legislative question for Magyar’s government.

Registered partnership continues to place same-sex couples outside the full framework of ordinary family law, limiting their access to shared naming rights, joint and stepchild adoption, assisted reproduction and automatic recognition of parenthood. It also imposes distinct age requirements and separate rules governing dissolution. Amnesty, drawing on KSH census data, reports that the 2022 census identified 10,030 same-sex cohabiting relationships and 4,125 children being raised by same-sex parents, while acknowledging that these figures almost certainly understate the reality.

Census recognition is not equality. A household can appear in state data and still disappear inside family law.

The state can count these families, but it has yet to fully recognise them. Pride counted tens of thousands of people whose relationships, families and parental rights are still only partially recognised under Hungarian law.

This year’s Pride march carried a joyous, liberating mood across Hungary.

The audit crosses the border

Orbánism also left things abroad that require counting: institutions without visible budgets, commitments made in rooms that Hungary no longer controls, relationships that survived because they were useful to the old order.

Átlátszó reported on Friday, 26 June, that the Orbán government had, under the radar, created a Hungarian Academy in Jerusalem months before the election. It opened in December 2025 in the city’s Talbiyeh district, at 6 George Washington Street, near diplomatic buildings and one of Jerusalem’s most expensive areas. It is led by Győző Vörös, who refers to himself as director until 2030. The institution presents itself as part of Hungarian cultural diplomacy and has already launched its own English-language journal.

The outlet could not find a founding charter, a government decision, an official gazette entry, a visible budget, organisational rules, a clear financing route, or a public explanation of the legal form or property arrangement. Átlátszó sent public data requests to Vörös, the Culture and Innovation Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the National Asset Management Company, and the State Treasury. It had received no answers by the time of publication.

This belongs in the audit of Orbánism. It likewise aligns with Viktor Orbán’s close political ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, a relationship that has shaped Hungary’s posture toward Israel and beyond.

The same week brought another external loose end. In January, Orbán’s government accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to join the Gaza Board of Peace, and Orbán signed its founding charter in Davos. By late June, the Guardian was reporting that the Board was considering sweeping legal immunities for itself, its contractors and security forces in Gaza, while also seeking access to public premises free of charge. The Board denied that any operative immunity framework exists. I found no public Hungarian clarification after the election on whether Magyar’s government still considers Hungary bound by Orbán’s participation, whether any financial commitment exists, or whether Hungary intends to remain involved.

Moscow supplied the week’s older reflex.

VSquare published a previously unused transcript from the Wagner rebellion showing Péter Szijjártó calling Sergey Lavrov on 24 June 2023 to ask whether things were under control and whether Lavrov was personally fine. He also offered personal help. Lavrov laughed and said he did not need anything.

It revealed a reflex more than a policy. Orbánism left institutions at home and a web of commitments abroad that now require careful examination, from cultural initiatives and diplomatic ties to lingering connections and unresolved obligations. Some may prove minor. Others may entail carrying money, legal obligations, or diplomatic costs. The first task is to put them on the record.

Magyar counts himself

By Sunday evening, Magyar had offered his own count.

In a Facebook post marking the Tisza government’s first 50 days in power, he said he was proud of what had already been done. The list was long and purposefully political: Hungary’s return to Europe, the reopening of Visegrád cooperation, progress on Transcarpathian Hungarian minority rights, public-media reform, assembly rights, the ban on hate-inciting political advertisements, new standalone ministries, the end of decree governance, accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, continued membership of the International Criminal Court, the publication of pardon-case files, the review of diplomatic passports, hospital air-conditioning investment, preparation for a wealth tax and school-start support, and the beginning of the process to open the agent files.

It was exactly the kind of post a new government wants at the 50-day mark: evidence of motion, evidence of control, evidence that history has not simply changed skin but started moving.

Magyar’s godsend is that he understands the public hunger for visible repair. The ladder photograph on top of the hospital, the 50-day list, the language of Operation Tisztítótűz, the insistence that Hungary has returned to Europe: all of it answers a public desire to see motion after years of suffocation.

By the end of the week, Hungary had opened a constitutional overhaul and asset-recovery drive, passed media reform, marched nearly 50,000 people through Budapest Pride, managed a nationwide heat emergency and watched its new prime minister publish the first balance sheet of his own government.

For those of us who learned politics under Orbán, the strange part is not that the state lied. It is watching the state try to account for its own lies in public.

The count will now move from rhetoric into cases: which assets can be traced, which laws survive review, which offices can be remade, which families gain recognition, which foreign commitments still bind the country, and which of the government’s 50-day achievements harden into institutional fact.

What I am watching next

The next phase will unfold in duller places, where the real story usually goes. I will be watching the consultation summary on the 17th Amendment, the safeguards in the Asset Recovery Office draft, the new public-media structure, and the first asset-recovery cases. Those cases will show whether Operation Tisztítótűz rests on evidence and due process, or whether recovery begins to outrun the law.

But I am also overseeing something less technical.

Hungarians feel different right now. You can see it in the polling: Tisza is far ahead, and Fidesz is at numbers that once felt impossible. You can see it in the streets, in the Pride crowd, in the heatwave photographs, in the way people speak about institutions that used to feel closed. There is a lightness in the country, even under the legal work and summer exhaustion. People are not just watching a government change; they are feeling it and living in it.

Authoritarian politics captures the face a country shows to the public. It teaches people to lower their expectations, speak carefully, laugh bitterly, and assume nothing serious can move. Something in that posture has loosened. Hungary is not fixed. The work ahead is enormous. But for the first time in a long while, many people are moving through public life as if the future has reopened.

I will also be watching whether Magyar’s 50-day list becomes an accountability tool or a victory poster: which items are completed, which are only started, and which depend on institutions still being rebuilt. Optimism is not a substitute for scrutiny, but it is part of the Hungarian mood now.

I will be watching whether Magyar’s government answers Amnesty’s marriage-equality proposal, or leaves LGBTQ+ families visible in politics and partial in law.

Abroad, the unanswered questions remain: whether the Jerusalem Academy produces a budget, whether Hungary clarifies its role in the Gaza Board of Peace, and whether the Russian channels revealed by VSquare become part of a wider audit of foreign policy.

The next weeks will show whether this count becomes evidence, theatre or law. But this week also showed something else: a country recalling how it feels to believe that public life can move again.

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Source: Official government consultation pages on the 17th Amendment and the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office; draft NVVH bill, explanatory memorandum and impact assessment; Parliament bill T/200 on media-law reform; Parliament bill T/174 on EU-funds legislation; Magyar Közlöny, including 97/2026. (VI. 25.) Korm. rendelet; Magyar Péter’s Facebook post on the Tisza government’s first 50 days; Budapest Pride organiser statements; Amnesty International Hungary; KSH-cited census data via Amnesty; Telex; 24.hu; 444; ATV; Magyar Nemzet; Átlátszó; VSquare; The Guardian; PolitPro; Kormány.hu; NNGYK; HungaroMet.

Last night I wrote a short note apologising for being more absent these days. I said I had been battling the flu in the middle of a historic heatwave here in Europe, here in Barcelona, where I live, and that the combination had made me virtually useless at writing anything solid.

That part was true. Here I am the next day, still sick, still sweating, perhaps even more so today, but now I have had more time to think about why this week has bugged me so much.

First, I want to thank everyone for the lovely messages. They meant a lot. It is still absurd to me that one day I decided to start a Substack and now, months later, I have connected with thousands of people in all corners of the world. People who are curious, empathetic, worried about democracy, and concerned about this world we all share. In one way or another, these are the people I have always gravitated towards.

I have been sick in my third-floor flat while Barcelona feels as if someone has put a lid over the city. The blackout curtains are up. Blankets cover parts of my flat to keep the worst of the sun out. The air conditioner has to run all day. I am worried about the electricity bill, obviously, but I do not see another choice. The fan runs on the other side of the apartment. The cats sleep in the coldest places they can find. I move around looking for cooler corners like a deeply unglamorous lizard. I point the fan at myself, then it irritates my throat. My room is pitch-black, and now I am also worried about whether my plants are getting enough sun.

First world problems, huh?

This is the level of climate anxiety I am currently operating at. The planet is heating, my throat aches, and I am worried about my electricity bill, my cats, my plants, and whether my brain will produce a sentence that makes sense.

It is too hot in this city to go outside before evening. This is no longer just Barcelona in summer. I have lived here for a few years now, long enough to be semi-local about heat, which mostly means knowing when to surrender. You quickly understand why the city runs late. Siesta at 3 p.m., dinner at 11 p.m., the slow rearranging of the day around the sun. You do not do much in the middle of the afternoon if you can avoid it. The people outside are often tourists, and I always hope they all have water, sun cream, and a better plan than walking through stone streets under a burning sky.

There is nothing noble about being sick in this sweltering heat. I kept trying to write this week, but most of what came out was nonsense. I am self-critical at the best of times, but this was different. The flu was definitely part of it. Still, it was the heat that made my brain feel worthless. It made my mind inept at writing, at doing my job, at doing one of the things I love most.

That alarmed me more than I anticipated.

I had thought about climate change as something governments argue about. Of course, I had. I had heard people talk about it on the news, in speeches, in reports, in all those distant ways that never quite feel like they belong to your own life.

I had not really thought about what it would do to my writing.

That sounds small, maybe even selfish, but it did something to me. This week made me realise how quickly this is arriving, how it is already shaping more parts of my life than I had fully admitted. The heating of the world settles into the body and the room, shaping how you sleep, how you breathe, how you move through your own space. It is already interfering with the things you love doing, and it will affect even more of them as it continues to accelerate.

Climate change affects us directly. If it is not today, it will be tomorrow, or soon enough. This week, for me, the historic highs of the heatwave made writing basically impossible. It felt like it was taking away the things I love most.

I am still very early in this writing life. I only really started sharing my work properly in December 2025, and somehow, there are now thousands of people from all over the world reading it. That still touches me in ways I do not fully know how to describe. I have always been a private person, so having an audience often feels strange. Lovely, but strange. It comes with weight. Any audience comes with responsibility.

This week, because I could not write properly, I realised how much I love it. I kept opening my laptop, staring at the screen, typing a few lines and deleting them again. It felt wrong, like trying to speak with the wrong voice. I missed the rhythm of it, the feeling when a sentence finally lands the way it should. I missed the quiet connection of knowing that something I write here in Barcelona might reach someone sitting somewhere completely different, maybe in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, reading it on their Sunday afternoon on the porch.

Then another thought occurred to me.

I do not mean that as an excuse. If I am a weak writer, I can learn. I hope I will get better over the years. I already think I have come a long way. But these last days made me realise that climate change will affect even the things we think are ours: attention, patience, sleep, work, thought, and the daily practices that allow a person to become who they are trying to become.

For most of my life, climate change still had a future tense. I knew about it as a child. We all did. We heard about 2050, 2075, two degrees, rising seas, emissions, targets, charts. It sounded terrifying, but it also sounded scheduled, like something waiting further down the road.

Now it is 2026, and the heat has long arrived.

Global warming and, more broadly, climate change are already upon us.

Across Europe, the news settles into a single, suffocating tone. Heat presses down on France until it turns lethal; Britain’s June slips past its own records as if they were nothing; classrooms empty, hospitals strain, and warnings ripple outward only to dissolve into the next day’s dread. The words grow sharper, more urgent; though they seem to land with less force each time, as if we are slowly learning how to hear catastrophe without feeling it.

By 2026, we have become very good at hearing catastrophic things in a normal voice.

That might be what angers me most: the calm, measured tone in which all of this is discussed, as if it were still abstract, still debatable, while people are already dying from heat across the world every year.

I also think about Donald Trump being president of the United States again, the most powerful democracy in the world, while openly casting doubt on climate science itself. He has called global warming a hoax, dismissed scientific consensus, and rolled back policies meant to address it. There are still millions of people who deny the basic reality of what is happening around them.

What the fuck?

That is not elegant, but I do not know what else to say. Go outside and feel the air for yourself. Notice how the summers have shifted, how the heat lingers and presses in ways it did not before. It is there in the strain on hospitals, in the faint vulnerability of those who cannot escape it, in the way daily life flexes around something that used to be the backdrop.

This is already here.

And yes, we need air conditioning. I need it. My cats need cooling. Sick people need it. Hospitals need it. Children need it. There is no virtue in pretending that heat builds character when it has become dangerous.

Still, I cannot shake the feeling that air conditioning is becoming the defining object of our time. The white box on the wall, humming away while the world outside becomes less livable. It gives relief, then quietly reminds you that relief is all we seem to be asking for.

That is the fear I keep saying out loud, only to the people closest to me. Will Barcelona become unlivable for us? Will Spain become increasingly difficult to inhabit? Will we one day have to move north, only to find that north is heating too? I love this city. It has become a home for me. I do not want to start thinking of home as a place with an expiry date.

Maybe this essay is a bit of a ramble. It probably is. But it is also the first thing I have been able to write in days, and after all the struggling, I think it came out okay. More than that, it reminded me how much I love writing. I missed it. I missed being here. I missed connecting with you.

So I am writing this from my sofa, fan pointed at my face, eyes drying from the wind, throat irritated, AC humming, cats lying around the flat in search of cooler ground. Outside, Barcelona is still too hot. Across Europe, the alerts continue. Somewhere, another official says the situation is being monitored.

Are we burning alive yet?

I think the answer is pretty clear.