Early on Europe Day, people began pouring into Kossuth Square outside Hungary’s gorgeous, neo-Gothic parliament. They had come to watch the new National Assembly take its oath on enormous screens. They cheered each glimpse of Péter Magyar. They booed some Fidesz and Mi Hazánk lawmakers. When the new speaker, Ágnes Forsthoffer, announced that the European Union flag would return to the building, the crowd roared once again. The Guardian reported the scene outside parliament as Magyar was sworn in.

Inside, 199 representatives took their oaths at about 11 am. Viktor Orbán was not among them.

For the first time since Hungary’s first post-communist parliament in 1990, Orbán was absent from the chamber. The old prime minister was outside the room where defeat becomes official. The new one was inside, sheathed by a two-thirds majority. Later that day, the EU flag was raised again on the facade, after Orbán’s government had removed it in 2014.

The flag’s return showed, in a simple and visible way, that the symbols of the state could be changed without Orbán in the building.

Hungary had changed government. Whether it had made Orbán smaller was another question.

The absence had been prepared two weeks earlier.

On 25 April, Orbán announced in a Facebook video that he would not take his seat in the new National Assembly. The simplest democratic ritual was there for him: to move from government to opposition, to cross the chamber and accept the diminished authority that comes with defeat. In most parliamentary democracies, that transition is unremarkable. In Hungary, Orbán chose not to make it at all.

Orbán declined the chair.

Call it what it is: post-power rank retention.

The symptoms are easy to locate. The patient concedes the election. He admits that “a political era has ended.” He calls for “complete renewal.” Then he explains that his real work is somewhere above the chamber, beyond the opposition benches, in the deeper country where his authority apparently still resides.

Sure. Opposition is for other people.

The result had been brutal. On 12 April, Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of Hungary’s 199 parliamentary seats, reducing Fidesz to 52. Orbán’s 16-year rule was over. On election night, Orbán conceded. Five days later, in a 17 April interview with the pro-Fidesz Patrióta channel, he spoke of pain, emptiness, and rupture. He said that “a political era has ended.” He said Fidesz needed “complete renewal.” Welt reported his call for renewal after the defeat.

His next move was more nuanced. Nearly 2.4 million people had still voted for Fidesz, he said. “Let’s not act like the whole country rejected our government.”

There it was: defeat, with its sharpest edges dulled.

Orbán has not conducted himself like a man trying to overturn the result. He accepted the outcome and stayed within its legal framework, even as he looked for ways to soften its political meaning. Rather than contesting the election itself, he has focused on preserving his authority outside the institutions that now record his defeat, treating the transfer of power as real while resisting the loss of status that normally accompanies it.

He accepted the transfer of power, but not the lessened place that power’s loss was supposed to bring.

Hungarian politics has produced a curious feat of geometry. Orbán is no longer prime minister, yet everyone keeps arranging themselves in relation to him. He will not sit with the opposition. Fidesz promises renewal under the same leader. Magyar’s government, elected to move beyond the Orbán era, spends some of its earliest constitutional energy defining the terms of Orbán’s return.

Everyone agrees Orbán lost. Orbán included. What he refuses to accept is the ordinary consequence of losing, becoming just another politician. Instead, he speaks of renewal from friendly Fidesz platforms, continues to cast himself as the voice of the “national side,” and positions himself above the opposition benches he refuses to occupy. The election removed him from power. Since then, much of his effort has gone into ensuring it does not render him irrelevant.

The Seat He Would Not Take

A parliamentary seat is not glamorous. It is where defeat becomes tangible. The former prime minister sits across from the new one. Cameras record the new hierarchy. The man who once set the agenda waits for recognition from the speaker. His microphone no longer carries the voice of the state. He speaks, but from a different place in the room.

Orbán, with no apparent shame, avoided all that.

Fidesz can still function perfectly well inside parliament. Gergely Gulyás can lead the caucus, the party can settle into the rhythms of opposition, and its MPs can absorb the daily frustrations that come with no longer setting the agenda. The institution offers a ready-made role for a defeated governing party. Orbán has decided not to play it.

Orbán has chosen a more sterile arrangement. Others can manage opposition. He would rather manage meaning.

His power always ran deeper than administration. Orbán led the government while training his supporters to see it as an extension of true Hungary. Brussels, liberals, NGOs, judges, journalists, migrants, George Soros, foreign capital, Ukrainian interests: all became elements of a single story of siege. Fidesz ran the state. Orbán cast himself as the nation’s sentinel.

Losing an election damages that claim. Sitting directly in opposition would further damage it.

Orbán has placed himself outside the institution that now records his defeat. The result is awkward but effective. He is no longer prime minister, but he has not become simply the man sitting three rows back, waiting for permission to speak.

That is the strategy in miniature. Orbán accepted the election outcome but resisted the political and symbolic consequences that normally follow a defeat of this scale.

Defeat, Lightly Edited

Orbán’s language since April has been careful enough to avoid looking deranged and proud enough to avoid sounding defeated.

He has admitted pain. He has admitted rupture. He has admitted that Fidesz needs renewal. That already sets him apart from a familiar species of defeated leader, the kind who discover electoral fraud, phantom conspiracies, and suspicious ballot boxes the moment the votes stop going their way.

His acceptance has limits, though. “Let’s not act like the whole country rejected our government” is a line worth pausing over. Numerically, it has a point. Nearly 2.4 million Fidesz voters did not vanish on election night. Politically, it performs another function. It asks supporters to treat a crushing defeat as an incomplete misunderstanding.

Tisza won 141 seats. Fidesz won 52. The irony is hard to miss. Fidesz spent years redesigning the electoral system to magnify the winner. In 2026, it worked perfectly. For Tisza. Fidesz built the amplifier and then got blasted by it.

Orbán’s response has been to put his foot in the door and ask whether everyone is sure they meant to close it.

This is what makes the current moment more gripping than a simple story of denial. Orbán is saying the election changed the government but left the country’s deeper ownership unsettled.

The phrase “national side” has a peculiar role in Hungarian politics. It does not just describe a faction. It draws a map. On one side are governments, parties, elections, and temporary officeholders. On the other hand is a supposedly more authentic Hungary shaped by historical wounds, grievances, and loyalties. The references change with the moment, from Trianon and foreign domination to Brussels and sovereignty, but the story remains the same. Political opponents may win institutions. They do not fully inherit the homeland. The nation is imagined as waiting elsewhere, beyond the reach of electoral arithmetic.

Renewal, Starring the Same Man

On 13 June, Fidesz held its congress and re-elected Orbán as party leader. Reporting put the tally at 729 votes in favour, eight abstentions, and none against.

For Fidesz, renewal, in a hypocritical sense, represents a promise of transformation, watched over by the very man whose presence made true transformation so difficult.

The party has grounds for this, though. Fidesz without Orbán is a question mark with county offices. Its ideology, hierarchy, donor relationships, media habits, internal discipline, and sense of historical mission all run through him. For years, the party was organised around keeping different parts of the system moving in the same direction under a single leader.

Now, the object of alignment has lost power.

That creates a problem no congress speech can solve. Fidesz cannot credibly pretend that nothing has happened. Its parliamentary presence has been cut by more than half. Its leader is no longer the prime minister. Its enemies control a two-thirds majority. The institutions it built are under review, reversal, or investigation.

Still, Fidesz also cannot easily ask the obvious question: whether the man who built the defeated system can also be the man who renews it.

So it has answered the question by avoiding it. Orbán stays. The party changes around him, under him, because of him, and never quite beyond him.

There is logic here. A panicked succession fight after a historic defeat could yank Fidesz apart. Orbán still has a base. He still has discipline. He still possesses the rare gift of making loyalists feel that obedience is a form of patriotism. Removing him would do more than alter the leadership. It would confront the party with the sharper question of whether it possesses any independent centre of gravity at all.

For now, Fidesz has chosen gravity.

The System Still Has Keys

Orbán leaves office unusually well-equipped for a defeated man. These are the things that make demotion negotiable.

Over 16 years in power, he helped create a political environment that stretched far beyond government itself. Elections can remove a cabinet in a day. The habits, relationships, and institutions that grew around Orbán’s rule tend to move more slowly.

The wider intellectual network is also real. Mathias Corvinus Collegium was endowed in 2020 with major stakes in MOL and Richter, giving the Orbán-aligned right a financial and institutional platform beyond the usual scale of party-adjacent politics. Over time, that platform expanded into a broader ecosystem that helped project Hungarian illiberalism well beyond Hungary’s borders, cultivating influence, relationships, and ideological networks across Europe and the Anglophone right. These networks remain part of the political environment Magyar inherited. As his government reviews institutions, funding structures, and the legacy of the previous era, it will inevitably encounter organisations and relationships shaped during Orbán’s years in power.

Orbán’s ability to act larger than a defeated opposition politician depends on these murky residues. He is not standing in an empty room insisting he still matters. He is standing inside a system built over 16 years to make him matter.

That system is now under pressure. Post-election reporting described anxiety among recipients of Hungarian right-wing patronage abroad. Other reports described Orbán-linked figures exploring ways to move wealth abroad, including through the Gulf, Singapore, Australia, and the United States, amid fears of scrutiny under the new government. Still, even these reported claims reveal something important. Some people around the old system appear to have understood defeat in very concrete terms.

Money is rarely sentimental. It tends to notice changing conditions before politicians do.

Magyar Builds the Anti-Comeback State

Péter Magyar’s government has acted as if Orbán’s defeat is real, urgent, and insufficient.

On 9 May, Magyar became prime minister. Within weeks, his government began moving against core pieces of the Orbán order. On 27 May, parliament voted 133 to 37, with five abstentions, to keep Hungary in the International Criminal Court, reversing an Orbán-era decision to withdraw from it. The government also moved against the Sovereignty Protection Office, set up investigative committees into alleged misconduct under the previous government, and pursued reforms that helped unlock €16.4 billion in frozen EU funds.

The clearest anti-comeback measure came soon after.

On 21 May, Tisza submitted a draft constitutional amendment limiting prime ministers to a maximum of eight years in office, counting cumulative service since 1990. The Guardian quoted the draft language: “A person who has served as prime minister, for a total of at least eight years, including any interruptions, may not be elected as prime minister.” In practice, the rule would bar Orbán, who served five terms over 20 years, from becoming prime minister again. On 16 June, the Hungarian parliament approved the amendment by 135 votes to 50, with six abstentions.

An assertive way to convey to the former prime minister that his retirement plans have been adjusted.

It may be defensible. Hungary had just emerged from 16 years of personalised rule. A prime ministerial term limit can be presented as a democratic guardrail against renewed concentration of power. Many democracies impose limits on presidents. Hungary’s problem was that the office of the prime minister had been turned, through party discipline and constitutional engineering, into the centre of a long political reign.

Nevertheless, the political target is visible from space. The rule applies to Orbán in practice. It tells voters that Magyar’s government sees him as a future threat serious enough to be written out of the premiership by constitutional amendment.

That may be necessary statecraft. It is also a highly visible political signal. Orbán will have no difficulty understanding what it is meant to do.

The Problem With Making Him Smaller

Magyar faces a genuine dilemma. The old system cannot be left intact simply because Orbán might claim persecution. A government with a two-thirds majority has both the mandate and the obligation to dismantle parts of the old order. Yet the longer those structures remain in place, the harder they become to undo.

Nonetheless, every move against Orbán risks confirming his size.

Fidesz has already shown how it will use this. Measures that supporters of the new government see as democratic safeguards can be reframed as evidence of insecurity. A term limit can be presented as fear of a comeback. Investigations can be cast as revenge. Efforts to repair institutions can be described as a purge. In that telling, every attempt to close the road back only reinforces the idea that Orbán remains the figure the new government cannot stop measuring itself against.

This is the trap and perhaps the lone idea Fidesz has at the moment, after such a crushing defeat. Magyar must build a country after Orbán while resisting the temptation to make every foundation stone anti-Orbán-shaped.

For Fidesz, the trap is different. The party needs renewal, but its main proof of continuity is the man who makes renewal suspect. It needs to show discipline without looking embalmed. It needs to defend its record without sounding like a museum guide in a burning building. It needs to oppose Magyar without reminding voters too vividly why they threw Fidesz out.

No wonder Orbán prefers altitude.

The Old 2002 Trick

Orbán has lost before. The useful comparison is not Donald Trump in 2020. Hungary is not facing a leader who denied defeat, but one who accepted it while carrying much of the authority, loyalty, and inheritance that made him dominant. I keep arriving back at a more superficial thought. Elections can change governments overnight, but they are much less reliable at shrinking the people who once seemed larger than the state itself. Orbán may have lost the office. Hungary is still finding out how long it takes to lose the shadow.

The more appropriate comparison is Orbán after 2002.

After that defeat, Orbán helped build the civic-circle movement that turned Fidesz from a defeated governing party into a broader right-wing social camp. The movement language and the claim that the homeland could not be in opposition helped transform defeat into injured possession. The lesson was uncomplicated and powerful. Institutions may temporarily belong to opponents. The nation does not.

The rhyme with 2026 is evident. Again, Orbán is shifting the centre away from parliament and toward the camp. Again, he is treating defeat as a problem of morale, organisation, and interpretation. Again, he is speaking as the organiser of a political community larger than the seats it holds.

The difference is that 2026 is heavier. In 2002, Orbán was a former prime minister with time ahead of him. In 2026, he is the architect of a 16-year system now being dismantled by a government with constitutional power. He is older, more exposed, and more personally fused with the structures under attack. His former state is being audited by his successor.

That may make the old trick harder to pull off. It is also the strategy he knows best.

The Man Outside the Chamber

There are reasons not to overstate this. Orbán conceded, did not challenge the result, spoke of renewal, and remained party leader. Refusing a parliamentary seat may simply be tactical, and Fidesz may eventually settle into a more conventional opposition role.

All fair points. They do not rescue the situation from its central absurdity.

A man who built a political system around himself has lost power and immediately arranged his post-power life to avoid looking smaller. His party has responded to defeat by reaffirming his indispensability. His successor has responded to victory by legislating against his return. The old media ecosystem is shaken, but still present. The old financial networks are nervous, but still relevant. The old language of the “national side” has so far survived the loss of government.

So let’s return to the scene on 9 May and join the crowd outside the Hungarian parliament, the large screens, the cheers for Magyar, the EU flag returning to the facade, and Orbán absent from the chamber for the first time since 1990.

By 16 June, parliament had approved a constitutional rule designed to stop him from becoming prime minister again. The image from May had become the logic of June. Orbán was outside the chamber. The chamber was still organising itself around him.

Still, the comparison is becoming harder to avoid. A few weeks into power, Magyar’s government is passing major laws, reopening Hungary’s relationship with Europe, reversing parts of the old order, and testing how much of Orbánism can be dismantled from inside the institutions Orbán once controlled. Fidesz promises renewal while keeping the same man at the centre, outside parliament, directing a party that says little about reform except that it is coming.

This may be how Orbán’s rank finally shrinks: not through one constitutional amendment, but through the daily sight of someone else governing.

Orbán has lost the office. Hungary is beginning to see what politics looks like when he is no longer the man holding it.

This week, the new government published the sort of documents Orbán’s government was never assembled to explain in public: cabinet summaries, Interior Ministry submissions, cost estimates, clemency records and consultation papers. Read together, they demonstrate how political messaging became government action.

2,349,022,540 forints.

Its force comes from its refusal to behave like a slogan.

The figure appears in government documents as the gross one-off cost of creating a 500-person reception station at Vitnyéd-Csermajor, a former agricultural site near the Austrian border, where Fidesz politicians would later insist there would be no migrant camp.

What gives the number its power is its specificity. It arrives stripped of ideology. No references to sovereignty, Brussels, invasion or national survival. Just a location, a capacity, a staffing requirement, an implementation schedule and a budget calculated to the forint.

Administrative records have a different weight. They are produced to enable decision-making, not to persuade voters.

The documents released by the government concern Hungary’s response to a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s highest court, in case C-123/22. The judgment addressed Hungary’s asylum and migration obligations and compelled the government to consider practical compliance measures. The effect of the released material comes from reading it in sequence. The further one moves into the file, the less the familiar political language matters. Arguments about sovereignty, border protection and migration give way to the mechanics of government: officials assigning responsibilities, ministries comparing options, timelines being fixed, capacities calculated and costs attached to decisions. The revealing story begins where rhetoric must become concrete enough to be planned, funded, and carried out.

The paper trail moves quickly. On July 7, 2024, the then Fidesz government established a working group following the CJEU ruling, comprising the minister leading the Prime Minister’s Office, the justice minister, the minister responsible for European Union affairs, and the interior minister. On July 25, the discussion had reached a possible accommodation near the Austrian border, including an open camp. By August 21, the government had authorised the interior minister to invest in the Vitnyéd property to make it suitable for receiving refugees. By September 11, the Interior Ministry material discussed a new reception station 23 kilometres from the Austrian-Hungarian border, a three-month implementation schedule, 500 places, 42 border guards, 87 new staff, and billions in costs.

The August 21 cabinet material, as reproduced in the government’s presentation, says that “the government authorised the interior minister to carry out investments at the Vitnyéd property for the purpose of making it suitable for receiving refugees.”

That sentence is one of the centrepieces of the week.

It is difficult to square with the later public performance.

Having read it, and as far as the available documents indicate, one passage stands out to me. In English, it reads: “The government determined that by 2026 it was necessary to sharpen the political conflict around migration.” The line appears in the government’s presentation of the underlying cabinet material. This suggests that migration was being discussed not only as a policy issue but also as a political strategy. Even without placing too much weight on that single sentence, the broader record points in the same direction: while the public debate focused on political messaging, government officials were simultaneously engaged in detailed administrative planning.

By September, the file had settled into numbers. The creation of a reception station suitable for 500 people was listed at gross 2,106,297,200 forints. Production-unit costs were listed at gross 203,550,000 forints. Equipment for 42 border guards came to gross 39,175,340 forints. The total one-off cost was given as gross 2,349,022,540 forints (about $7.7 million at current exchange rates). The annual costs were larger: 87 new staff for the National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing at gross 769,607,840 forints; operation and guard-protection expenses for the Vitnyéd-Csermajor Reception Station at gross 1,754,991,668 forints; and an additional 450,000,000 forints in financing needs for the National Office for the Judiciary. The annual total was gross 2,974,599,508 forints (about $10 million).

This was a document with 500 pages, a staffing plan, border-guard equipment, a three-month implementation estimate and more than 5.3 billion forints in combined first-year and annual operating costs (roughly $17 million combined).

Publicly, Fidesz politics had left little space for that kind of administrative language. Migration was made into the central emotional architecture of Orbán’s rule: Brussels as pressure, migrants as threat, sovereignty as permanent defence, the Hungarian border as proof that the government alone could see what others refused to see. By the time the subject reached voters, law and cost had largely disappeared from view, leaving the performance of refusal.

The denials followed.

On the government’s presentation, Alpár Gyopáros, a Fidesz MP and government commissioner responsible for regional development, appears beside the sentence: “There will be no migrant camp in Vitnyéd-Csermajor.” Tamás Menczer, Fidesz’s communications director and one of the party’s most prominent public spokesmen, appears with his own familiar line: “We do not want immigrants.” The final slide shows Gergely Gulyás, then the minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office and one of the government’s chief public voices, telling the Hungarian News Agency on September 26, 2024: “There will be no refugee camp of any kind in Vitnyéd; the government has no such plan.” Beneath that, the same slide includes a line reported by HVG: “There may be summer camps for students.”

A state was costing a reception station while politics denied a camp. A file discussed a 500-person facility, while a minister told the public the government had no such plan. An Interior Ministry submission discussed a site near the Austrian border, while the public answer focused on schoolchildren and summer camps.

The documents leave open questions about political intent, final approval and implementation. They still show serious administrative preparation for a reception facility, while the public message remained categorical.

That contradiction needs no embellishment.

The strength of those questions comes from their simplicity. A trick rarely requires a gross 2.349 billion forint implementation estimate, an annual cost line approaching 3 billion forints, 87 new staff, guard-protection costs and a three-month construction schedule. A trick rarely requires the interior minister to brief the cabinet that the planned camp at Vitnyéd-Csermajor would have a budgetary resource need.

Vitnyéd gives us a rare glimpse of Orbánism in a more vulnerable form. The public performance was loud, moralised and absolute. The internal record was practical, legalistic and expensive. The old government told its voters that migration could be defeated through will, refusal and the correct enemy vocabulary. Simultaneously, its officials were reading court judgments, discussing accommodation, calculating costs, and preparing for contingencies.

This is where the week begins for me, with the old state telling one story in public and writing another in its files.

What the files changed

For weeks, Magyar’s government has spoken about restoring public media, unlocking European funds, reforming child protection, strengthening transparency, tracing public money and revisiting decisions taken under the previous administration. This week, those ambitions began appearing in the form that will determine whether they matter: draft laws, consultation papers, official records, ministerial files, cabinet summaries and institutional redesigns.

Election victories change authority. Documents change the state.

The government is now trying to act on the instruments that made Orbánism durable. Media structures, asset declarations, procurement rules, foundation law, secrecy practices, child-protection management, emergency-law finance, construction permitting and cabinet minutes now sit inside the same political argument because they are all parts of the same inheritance. Orbánism survived through speeches and party discipline, and through forms, mandates, exemptions, boards, definitions, procedures, and files that almost no one outside the system was expected to read.

The Fidesz congress gave the week its other portrait.

While the new government was publishing records and presenting legislative packages, Orbán was asking his party for another mandate. He received it almost completely. At the Budapest congress, 729 delegates voted to have him remain Fidesz president. No one voted against him. Eight abstained. The result looked overwhelming, but its shape felt strange. Orbán was re-elected as party president after losing the state, and his new mandate lasts only one year.

That is a revealing arrangement.

Fidesz is still Orbán’s party, but the meaning of that fact has changed. He has said his place is in the renewal of the national camp, which suggests how he now sees himself. He is no longer the head of government, no longer the man signing budgets and chairing cabinet meetings, yet he is still trying to remain the central interpreter of the political community he built.

That makes his position more spectral than before.

Orbán’s words used to arrive with institutions behind them. A sentence could become a campaign, a decree, a television segment, a school poster, a public procurement priority, a budget line, a foreign-policy veto. Now he speaks from inside the party, while the state he used to command is being opened by someone else.

The sentence resembled a statement of personal political identity.

He accepts responsibility and stays. He speaks of generational change while remaining indispensable. He vows renewal from the centre of the room. He recognises defeat as a shock, then turns it into a message of survival.

At the congress, he reportedly listed ten reasons for Fidesz’s defeat, including the party’s failure to answer Tisza’s corruption allegations during the campaign. That is a notable admission as it recognises the wound while leaving the system unnamed. Corruption appears as a campaign-management failure, something the party did not rebut effectively enough, while the state is now releasing records that make the allegation much harder to contain within campaign language.

Orbán is trying to turn Fidesz into an opposition party while preventing Fidesz from becoming a post-Orbán party.

As is the tension inside the Fidesz congress. Orbán remains powerful enough that no one voted against him. He is weak enough that his mandate had to be limited to one year. He speaks of renewal while preserving command. He promises reorganisation while the government he led's files are being read back to the country.

Magyar’s response was brutal. He said Orbán had become the Ferenc Gyurcsány of Fidesz and added that there is no democratic opposition with a mafia boss. Gyurcsány, Hungary’s prime minister from 2004 to 2009, became a deeply polarising figure after the leaked “Őszöd speech” and the political crises that followed, remaining a symbol of opposition failure for many Fidesz voters long after leaving office. The comparison was designed to wound because it touches the deepest fear around Orbán now: that he may become the figure whose continued presence prevents his own side from understanding why it lost.

The files released this week make that position harder. Fidesz can still tell its voters the ancient story about sovereignty, Brussels, migration, foreign pressure and national survival. It can still speak in the emotional language that carried the party through years of power. But now that language has to live beside cabinet summaries, Interior Ministry notes, cost tables, Justice Ministry memoranda and consultation documents.

Records have a way of narrowing the distance between what was said and what was done.

Hungary is beginning to read the internal record of how Orbán’s state actually functioned.

Read more

Europe’s nationalist right faces an unexpected problem. The man who served for years as its most successful governing example has been eliminated dramatically by Hungarian voters, and the movement he helped legitimise is looking for a new heir to the illiberal throne of Europe.

For an unduly long time, Viktor Orbán occupied a peculiar place in European politics. To his critics, he was a democratic vandal with a gift for turning EU summits into hostage situations. To his admirers, he was something more valuable, proof of concept. Plenty of politicians could rage against Brussels. Plenty could denounce liberal elites, immigration, judges, journalists, and modernity itself. Orbán accomplished something rarer. He built a state that appeared to make those complaints governable.

Over sixteen years in power, he gave Europe’s nationalist right a functioning showroom. Hungary became the place where sympathisers could point and say, “See? It works.” Elections could be won repeatedly. Institutions could be bent without quite breaking. Opposition could be contained. Loyalists could be rewarded. Brussels could be denounced while its money continued to arrive. The trick was not merely to survive within the European Union, but to learn how to utilise membership itself as part of the system.

His central insight was that the European Union’s strengths could become vulnerabilities. Consensus, designed to foster cooperation, became leverage. Legal caution, intended as a safeguard, created space for delay. Funding disputes became theatre. In Orbán’s hands, a small state could cast a much larger shadow, provided its leader was willing to turn every negotiation into a test of endurance.

His power also rested on something beyond Brussels. Orbán became Vladimir Putin’s most useful political partner inside institutions designed to contain Russian influence. Hungary repeatedly delayed or diluted EU measures against Moscow, resisted assistance to Ukraine, and became a frequent source of uncertainty inside Western alliances. Moscow had every reason to treasure him. He was not simply another nationalist leader with a weakness for Kremlin atmospherics. He sat inside the EU and NATO, where delay was essential for Putin.

Orbán’s domestic project, European leverage, and geopolitical usefulness reinforced one another. Each clash with Brussels fed his authority at home. Each new layer of domestic control made him harder to discipline abroad. Each dispute over sanctions, Ukraine, energy, or NATO cooperation increased his value to outside actors eager to weaken European unity. He turned conflict with the Union into a source of legitimacy, then used that legitimacy to deepen the system that made the conflict possible.

Now the proprietor has vanished.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party did more than end sixteen years of Fidesz rule in April 2026. By dethroning Orbán, it removed the EU’s most experienced internal antagonist, the leader who showed Europe’s nationalist right how to govern from within the Union while attacking it as an oppressor. It also removed Moscow’s most dependable ally inside the EU’s decision-making process. His defeat raises a question larger than Hungary. Who, if anyone, can fill his specific position as both model and obstacle?

No single figure now carries the whole inheritance. Orbán’s position required state control, veto power, ideological skill, patronage, media dominance, external backers, foreign admirers, and an instinctive understanding of where the EU hesitates. It also benefited from a geopolitical environment in which Russia saw strategic value in keeping him in office. Many potential successors have some of these assets. None possesses them all.

The search, therefore, leads away from the fantasy of a single successor and toward a more worrisome vista. Orbán’s old functions are being scattered across Europe’s right. Obstruction has a home in Bratislava. Respectability has a base in Rome. The brand runs through the European Parliament. The transaction returns in Prague. Old alliances survive in Ljubljana. Strategic ambiguity gathers force in Sofia. Warning lights keep flashing in Bucharest.

Robert Fico is the closest operational heir because he understands the first rule of Orbán’s method. A leader does not need to dominate Europe to make Europe wait. The Slovak prime minister has what many louder nationalists lack: a government, a seat in the Council, and a willingness to turn European consensus into a bargaining exercise.

Fico has halted Slovakia’s military aid to Ukraine, rejected the EU’s plan to phase out Russian gas, and threatened to assume Hungary’s obstructive role on Ukraine financing. At home, his government has pressured watchdogs and media institutions, while protests have followed his moves against the whistleblower office, the penal code, and voting rules. He also has a sympathetic president in Peter Pellegrini and a political style built around welfare nostalgia, resentment, and suspicion of Western liberal authority.

If Brussels were seeking a new specialist in summit prolongation, Fico would be around the top of the list.

Slovakia gives him a narrower instrument. Its institutions have deteriorated, though they have not been reshaped over sixteen years under a single ruling party. Its economy, size, and exposure give Fico less room than Orbán enjoyed. He can delay, trade, and complicate. He cannot yet offer Europe’s nationalist right proof that state capture inside the EU can be made durable.

Giorgia Meloni presents a more elegant problem for Brussels. She is the most powerful hard-right leader in the Union, which makes her a poor fit for the role of anti-Brussels insurgent. Italy is too central, too indebted, too exposed to markets, and too important to NATO for its prime minister to behave as Orbán did.

Meloni’s essence lies in her ability to win without sounding permanently insurgent. On migration, she has helped move Europe toward externalisation, offshoring, detention, and deals with third countries. Her Albania migrant-centres scheme has faced legal obstacles, although the broader achievement is political. She has made once-fringe proposals sound like items on a Council agenda.

Orbán shouted from the edge of the room. Meloni has learned how to shift the room’s assumptions.

That may prove more durable than defiance. Meloni remains aligned with Ukraine, operates inside NATO consensus, and has been among the strongest supporters of sanctions against Russia among Europe’s nationalist leaders. For that reason alone, she differs fundamentally from Orbán. She also faces courts, coalition politics, fiscal pressure, and Italy’s dense institutional life. She is unlikely to become the EU’s leading spoiler. She has already become the figure who makes policies once associated with the fringe feel available to the centre-right and negotiable to Brussels. Orbán made Brussels listen to the hard right by blocking things. Meloni has made Brussels borrow its vocabulary.

France poses the greatest future threat because it would change the scale of the problem. Marine Le Pen’s judicial position remains unresolved before her appeal ruling, and Jordan Bardella stands as the obvious substitute if she is barred from the 2027 presidential race. Bardella already chairs Patriots for Europe in the European Parliament, the political family Orbán helped build. He has the youth, the discipline, the parliamentary network, and the polished surface of a radical politics conditioned for television and coalition respectability.

The missing piece is executive power. Orbán supervised ministries, budgets, public media, universities, prosecutors, borders, and vetoes. Bardella has the brand. Le Pen has the mythology. National Rally has the larger opportunity because France is a founding EU state, a military power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and one of the Union’s central political engines.

A French nationalist government would give Orbán’s language a state far more powerful than Hungary. Budapest could twist obstruction into leverage. Paris could bring that politics into the centre of the European project.

Romania supplies the sharpest warning from the eastern flank. George Simion lost the 2025 presidential rerun to Nicușor Dan, but his defeat settled less than it appeared to settle. Simion dominated the first round and carried a large nationalist electorate into the runoff. His politics combines anti-elite fury, suspicion of Brussels, national grievance, religious imagery, digital mobilisation, and a shifting line on Ukraine and Russia.

That shifting line deserves attention because it is not simply confusion. Simion has said Romania should be compensated for its aid to Ukraine. He has claimed Russia is not a major threat to NATO. He has also described the war as Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ambiguity is part of the method. It allows different audiences to hear reassurance, resentment, and defiance simultaneously.

Romania carries real strategic weight. It borders Ukraine, faces the Black Sea, borders Moldova, and plays a central role in NATO’s eastern posture. A nationalist government in Bucharest would touch the Black Sea, Moldova, NATO logistics, Ukraine policy, and the EU’s eastern security architecture at once. For now, Simion remains a warning. The warning is audible enough.

Bulgaria shows a slower drift. Rumen Radev’s new political vehicle won an outright majority in April 2026, and his government has already said it will stop further weapons supplies to Ukraine. Bulgaria also joined the euro area on January 1, 2026, which makes the case more interesting than a simple story of anti-EU rupture. The country is moving deeper into the Union’s monetary core while warming up to Russia.

That combination is sinister. Radev points to the possibility of a government deepening formal integration with Europe in one field while weakening the Union’s strategic line in another. The EU is built to recognise open confrontation. It is less equipped to respond to the gradual withdrawal of commitment.

The remaining figures are less likely to inherit Orbán’s place, but they show how divisible his politics has become. Andrej Babiš offers the transactional version. His return in Czechia, ANO’s links to Patriots for Europe, and his business background place him inside the post-Orbán field. He has money, media instincts, anti-migration appeal, and a long habit of treating public life as a negotiation over advantage. In his version, ideology arrives with an invoice attached.

Janez Janša offers a different fragment. The Slovenian leader is one of Orbán’s long-standing fellow travellers, a combative right-wing politician whose previous period in office drew criticism over media freedom and democratic standards.

Herbert Kickl and Geert Wilders mark the outer edge of the field. The FPÖ helped launch Patriots for Europe and won Austria’s 2024 election, though Austria’s coalition system kept Kickl out of office. Wilders reached influence in the Netherlands, then brought down his own government and saw Rob Jetten sworn in as head of a new Dutch minority coalition. Both show reach without command. They move some weight around European politics, but they do not currently hold the instruments that made Orbán dangerous.

By this point, the inheritance has begun to look less like succession than distribution.

The rhetoric is easy to export. The full system is much harder. It requires time, constitutional revision, disciplined party organisation, loyal business networks, media dominance, weak opposition, EU money, unanimity rules, and a leader willing to turn every Brussels dispute into domestic proof of persecution. It also requires circumstances that made Orbán unusually valuable to outside powers, particularly Russia. European nationalists admire the finished product. Few possess the materials.

That should give the Union little comfort. A single antagonist can be watched. Brussels learned Orbán’s habits. It could bargain with him, sanction him, flatter him, condemn him, and occasionally use him as the explanation for its own paralysis. A dispersed method is harder to manage. It moves through habits rather than commands.

The uncomfortable part for Brussels is that these tactics grow from inside the European system. Unanimity gives delay a price. EU funds give resentment a purse. Rule-of-law procedures move slowly enough for captured institutions to harden. The Union’s caution, one of its civilising virtues, becomes a resource for governments willing to abuse time.

The EU may discover that a single adversary was easier to understand. Orbán gave Brussels one face, one capital, one familiar seat at the summit table. The next phase offers habits instead: the veto threat, the migration bargain, raids on public broadcasting, patriotic invoices, hesitations over Russia, attacks on judges, and complaints of Brussels arrogance issued just before the next request for European funds.

Orbán’s fall weakens the centre of European illiberalism. It also removes the Kremlin’s most effective advocate inside EU and NATO decision-making. Regardless, it leaves many of the incentives that made him powerful intact. The EU still rewards unanimity games. It still struggles to prevent elected governments from becoming entrenched before institutional damage becomes permanent. It still sends funds into political systems it later discovers it cannot discipline. It still depends on consensus in areas where a determined government can extract value from delay.

Orbán’s real legacy may be that he made the EU’s internal vulnerabilities legible. His successors do not need his longevity, charisma, or control over Hungary. They only need to copy the parts that traverse.

Orbán has lost power. The weaknesses that made him useful to his allies and to Europe’s adversaries remain, even if his defeat has made them less easy to exploit.

Sources include The Guardian, Associated Press, Financial Times, Le Monde, the European Central Bank, official EU materials, Freedom House, V-Dem, ECFR, Carnegie Europe, Chatham House and IISS.

At first, I saw the story as steel: heavy, unyielding, already saturated with guilt. Even before I had written a sentence, steel brought the image of a tank.

The documents moved me elsewhere. Their pages led me away from the dense moral resonance I had first projected onto the scandal and toward something paler, more ambiguous, less ready-made for outrage.

The word was alumina.

A white powder. Aluminium oxide. Refined from bauxite. Shipped in bulk. Loaded into silos. Moved by conveyor belts. Written into customs records as another export. Alumina is essential for making aluminium, a metal used in aircraft, vehicles, infrastructure, weapons systems, and the ordinary machinery of modern life. It usually disappears into statistical tables, hidden below public language, until war forces a person to follow cargo backwards from the wound.

Growing up in Ireland meant that the story reached me before I understood it.

Ireland is not scenery to me. It is weather in the bones, in school corridors, in wet uniforms, in blurred bus windows, on football pitches under low skies. It is where I grew up, where memory settled into habit, where history lingered in conversations, commemorations, and the stories people carried with them. It is a place shaped by its past and attentive to questions of power, identity, and belonging.

Neutrality belonged to that pride. It emerged from an older wound, from the memory of a small country refusing to be drafted into the logic of larger powers. Ireland’s neutrality was never only a policy. It became woven into the country’s sense of itself: a nation that sent peacekeepers abroad, carried the memory of its own subjugation, distrusted imperial certainty, and instinctively recognised something of its own history in people living under the shadow of stronger states.

For those reasons, Ukraine made sense there.

When Russia invaded, an Irish response came with an instinctive recognition. People who had never been to Kyiv understood the sentence “a larger neighbour says your country is not real.” They understood it without theory, because Ireland’s own memory still carries the bruise of being made small by someone else’s map.

The same Ireland spoke often, and rightly, about Palestine. It was among the few countries in Europe where sympathy for Palestinians did not always have to pass through layers of diplomatic humiliation before finding its voice. Irish people saw occupation and knew the word. They saw dispossession and did not need it translated. They saw a trapped people facing a power that explained itself endlessly and called that explanation order.

Ireland also welcomed immigrants, though not without ugliness, and not without the resentments now crawling through Europe in search of a flag to wear. Still, Ireland changed. It became less homogeneous, less sealed, less certain of its old face. New languages drifted through streets that had once sounded more uniform. Classrooms, workplaces, and neighbourhoods acquired different rhythms, different memories, and different ways of belonging. The country grew more complicated and, for that reason, more alive. The new Ireland often arrived carrying exhaustion, uncertainty, and the weight of beginning again, yet it widened the place’s horizon all the same.

This is the Ireland I harboured: neutral without being numb, proud of its conscience, quick to spot a bully, capable, at its best, of making room for the wounded.

Within that Ireland, I found the route.

It begins on the Shannon Estuary, at Aughinish, in County Limerick, where ships unload bauxite, which is refined into alumina, then load it onto vessels once more and send it abroad. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a significant share of that output has travelled east, flowing from the quiet waters of the Shannon into Russia’s industrial system.

The exports were documented and moved through ordinary trade channels. They remained lawful because alumina is not currently an EU-sanctioned export, Aughinish itself is not sanctioned, and Rusal, unlike Oleg Deripaska personally, is not under EU or UK sanctions.

In 2022, Ireland exported $243 million of alumina to Russia. By 2024, the figure had risen to $376 million, a 55 per cent increase after the invasion. Almost 500,000 tonnes, worth about $200 million, reportedly went from Aughinish to Rusal’s smelter at Krasnoyarsk in 2024. The shipments accounted for roughly two-thirds of the smelter’s alumina imports and appeared sufficient to support about a quarter of Krasnoyarsk’s annual aluminium output.

Krasnoyarsk is a major Siberian industrial city and is listed by the Kyiv School of Economics as a critical military-industrial hub within Russia’s defence economy.

The plant in Limerick is owned by Rusal, the Russian aluminium conglomerate. Alumina from Aughinish is sent to Rusal smelters in Russia, where it is converted into aluminium. Leaked records reviewed by investigative reporters show that aluminium from the Krasnoyarsk chain moved through Rusal’s trading arm to Aluminium Sales Company, known as ASK. ASK sold aluminium to sanctioned or defence-linked Russian customers. Companies manufacturing weapons paid ASK $337 million for aluminium under Russian state defence contracts between February 2022 and April 2025.

That is the route at the heart of the story.

Bauxite arrives at Limerick. Alumina leaves for Siberia. Aluminium enters a Russian trading chain. Metal reaches defence-linked customers.

No public evidence directly links an individual Irish shipment to a particular missile, drone, aircraft, shell, or bomb. Alumina from Ireland mixes with material from other countries in Russian smelters, obscuring the source of any given batch. The blending of commodities, the thinning of documentation, and the complexity of war supply chains diffuse responsibility, allowing routine transactions to continue beneath the shelter of legal frameworks, employment concerns, and the persistent emphasis on civilian uses.

All of that may be true.

The route remains.

In April 2022, Patrick O’Donovan, then a minister of state, told the Dáil that Aughinish “is not in any way connected to a war machine.”

That sentence has not aged well.

This year, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, visited Dublin and said plainly, “No European products should end up with bombs and missiles that kill Ukrainian civilians.” She also said alumina is not currently covered by EU sanctions.

After the March 2026 disclosures, Ireland’s Department of Enterprise told the Guardian that “the general principle of EU sanctions on Russia is that their imposition does not have a greater impact on a European member state than on Russia itself.”

In the careful language of government, the statement establishes a priority: sanctions are judged first by their impact on European member states. The practical consequences for a member state become the immediate concern, while the wider human costs of the war remain outside the calculation.

That statement indicates that the legal framework is being weighed against economic and political considerations rather than presented as a purely neutral principle.

Ireland stayed within the law because the law allowed the trade. Nothing about the arrangement was hidden. The ownership, the destination, and the material itself were all matters of public record. Alumina’s absence from the sanctions list was not an oversight lurking in the shadows but a deliberate failure of the regulatory framework.

That category had a history. During the 2018 and 2019 U.S. sanctions crisis around Rusal, Ireland had already learned that Aughinish was a geopolitically exposed industrial asset whose ownership implications extended to employment, supply chains, and industrial policy. The refinery’s significance was well understood by Irish officials, international regulators, and the company itself. By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the possibility that Aughinish could become entangled in sanctions policy was neither novel nor unforeseen.

When alumina remained outside the EU sanctions net after 2022, the decision reflected a reluctance to confront the extent to which Europe’s industrial systems remained entangled with Russia. The prospect of economic disruption, political fallout, and difficult adjustments made inaction easier than reckoning with dependencies that had long been treated as manageable.

The absence of sanctions on alumina may sound like a technical policy decision. Behind that neutrality is the quiet of closed offices, stamped documents, and unchecked cargo. Raw material keeps moving while, beyond Ireland, blood is spilt and homes are destroyed. Bureaucratic language has a hollow finality at the edge of a grave. It replaces recognition with procedure and asks the air to remain still.

This is why the story is hard to move past. It reaches into Ireland’s understanding of itself and asks what that understanding means when an economic route becomes too useful to see clearly.

I do not write that with pleasure.

I write it with the embarrassment of recognition.

When concerns emerged about continuing alumina exports to Russia after the invasion, Irish officials defended the trade by emphasising that alumina was excluded from EU sanctions. The transactions, they maintained, remained lawful.

Compliance is a legal word that shapes how responsibility is understood. It allows the state to remain within established procedures while avoiding direct political judgment. Through compliance, a trade route becomes an administrative category, decisions are absorbed into regulatory frameworks, and questions of responsibility are transferred to institutions charged with oversight.

Aughinish was established as part of Ireland’s broader effort to industrialise and attract foreign investment. Planning for the refinery began in the early 1970s, and production started in 1983, during a period when the state was investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development. The Shannon Estuary’s deep-water access made the location attractive for large-scale industrial operations, and Ireland actively encouraged international companies to invest in projects that promised employment, exports, and long-term economic growth.

The plant was later owned by Glencore. Then, Rusal acquired it in 2007.

Rusal’s own materials describe Aughinish as Europe’s largest alumina refinery, with an annual capacity of 1.915 million tonnes. Rusal’s share-capital structure, updated in May 2026, lists EN+ Group as holding 56.88 per cent of the company, SUAL Partners 22.81 per cent, and other shareholders the rest. Aughinish sits inside that structure.

It is safer and more accurate to say that Russia retains corporate control over Aughinish through Rusal than to pretend the refinery belongs, in some simple, old-fashioned way, solely to Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska is one of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs, a billionaire industrialist who built much of his fortune in the aluminium sector and became closely associated with the rise of post-Soviet Russian business power. He founded the corporate empire from which Rusal emerged and remains sanctioned by the EU, the UK, and the United States. His formal power over the company changed after the U.S. sanctions crisis, when ownership and governance structures were reorganised. The plant remains inside a Russian-controlled corporate group whose founder continues to occupy a significant place in the story of Russian industrial influence.

The West learned to distinguish between the man and the company.

The supply chain kept moving.

There is an Irish story there, older than Russia’s invasion, older than sanctions, older than the latest shame. Ireland wanted to become a useful part of the world economy. Aughinish was one of the places that made that wish physical.

Now the apparatus belongs to a Russian chain.

That does not make the local workers villains, or Limerick guilty, or every employee at the plant an accomplice to a war crime. Such writing would be obscene. The people around Aughinish contend with the consequences of decisions made far above them, in boardrooms, ministries, sanctions committees, and quiet calls where the word “strategic” does a lot of moral laundry.

The plant provides work, wages, and sustenance for contractors and apprentices. It supports local shops and families. It gives some people a reason to remain in the area. At the same time, it is Europe’s largest alumina refinery, a Russian-controlled asset, a supplier to Russian smelters, and a fact Ireland cannot obscure with patriotic rhetoric.

Even the number of jobs has become part of the fog. Rusal’s own website lists a headcount of 460 at Aughinish. Later reporting, citing a KPMG figure, has reported about 900 staff or jobs supported. Both figures may be true in different ways. One may mean direct employees. The other may include contractors, apprentices, suppliers, and the wider employment ecosystem that gathers around a plant this large. But the distinction matters because jobs are the shield held up whenever the route is questioned.

A 460-person payroll and a 900-person local dependency are not the same political fact.

No serious article should treat the people of West Limerick as expendable. No serious government should hide behind imprecise numbers when those numbers are invoked to defend a route into Russia.

The Irish government’s defence rests on a set of practical considerations centred on employment, industrial stability, and economic dependence. Officials argue that Aughinish supports local livelihoods, that sanctions could jeopardise those jobs, that Europe continues to rely on alumina, and that Russia would likely obtain the material from alternative suppliers if Ireland stopped exporting it. The emphasis throughout is on immediate, measurable local consequences rather than distant suffering or the complexities of tracing responsibility through a global supply chain.

Each justification has a surface logic that is difficult to dismiss outright. The arguments appeal to immediate consequences, local livelihoods, industrial dependence, and the possibility that Russia would simply obtain the material elsewhere.

I also know what a loophole sounds like when it learns to speak Irish.

It speaks in the language of compliance.

It says proportionality.

It invokes regional jobs and economic security.

It says no evidence.

It says not currently covered.

It points to Ireland’s concrete actions in support of Ukraine: humanitarian aid, temporary protection, accommodation for tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, participation in EU civil-protection efforts, non-lethal military support, and consistent public backing for sanctions and diplomacy aimed at countering Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, the ships move.

Rusal’s own description of Aughinish places it comfortably within the language of European industry, a deep-water terminal moving alumina efficiently to smelters across the continent, a Shannon Estuary refinery presented as part of the ordinary circuitry of European production and supply.

A facility described in European delivery terms has, in wartime, sent vast quantities of alumina to a Siberian smelter. The public face looks west. The route runs east.

There is also a European asymmetry here that deserves its own shame. The EU has moved to block Russian aluminium from entering Europe. It has tightened parts of the trade regime and announced sanctions packages in the language of pressure and resolve. Yet alumina moving from Europe into Russia has remained outside the ban. Russian metal imports are treated as a problem. A key upstream input going out is treated as an exception.

The direction of the cargo changes the moral vocabulary.

That is why Aughinish reaches beyond Ireland. It reveals what happens when Europe’s rhetoric of resolve collides with its industrial dependencies: forceful declarations in public, carefully preserved exceptions in practice.

The issue has become more politically visible in 2026 as Ireland prepares to assume the presidency of the Council of the European Union. The Ukrainian embassy in Dublin has expressed serious concern. Irish MEPs have called for action. Independent senator Tom Clonan has reportedly described the situation as “completely and utterly untenable” if Ireland wants to say “Slava Ukraini” while remaining a major exporter of alumina to Russia’s war economy. Enterprise Minister Peter Burke has said a comprehensive probe is underway and that its results will be passed to the European Commission.

The timing is difficult to ignore. By March 2026, nobody in Dublin could plausibly say the concern was theoretical. The route had been publicly described: Aughinish, Krasnoyarsk, Rusal’s trading network, ASK, defence-linked customers. Once those links entered the public record, the focus shifted from what Ireland could have known at the outset to how Ireland responded after the route had been clearly identified.

Another uncertainty now hangs over the figures. In 2026, official Irish statistics reportedly showed that Russia accounted for 83 per cent of Aughinish’s first-quarter exports. The company disputed that figure and said the real number was closer to 51 per cent. The difference is not minor. It is the difference between a dominant destination and a merely enormous one.

Until the raw data and methodology are fully explained, the safest conclusion is not that one number has defeated the other. The safer conclusion is that a refinery at the centre of a European war loophole cannot yet be described with public confidence. Even the scale of the route is wrapped in dispute.

That, too, is part of the story. The uncertainty extends beyond what moved through the Shannon and into the challenge of establishing a clear public account of the trade.

The residue at Aughinish is also physical.

Beside the refinery lies a bauxite-residue disposal area of roughly 450 acres. Planning permission to expand it was quashed by the High Court in 2022. A revised application was approved in 2025 after objections from local farmers and environmental groups. This should not be forced into a metaphor too quickly. Red mud is not a symbol; it is a fact. It is waste, stored in a landscape, defended through planning files, challenged through courts, lived beside by people who did not choose the global aluminium system and yet inherit its remains.

The plant leaves residue in more than one language.

That is the line I cannot cross. The ships keep moving. The plant keeps operating. Alumina is shipped to Russia, where it is processed into aluminium and distributed through civilian and military supply chains. Trade records and investigative reports show Russian arms manufacturers receiving large shipments under state defence contracts from ASK. Meanwhile, the war continues to accumulate its dead. The United Nations has verified tens of thousands of civilian casualties since Russia’s full-scale invasion, including more than 12,000 civilians killed and many thousands more injured, while Ukrainian authorities and independent researchers believe the true toll is significantly higher. Entire towns have been shattered. Apartment blocks have collapsed into dust. Schools, hospitals, power stations, and homes have been struck. Millions have been displaced from the places where their lives once made sense. Behind every statistic is a person who expected to wake up in a familiar room and instead found themselves running from fire, searching through rubble, or burying someone they loved. The regulatory compliance of each shipment cannot erase the downstream human geography.

Ireland should not bear singular responsibility. That would flatter everyone else. Across Europe, clean institutions conceal areas of moral compromise, and governments have developed their own dialects of exception. The sanctions regime is severe, but it is shaped by fears about prices, shortages, industrial dependence, and the political cost of discovering that morality becomes expensive when it reaches the payroll office.

Ireland’s case hurts me because Ireland taught me better language than this.

It taught me to listen when power speaks with confidence and to remain suspicious of narratives that erase the voices of smaller nations. My understanding of neutrality is rooted in historical experience and resists passive disengagement. Sympathy for the occupied is not measured by convenience. Welcoming those displaced by conflict requires an awareness of the structures that forced them to leave.

So what do I do with an Irish refinery feeding material into Russia’s aluminium system while Irish leaders speak of Ukraine with perfectly decent words?

I do not think Ireland chose Moscow, and framing the story that way would be both too simple and too comforting, because it would allow everyone involved to imagine that the moral failure lay in a single act of allegiance rather than in a long series of decisions, omissions, exceptions, and accommodations that accumulated over time until they formed a route that nobody seemed willing to interrupt.

It is the story of a country that continued to rely on a route after its consequences could no longer be dismissed as abstract. The question is no longer whether Aughinish was legal; by every official measure, it was. The question is whether legality became a shelter once the route could be traced, and whether compliance replaced the harder burden of judgment.

Perhaps that is why the refinery on the Shannon lingers in the mind. Not because it offers a clear villain or an easy verdict, but because it leaves behind a tougher question. What do we owe our principles once keeping them becomes inconvenient?

Linked source set

• The Guardian: Aughinish supply-chain investigation

• Rusal: Aughinish Alumina corporate profile

• Rusal: Share capital structure

• U.S. Treasury: Rusal/EN+ sanctions restructuring notice

• The Guardian: June 2026 EU sanctions round and alumina omission

• Financial Times: Irish government pressure, 2026 export-share dispute

• The Irish Sun: Kaja Kallas Dublin remarks on alumina loophole

• The Guardian: UN-reported Ukraine civilian casualty figures

People often ask how I became this kind of writer.

Sometimes they phrase it as a question about language. How does someone write about Hungary with this much feeling, in English, from Barcelona, with an accent that sounds Irish in places and Hungarian somewhere underneath? Where did this way of seeing begin?

Language is what people detect first. This is a story of everything that happened before it.

This story is about a child leaving Hungary, landing in Ireland, unable to understand what anyone was saying, spending years trying to work out where he belonged, carrying around a brain that sometimes turned against him, falling in love, becoming gripped with politics, and learning, again and again, how to adapt to different people, different countries, different versions of himself. All of that shaped how I see the world long before I called myself a writer.

I was born in Budapest in 1998. My earliest years were spent in Pilisjászfalu, a small village outside the capital. When I think about where I come from, flags and borders do not come first. A serene childhood does.

I think about forests, hills, family lunches, friends knocking on the door, my grandmothers, dogs barking somewhere in the distance, and long summer evenings that felt as if they would never end. Back then, Hungary was not an argument, a culture war, Viktor Orbán, or something I had to explain or defend. It was home.

Budapest was nearby, but my world was small enough to fit inside familiar faces, familiar roads, and the belief that tomorrow would look much like today.

Hungary, before politics, felt like childhood.

Childhood lies to you in beautiful habits. It makes ordinary things feel endless. It persuades you that the people around you will always be there, that the places you love will stay the same, and that belonging is natural rather than fragile.

Near our house stood an old mine where my brother, my sister and I used to wander around with our dogs. We spent hours playing around abandoned mineshafts. Looking back, it was completely unsafe. One wrong step and one of us could probably have disappeared into a hole in the ground. At the time, nobody thought much about it.

What I remember is the freedom: the dust, the open space, the feeling of having an entire world to explore without adults constantly hovering over us. Whole afternoons vanished out there.

Countries arrive in your life long before politics does.

A country begins as people, places, smells, jokes, routines, and memories. It begins as your grandmother’s kitchen, your best friend’s laugh, the road you walked a thousand times without thinking about it. Only later do politicians arrive and start telling you what the nation represents. By then, most people already know, or at least they think they do.

A few years ago, my childhood best friend came to visit me in Barcelona. We met when we were about five or six years old, then spent almost twenty years living separate lives.

When he stepped into my flat in Poble Sec, the years seemed to fold in on themselves. We sat there talking late into the night about school, family, Hungary, relationships, mistakes, and all the strange directions our lives had taken. What struck me was how much had endured: the same humour, the same references, the same instincts, the same shared understanding that did not need explaining. Twenty years had passed. Underneath everything else, we were still two kids from the same village talking shit together.

That visit brought Hungary back as a person sitting across from me at the table. It reminded me that a country is never exclusively the government that disfigures it. It is also the people who carry its humour, damage, tenderness, memory, and stubbornness through the years, when public life becomes unbearable.

At around eight years old, my life packed itself into a suitcase and flew to wet and windy Ireland.

My father had gone a year earlier, and then the rest of us followed. At first, we lived in Wicklow, south of Dublin. It was beautiful, though my first memories of school are mostly centred around nerves. English was not yet a language I could use at all. It rolled under me, fast and strange, while I stood inside it with almost nothing.

There was yes. There was no. Everything else felt out of reach.

I remember sitting in classrooms listening to streams of sound that clearly meant something to everyone except me. I watched faces, gestures, reactions. Most days felt like guesswork. Every interaction carried a small knot of anxiety because I wanted to belong and had no idea how.

For reasons still unclear to me, Britney Spears became an early survival strategy. One of my first social scripts in Ireland was: “Hi, my name is Peter, and I like Britney Spears.” That was more or less the full range of my public personality. Somehow, it worked. Around school, a small reputation formed: the Hungarian boy who liked Britney Spears.

It is funny now. Underneath it was fear. English now feels precise to me, but there was a time when it was little more than noise passing around me. Moving to Ireland meant waking up in a world where almost everything familiar had slipped out of reach. No single loss hurt the most. The hardest part was being cut off from a life I understood and dropped into one I could not yet read.

There was kindness too. In those early days, one of my oldest friends, someone I have now known for nearly twenty years, helped make the unfamiliar less frightening. Other children reached out. Teachers paid attention. Ireland could be hard, but it was also full of people willing to make space for a child who could hardly summon the courage to walk into school in a strange new world.

Ireland showed me a future.

It presented my family with more stability than Hungary would have. It provided me with a solid education, native-level English, lifelong friends, and difficult lessons. It also showed me a way of surviving discomfort through humour. Irish humour is sharp, often dark, and allergic to self-importance. People joke sideways. They understate everything. They take the piss before anything gets too grand. I picked that up pretty quickly. Maybe the weather helps. When the sky is grey for half the year, sarcasm becomes a public service and a coping mechanism.

That shaped more than my sentences. It shaped my suspicion of performance. Ireland taught me to listen for inflated language, for people trying to sound larger than they are, for authority wearing a costume. It gave me an ear for vanity. It gave me the pleasure of puncturing pomposity before it became dangerous.

Hungary left me with an ache. Ireland gave me some of the means to live with it.

Ireland also allowed me distance from the Hungary Viktor Orbán was building. Leaving hurt, but there was luck in spending those years outside the full and direct environment of his rule. That luck carries discomfort with it. Distance can protect you, but it can also leave you wondering what the cost of protection is.

Ireland saved me and eventually became a place I had to leave. There was no clean disdain in it. Some part of me knew that staying would be bad for my mind, and bad for the person trying to emerge underneath all that uncertainty.

Barcelona felt different.

The city entered my life gradually. First through holidays. Then through Erasmus. Later, through a master’s degree at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Barcelona ceased being a place I visited and became the place I considered as home.

At Universitat Pompeu Fabra, I studied democracy, migration, multiculturalism, federalism, human rights, and political systems. I was not always the most disciplined student, but those years expanded my horizons significantly. What stays with me now is the people I met around the lectures: conversations over coffee, friendships that crossed continents, and familiar political questions seen through completely different cultural lenses.

Barcelona gave me permission to live without a clean category. Hungarian by birth. Irish in speech and humour. European through experience. Foreign and at home in the same city. A person does not have to resolve every contradiction to become real.

It also changed my ear. Living in Barcelona means moving constantly between languages and ways of speaking. A conversation in Spanish can be followed by work in English, then an evening listening to Russian across the dinner table. Over time, language stopped feeling fixed. Every interaction leaves a trace: a different rhythm, a new expression, a subtle shift in tone.

My partner is Russian, so another world is always nearby. I still do not speak Russian, despite occasionally convincing myself that I do. Every now and then, I overhear part of a conversation with her mother, recognise a word that sounds vaguely familiar, and immediately commence constructing elaborate theories about what is being discussed. These theories are usually delivered with complete confidence and virtually no accuracy.

Through her, Russia became something far more human than the version that appears in headlines. It entered my life through stories, traditions, films, humour, and family memories. One New Year’s Eve, she introduced me to The Irony of Fate. The film represented being invited into a cultural tradition shared by millions.

Barcelona has reinforced that lesson again and again. The closer you get to people, the harder it becomes to believe in neat categories. Real lives spill across borders. Families carry multiple histories at once. Languages overlap. Influences accumulate. The world people actually inhabit bears little resemblance to the tidy identities imagined by nationalist politics.

A life lived between Hungary, Ireland, and Spain leaves little tolerance for politicians who pretend belonging is straightforward.

After my master’s, Barcelona became a gamble. Other cities and other jobs might have led more directly toward politics, writing, or the life I once imagined. But the city had already taken hold of me, and so had the person who became the centre of my life here. So I stayed.

For several years, work meant digital marketing. It paid the bills and taught me a great deal about communication, but over time, I became more interested in the stories behind people’s attention than in capturing that attention itself.

Then the drift began.

Not as a judgment on people who find meaning in corporate work. Some do. I did not. My routines became efficient and practical, but life started to feel muted. The curious child who loved stories, politics, languages, arguments, and the world in all its mess went quiet.

It affected my health. It changed how I looked at Hungary from a distance. The things that once made me feel awake began to fade. From the outside, my life looked stable. Inside, each year seemed to move me further away from the person who was supposed to be living it.

That frightened me.

OCD has always been one of the hardest things to explain because most people imagine something very different from reality.

People think of visible habits: cleaning, checking, and arranging things. Sometimes those are part of it. Often they are not.

For me, OCD feels like getting trapped inside a question that refuses to accept any answer. A thought appears, usually attached to fear, guilt, doubt, or responsibility. I examine it. I answer it. I reason with it. Then it comes back demanding another answer.

At three in the morning, a conversation from earlier in the day can suddenly return. Did I sound rude? Did I interrupt someone? Did I miss something important? What begins as a question quickly becomes an investigation.

The frustrating part is that I usually know what is happening. I know the thought is irrational. I know I have been here before. Yet OCD has a way of making uncertainty feel urgent. Logic arrives with sensible explanations, but fear keeps asking for one more review. One more check. One more attempt at certainty.

There were periods when it consumed enormous amounts of energy. From the outside, life looked normal enough. I went to work. I answered messages. I met friends. Inside, huge amounts of attention were being spent fighting battles nobody else could see.

I would never romanticise OCD. It has caused suffering, frustration, and exhaustion. But it has also forced me into a level of self-observation I probably would not have developed otherwise. When your own mind constantly demands scrutiny, you become attentive to details, contradictions, emotional shifts, and hidden assumptions.

Writing is one of the few places where that restless attention becomes useful.

My first drafts often resemble the inside of my head. Ideas overlap. Questions compete for space. Connections appear before the structure does. The challenge is not generating thoughts but organising them into something coherent.

That is why revision matters so much to me. It feels less like polishing and more like excavation. Each draft gets a little closer to what I was actually trying to say. The process can be obsessive in its own way, but unlike OCD, it moves somewhere, periodically toward clarity.

OCD has not made writing easy. Nothing about it is easy. But it has made me extremely aware of how fragile and complicated our inner lives can be, and how much of what shapes us remains invisible to everyone else.

For a long time, there was no clear use for that intensity.

Then Hungary returned to the centre of things, and subsequently, my life.

A few things converged. My health was difficult. My family and I were going through one of the hardest periods of our lives. At the same time, from a distance, fellow Hungarians seemed trapped under a political order that had spent years teaching people that nothing could change.

For 16 years, hope in Hungary felt almost reckless. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary became expert at exhaustion. It restricted the imagination. It made resistance look naive, solidarity look dangerous, and decency look weak.

Then came Budapest Pride last year.

I watched the livestream for hours. Six, maybe seven. People moved through Budapest with flags, signs, faces, voices, and the simple refusal to disappear. For the first time in years, being proud of Hungary felt conceivable again. The courage on display was ordinary and therefore more moving: people showing up, walking together, becoming visible in a country where power had worked so hard to make visibility feel hazardous.

For the first time in a long time, Hungary’s story did not feel concluded.

It was also the beginning of writing about it seriously.

There was no ideal strategy. Writing by itself will not restore a democracy or undo political damage. Still, silence became impossible for me. The Hungary that shaped me was being explained to the outside world through Viktor Orbán’s language, Viktor Orbán’s myths, and Viktor Orbán’s lies. Someone had to speak about the damage beneath the slogans.

Authoritarian language concerns me because it prepares the ground. It teaches citizens whom to fear, whom to mock, whom to blame, and whom to exclude. It turns neighbours into symbols and minorities into warnings. It makes cruelty sound administrative, cowardice sound prudent, and obedience sound patriotic.

My partner is from Russia. Some of my closest friends come from Venezuela and other countries where politics has not remained confined to parliaments, elections, or television debates, but has seeped into everyday life. Through the people I love, I have seen how authoritarianism leaves traces long after the headlines move on. It lives in carefully recounted family stories, in relatives scattered across countries, in the instinct to lower your voice before discussing certain subjects, in the habit of measuring what can be said, and to whom.

The more personal these relationships became, the harder it was to think about politics as something detached from me. Authoritarianism stopped being a concept and became something human and direct. I began to recognise it in small moments: a joke that carries more caution than humour, a memory interrupted halfway through, a hesitation before expressing an opinion, a reflex of self-censorship so deeply learned that it no longer feels like fear. When people you care about have grown up around propaganda, repression, exile, or the gradual erosion of public truth, you start to see how political systems settle into private lives and shape people in ways that statistics never capture.

That is why political language that flattens identity provokes such a strong reaction in me. It reduces real lives into categories simple enough to be used against people. It asks citizens to forget what every honest life already proves: belonging is layered, memory is complicated, and no country can be reduced to the slogans shouted in its name.

The writing began from that recoil.

It is for Hungarians who feel alone. For people abroad who sense something is wrong but cannot name it. For those trying to understand how a country can be slowly trained to accept cruelty as normal. It is also for myself, because writing is how confusion becomes thought, how fear becomes argument, how the world, briefly, becomes less impossible to read.

Writing made the numbness harder to maintain.

It reawakened what had gone quiet in me: curiosity, anger, humour, and the urge to understand how people learn to live with things they should never have accepted. Most of all, it gave me a sense of community, something I had not known I was missing.

For a long time, politics felt distant, something unfolding far away while I watched, angry and alone. Then readers appeared, Hungarians abroad, expats in Hungary, people with no Hungarian background who still cared, people who understood that democracy, cruelty, propaganda, and fear are never only local stories.

That changed the work. It felt less like shouting into the dark and more like building a small place where people could keep paying attention together.

Some days, I write for twelve hours. It exhausts me, but it does not drain me as much as the work that came before. This exhaustion has meaning attached to it. It feels like an effort to move in the right direction.

So when people ask how I became this kind of writer, there is no single answer. There is only the life that made the question possible.

I write in English because that is the language in which I became precise.

I write about Hungary because that is the country that made precision necessary.

Writing about Hungary became a way of returning before return was possible. A way to stand closer to the place left behind as a child and say: I still see you. I still care. I am not looking away.

I keep coming back to Tamás Sulyok sitting there, perched up in his castle overlooking Budapest.

The presidency is not Hungary’s most influential office. That is effectively the point. Sulyok takes a central place this week because he is still there, because he was chosen under the old order, because Péter Magyar has asked him to leave, because he has refused, and because Parliament is now becoming the place where Hungary has to decide how a democratic mandate deals with officials installed precisely to outlast one.

I know this is constitutional procedure. I also know it does not feel like procedure when you are watching it happen to your own country.

On June 1, Prime Minister Péter Magyar again asked President Sulyok to resign. Sulyok refused. Magyar then said his government would use Tisza’s two-thirds majority to amend the Fundamental Law and force Sulyok from office, though the exact mechanism remains unresolved. Sulyok replied with the sentence that has been on my mind all week: “Neither democracy nor the rule of law can be built on threats.” Reuters reported the confrontation here.

It is a skillfully crafted sentence, and also an infuriating one, precisely because eloquent language can be employed in bad faith.

The remnants of the old regime here defend themselves through procedural language, claiming legality and restraint while obscuring how those mandates were created, protected and made useful.

That is why this week felt so tense. It was not just the week Sulyok refused to go. It was the week Orbánism again became visible as a structure of survival: enduring offices, persistent mandates, parliamentary choke points, public media habits, foundation boards, asset declarations, prosecutor caution, and individuals who now claim the deep moral value of procedure after losing the system that protected them.

Orbán is no longer in the prime minister’s office, but his influence remains embedded in institutions.

What mattered

The most urgent issue now is the collision between a newly won democratic mandate and a constitutional structure deliberately shaped to preserve the outgoing regime’s power.

Hungary voted for regime change on April 12, but Orbánism was built to last beyond elections. The presidency is only one example of this legacy, still holding power long after voters demanded change.

Sulyok’s mandate runs until March 2029. Magyar says the public chose a new constitutional path with Tisza’s two-thirds majority. Fidesz calls the pressure on Sulyok an “unlawful ultimatum.” Sulyok says democracy cannot be built on threats. Magyar argues that old officeholders must leave so democracy can be rebuilt. Parliament must now decide whether to create a legal mechanism to remove Orbán-era holdovers who refuse to resign.

This is the first true stress test of the new era, because it questions whether institutions shaped under Orbán can support democratic renewal or become respectable shelters for the old order.

Sulyok and other Orbán-era holdovers need to be removed, and institutions need to be opened to democratic accountability. Hungary should not be trapped within constitutional structures built to shield a defeated regime.

But I also want the method to matter.

Perhaps this is especially important now, at the very moment when methods may determine the legitimacy of renewal. The ultimate challenge is utilising power to resuscitate democracy without repeating the Orbán era’s abuses and centralisation.

That is the delicate balance Magyar must strike. He is correct that the old order cannot govern from behind institutional walls, but in pursuing reform, he now faces the danger of letting urgency override the caution needed to avoid repeating the Orbán era’s central habit: treating constitutional power as whatever the winner can force through.

Telex reported that when Magyar’s parliamentary group was asked to endorse the strategy, even his own MPs did not yet know the exact constitutional route for removing Sulyok. That does not prove recklessness, but it does show how quickly the political mandate is outrunning the legal architecture around it. The country wants change faster than the rules can be written.

This week, Hungary stands between political urgency and constitutional caution, as the first post-Orbán parliamentary showdown unfolds.

The president is still sitting there

There is something almost too neat about the image of Magyar at Sándor Palace on June 1.

The new prime minister outside. The old system still inside. Hungary watching a constitutional dispute unfold in real time, knowing that everyone is talking about law while everyone understands that the real subject is power.

Sulyok does not have Orbán’s executive authority, but he has enough leverage to matter. The Hungarian president can sign laws, return legislation to Parliament for reconsideration, or refer bills to the Constitutional Court, which means even a largely ceremonial office can slow or complicate the new government’s reform agenda. His refusal to resign made this leverage clear: limited powers can still obstruct democratic renewal when the political context gives them weight.

The presidency now embodies the lingering power of the old regime.

Sulyok has become the first respectable bunker of the old state.

I do not mean this as a personal psychological diagnosis; I mean it institutionally. The office now carries more political weight than its official powers suggest. It stands for a wider category of Orbán-era appointments: people whose mandates continued beyond the election, who now treat the election as just another fact, and who claim continuity is democracy while removal is revenge.

There is a legal argument here, and a political trap.

The trap is that Orbán’s people now want to turn their staying power into democratic virtue. The president’s mandate, the prosecutor’s independence, the media authority’s continuity, and the Constitutional Court all become sacred. Every office Fidesz filled, shaped, pressured or insulated is suddenly treated as a delicate constitutional flower the new majority must not touch.

Hungary cannot pretend these offices emerged independently. They were shaped by the previous regime and, in part, designed to preserve its influence beyond the election cycle.

A recent survey cited by Telex found that 64 per cent of Hungarians want Sulyok to resign, but the majority support alone is not enough. If his removal is not constitutionally sound, the old regime will claim victimhood, and the new government will inherit a wound it does not need.

Parliament’s decisions will determine whether Hungary achieves democratic renewal through lawful reform, or merely repackages the old logic of power under new management.

Parliament gets the argument

I have been watching Parliament this week with the strange feeling that the country has returned to the place where politics is supposed to happen, while also knowing that the place itself carries the memory of what happened to it.

For years, Parliament was too often reduced to scenery: a beautiful building used to process decisions made elsewhere, a theatre of votes whose outcome everyone knew, a place where democratic form remained visible even as party discipline, emergency powers, loyal institutions and one man’s authority hollowed out the substance.

Parliament is central again, and that is both hopeful and risky.

Tisza’s two-thirds majority gives the government the legal power to undo parts of the old order, but the legitimacy of that work depends on restraint, clarity and durability. In many democracies, supermajorities are designed to encourage broad consensus for constitutional change. Under Orbán, Hungary’s two-thirds threshold became something else: a tool for unilateral redesign. The Fundamental Law was amended repeatedly; electoral and judicial structures were changed; loyalists were entrenched; and constitutional amendment became a governing instrument rather than a national settlement.

Now Tisza has the numbers to dismantle parts of that inheritance. Its legitimacy depends on showing that dismantling is different from taking possession.

Magyar is adept at compressing moral anger into executable action. That was exactly what the opposition lacked for years. The old democratic opposition could often explain, condemn, mourn, document, and occasionally form committees about Orbánism, while Orbánism continued to govern the country with the relaxed confidence of a system that had stopped expecting consequences. Magyar broke that rhythm. He made politics feel immediate again.

Governing means channelling urgency into reform that lasts. This week, Magyar sounded like three politicians at once. On Sulyok, he was the insurgent tribune rejecting old officials as masks for Orbánism. On EU funds and the budget, he acted as a prime minister seeking a solvent and credible state. On corruption, asset declarations, and the National Bank scandal, he sounded like a prosecutor asking why these issues had never been properly examined.

All three versions of Magyar are useful.

The prime minister must win inside Parliament. The prosecutor must respect evidence. The insurgent must remember that victory does not remove limits. The challenge is not to slow the transition into paralysis, because the old system wants exactly that. The challenge is to move quickly and set rules clearly enough that the public can see the difference between accountability and appetite.

The old order deserves removal. The real measure is whether that removal leads to lasting renewal or simply substitutes one imbalance for another.

Read more

I began writing this essay after reading María Ramírez’s Guardian piece on Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s reputation abroad, and the unrest gathering at home. The article caught the gap I live inside. The Spain admired from afar, and the Spain lived through high rent, late trains, low wages, many languages, headbanging bureaucracy, familiar affection, and undeniable anger.

From afar, Spain can appear almost enviable. Its economy has outpaced much of Western Europe. Its government has defended immigration while others race to sound more vicious. Social rights have moved into the mainstream. Spain has protected reproductive freedom, normalised LGBTQ+ equality, and treated migration as part of the country’s future. Reuters reported that Spain planned to “regularise about 300,000 undocumented migrants per year”, with the government saying it needed roughly 250,000 to 300,000 tax-paying foreign workers annually to sustain the welfare state.

This is not the usual story Europe tells about itself nowadays. Much of the continent has learned to speak about migration as a risk before it speaks about people. Spain has gone further than most in saying the obvious thing out loud. An ageing country needs workers, taxpayers, carers, neighbours, lives.

That is one story. The rougher one lives closer to the ground.

The comments beneath Ramírez’s article were almost as revealing as the article itself. Readers pointed to housing costs, low wages, corruption, delayed trains, small-business pain, and the gap between foreign admiration for Sánchez and the realities of local life. One reader mentioned “hyperpolitics”. Another described Spain as a jigsaw held together by dialogue, compromise, and patience.

That felt true. Spain is admired from the outside. Inside, it is exhausted, loud, anxious, expensive, and still somehow functioning.

That is the Spain I recognise.

My love for Spain grew gradually, first through Erasmus, then a Master’s, then through friends, nights out, late dinners, the tangle of bureaucracy, a new language, the relentless heat, work, public squares, small kindnesses, and the ordinary rituals of building a life somewhere new.

Barcelona entered me through routine. The walk to buy fresh bread. The sound of Catalan in a corner shop. Old men arguing outside a bar before lunch. The rent panic. The August heat pressing down on streets that smell of bins, sea air, and stone. The neighbour who complains about everything and still helps when something breaks.

At some point, Hungary began to feel more distant. Orbán had made the country I came from feel smaller, meaner, more suspicious of itself. Barcelona became the place I had chosen. Then it became the place that shaped me.

So this is where I write from. I am Hungarian. I live in Barcelona. I love Spain. I also treasure Catalonia and Barcelona.

I love Spain after the romance. I love it with my eyes open. The paperwork still drives me mad. The rent is brutal. The trains are always late. Tourists overcrowd most of the city. Politics seeps into every corner of life. And still, the attachment stays. Spain taught me that a country does not need to be neat to be loved. It can argue with itself in several languages at once. It can be wounded, generous, stubborn, funny, exhausted, and still open. Barcelona is that feeling made physical. Catalan in the corner shop. Spanish in the street. English at the next table. A city too expensive for its own people, too alive to become only a museum, too mixed to obey anyone’s fantasy of a pure nation.

That is why the rise of Vox chills me to the bones.

The modern far right can feed on countries that become too plural, too changed, too open for reactionary politics to tolerate. It feeds on the moment when a functioning society starts to feel unfair, when public anger is real, when trust has thinned, when people know something is wrong, and someone arrives to tell them exactly whom to blame.

For Vox, Spain’s diversity is recast as disorder. Catalan identity is framed as disobedience. Immigration becomes a threat. Feminism is twisted into an imposed ideology. LGBTQ+ rights are painted as a moral decline. Historical memory is rebranded as revenge. The nation’s plural identities are turned into targets.

Vox names this as unity. It says Spain needs order, borders, a common language, strong institutions, and protection from fragmentation. Its version of unity asks too many people to disappear.

Viewed from abroad, Vox can look like another entry in Europe’s hard-right catalogue. Another anti-immigration party. Another nationalist force. That misses the Spanish core.

Vox’s deepest project is Spanish central nationalism. Its 2023 programme, as summarised by RTVE, proposed an “unitary state”, the return of education, health, security, and justice powers to the central state, the illegalisation of parties seeking Spain’s territorial breakup, and the defence of Spanish across the whole country. The same programme vowed to repeal gender-violence legislation, LGBTQ+ and trans-rights laws, and Spain’s climate law, while taking a harder line on immigration.

Call it by its name. Hard-right nationalism with a programme for the state.

The Catalan question sits at the epicentre. Vox’s rise cannot be understood without the Catalan independence crisis. The party found its early force in the claim that Spain was being broken apart by separatists, indulged by the left, and mishandled by a weak mainstream right. It took that charge and pushed it into every other fight. Migration. Feminism. LGBTQ+ rights. Islam. Climate politics. Historical memory.

Living in Barcelona changes how this feels.

Catalan is no theory here. It is on the street, in schools, in shops, in offices, in friendships, in jokes, in the daily evidence that Spain contains more than one national feeling. You do not have to support independence to know that Catalan identity belongs to Spain’s democratic reality. Vox treats that reality as an insult.

Andalusia made the danger harder to ignore. On 17 May, PSOE was beaten in one of the places where Spanish socialism once felt almost enduring. This was Felipe González country, the old southern fortress, the region PSOE governed for decades after Franco. Then the floor gave way. The party fell to 28 seats, its worst result there since Spain’s democratic restoration. The PP won 53 of 109 seats, close to power but still two short of an absolute majority. Vox rose to 15. One extra seat, but that is how leverage works. Vox does not need a landslide when the PP needs its hand on the door. Ramírez’s Guardian piece described the result as PSOE’s worst in the region since the restoration of democracy.

This is how Vox gains power. It does not need to finish first. It needs to stand close enough to the PP that its demands become the price of government. “National priority”. Anti-migrant policy. Attacks on equality. Hostility to regional pluralism. The slow hardening of what the mainstream right accepts. Recent PP-Vox arrangements in Castilla y León have already brought “national priority” language into government deals, including restrictions around access to housing, services, and public benefits.

This is why Ramírez’s piece stayed with me. It wrote about Sánchez’s disunited image. Admired abroad, weakened at home. I do wonder in moments of anxiety what kind of right is waiting if he falls.

Spain’s problems are real and immediate. Housing is brutal, with rents soaring far beyond what most can afford. Salaries lag behind the cost of living, and the relentless pressure of mass tourism has warped entire cities. Young people are angry, and with good reason. Public services strain under increasing demand. Corruption scandals have eroded trust in the current government. Anyone living here feels the frustration keenly, without needing it explained by foreign admirers.

The question is what politics does with that frustration.

Vox hands Spain a list of scapegoats: migrants, feminists, queer people, Catalans, Basques, Muslims, Brussels, judges, journalists, and globalists. Anyone weaker than the state. Anyone convenient enough to blame. A script too familiar to me and many others.

That is what I recognise as a Hungarian.

Orbán’s politics prepared me for how quickly anger curdles into suspicion. When prices rise, blame Brussels. When hospitals fail, blame migrants. If teachers protest, call it foreign interference. When queer people ask to live freely, recast it as an attack on children. If journalists investigate, label them traitors. When civil society speaks, call it a conspiracy. Every frustration finds a target, and every target is pushed beyond the nation's boundaries.

Spain did not import Vox from Hungary. That would be too easy. Vox came out of Spain’s own unfinished arguments. Catalonia gave it a wound to press. The collapse of the old party system gave it space. Migration gave it targets. The mainstream right gave it oxygen by pretending it could borrow the anger without paying the price. Vox is Spanish in its obsessions, its resentments, and its chosen enemies. That is what makes it dangerous. It knows exactly where to press because it grew from the pressure points.

At this point, Orbán enters this story.

Even in an essay about Vox, I cannot stop writing about him. He is the bad flu that keeps returning. You try to move on, then there he is again, forming the air around another country’s politics.

He saw Vox as an ally. His world understood what Vox could become.

In 2023, Vox acknowledged financing election campaigns with large loans from MBH Bank, a Hungarian bank described by El País as close to Orbán’s world. El País reported that Vox had received 9.2 million euros from a Hungarian bank close to Orbán for its 2023 municipal and general-election campaigns. El País later reported that Vox again turned to Hungarian banking for a seven-million-euro loan for the 2024 European campaign.

The strongest version of the claim is political, not criminal. Spain’s anti-corruption prosecutors later archived a complaint over possible illegal financing, treating the Hungarian financing as a loan rather than a donation. No public evidence shows Fidesz directly wiring money to Vox. The political fact still stands. A major Spanish far-right party received campaign financing from a Hungarian bank tied to Orbán’s political and business world. Then Vox moved deeper into Orbán’s European camp.

In July 2024, Vox changed chambers in Brussels. It left Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists group and joined Patriots for Europe, the new far-right alliance built around Orbán, Austria’s FPÖ, and Andrej Babiš’s ANO. This was not a technical shuffle in the European Parliament. It was Vox choosing its political home. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally joined soon after, and the group became the third-largest force in the Parliament. Vox had already taken Hungarian money through MBH Bank. Now it was sitting inside Orbán’s European camp. The relationship had now acquired a name, a voting bloc, and a seat in Brussels.

Orbán does not need to rule Spain to send aftershocks through Europe. His politics travels through money, alliances, conferences, slogans, and the constant search for someone to blame. I know this methodology. Make people feel they must earn their place, turn loyalty into a test, present the nation as fragile, then appoint yourself its only doctor.

For someone living in Barcelona, Vox’s presence in Spain would affect people I know. It would touch immigrant friends who already live with enough precarity. It would touch LGBTQ+ people who built lives in a country that became one of Europe’s most socially advanced. It would touch Catalan autonomy, language, and public life. It would touch on women’s rights and the legal framework Spain built around gender violence. It would touch the basic feeling of who gets to belong.

Barcelona is almost everything Vox mistrusts. Multilingual. Migrant. Feminist. Queer. Catalan. Spanish. International. Difficult. Expensive. Beautiful. Overburdened. Alive. It's a stark contrast to live in daily while the rise of the far right continues in all directions around us.

I have already watched Orbán’s politics narrow a country’s imagination. I have watched a government teach people that every independent institution is suspicious, every minority a problem, every foreign influence a threat, every criticism an attack on the nation. I have watched nationalism become less about loving a country and more about deciding who can be expelled from the idea of it.

Now I live in Spain, and I see a party with Spanish views, Spanish resentments, Spanish targets, moving inside a European camp Orbán helped build.

Spain has its own path. Vox can damage Spain in a Spanish way. It can make Catalan public life sound like treason. It can make immigrant workers sound like invaders. It can make queer people sound like a threat to children. It can make the PP depend on its votes, then pretend that dependency is normal. It can make enough people believe the Spain around them is less real than the Spain Vox wants to restore.

That promise is false.

The Spain around us is already real.

You see it in the ordinary friction and beauty of daily life. Catalan and Spanish voices sharing the same street. Immigrant workers holding up entire industries. Women refusing to go backwards. Queer people living openly. Young people shouting about rent. Grandparents protecting the public healthcare they built. Families improvising a future in cities that never stand still.

I love Spain because of the disarray. I love it because it gave me a new home after Hungary began to feel stolen by men who twisted power into patriotism. Spain did not save me. Countries do not do that. But it taught me to live inside disagreement without wanting it erased. It made me less willing to accept a smaller, more frightened version of community anywhere.

That is why the rise of Vox scares me.

Because I recognise the hate.

Because I know what happens when a country is told to fear its own plural life.

Because the first loss is often emotional. A place becomes more suspicious. Then meaner. Then smaller. Then people begin to forget it was ever larger.

The itinerary itself carried a message. First Poland and Austria: Hungary’s regional ally and its western neighbour. Then Brussels, Berlin, Paris, the seats of European power. This was not the convenience of a travelogue. Rather, a sequence designed to signal intent and reorientation, tracing Hungary’s movement from Central Europe toward renewed engagement with the heart of Europe.

For too long, Viktor Orbán made Hungary visible in Europe by being problematic and disruptive. Péter Magyar is endeavouring to make Hungary visible by being serious and constructive. Visibility for Orbán meant spectacle. For Magyar, it now means accepting scrutiny. The continent’s attention has shifted. The old era of showmanship has faded, replaced by a climate of evaluation and audit.

Each visit tested whether Hungary could move past symbolism and accept real scrutiny and consequences. The process is public and uncertain. Europe is watching, with the terms still being written.

The Poland-Hungary bond is old and real, built over centuries. For Magyar, the visit was also a test. Poland’s recent struggles, including pressure on judges, captured public media, and conflict with Brussels, show that democratic recovery is sluggish and uncertain.

Meeting Donald Tusk and Lech Wałęsa, the symbol of Solidarity and Poland’s democratic uprising, Magyar was acknowledging the complexity of such repair. His presence marked Hungary’s re-entry into the region’s ongoing experiment with democracy.

Austria followed Poland, contrasting drama with intimacy. The neighbour, the old counterpart, the western doorway: Hungary has always lived beside Austria, even when the door seemed closed.

The Austrian-Hungarian relationship lives through daily life. It is work, trade, families, commuting, companies, roads, railways, wages, hospitals, universities, and border crossings. Many Hungarians see Austria as a practical part of Europe. It is close, richer, orderly, accessible, and a little humiliating, as nearby success often is. For them, Austria is no abstract concept. The old imperial ties remain, but should not be over-romanticised. Hungary’s western orientation was lived before it was declared.

With Poland as a mirror of democratic repair and Austria as a quieter threshold, the tour moved west. Each stop layered purpose. First came the struggle to recover democracy. Then came the lived habits of Western normality.

From Austria, the tour advanced to Brussels, where symbolism dissolves into bureaucracy, and scrutiny replaces applause. Here, Hungary’s true argument was put to the test: can Hungary move from performance to proof?

Brussels is where Europe audits. For Orbán, Brussels was both enemy and bank. He treated it as a villain for domestic politics and as a source of funds to exploit. For Magyar, the challenge is different. He must persuade Europe that Hungary deserves trust by strengthening institutions and prioritising substance over spectacle.

Hungary’s move to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office would mark a decisive break. European prosecutors could investigate crimes affecting the EU’s financial interests, reducing dependence on domestic structures that have long protected allies. This would expose Hungary’s institutions to external review and signal to Brussels that Budapest is willing to cede some control in exchange for trust.

It would also break with the Orbán system, which treated EU funds as entitlement, leverage, and domestic political fuel. Now, the challenge is whether those funds will be governed by public rules and transparency rather than private bargains and patronage.

After Brussels came Berlin and Paris, raising the stakes. Hungary’s credibility now depended on engagement with the continent’s economic and strategic powers.

Berlin stands for economic seriousness. Germany anchors Hungary’s industry. German factories, investors, and political caution have defined Hungary’s place in Europe for decades. To be taken seriously in Berlin means being taken seriously by those who manage Europe’s ledger.

Paris gives the tour a different meaning. France stands for strategic Europe: defence, sovereignty, nuclear energy, Ukraine, and the language of power. In Paris, the difficulty is whether Hungary can reclaim sovereignty through coordination with Europe, reversing the old pattern set by Orbán, for whom sovereignty meant isolation.

Orbán manipulated sovereignty to authorise obstruction. Magyar is trying to use it as a language of alignment. Hungary’s interests, too often aligned with Moscow’s convenience, are now positioned differently.

Ukraine is where that difference becomes concrete. Here, posture is put to the test, and Hungary’s intent is exposed.

Orbán employed the Hungarian minority in Ukraine as a tool of obstruction and rarely as genuine advocacy. Language, schools, and political rights frequently stalled Brussels and pressured Kyiv. Under Orbán, minority defence became a pretext for delay. Now, the potential is for genuine advocacy.

Magyar’s approach is practical and conditional. The new Ukraine deal includes language, cultural and educational rights, oversight, and regular talks. If Ukraine delivers, Hungary will support its EU path. Reform must be proven. Hungary still has national interests. But now, national interest may no longer mean veto by default.

It is easy to be welcomed in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. It is harder to sustain a consistent, principled Ukraine policy. Now it is time to separate advocacy for Hungarian communities from obstructionist tactics aligned with Kremlin interests — a distinction Orbán never made, but Magyar must pursue.

For Hungarians, the meaning is emotional and political. Dignity and belonging have become the stakes of the country’s external reputation.

The tour served another purpose: it told Hungarians their country is no longer represented abroad only by vetoes, scandals, frozen funds, Kremlin ambiguity, and lectures about Brussels. Hungary can be seen again as normal, competent, and wanted.

Hungarians abroad, such as myself, braced themselves when the country came up in a conversation. Hungary became shorthand for Orbán, illiberalism, Putin, corruption, anti-LGBTQ+ laws, EU blackmail, and new scandals in the news. Describing Hungary became a defensive act. Sometimes, silence was easier. Now, a shift is possible. Hungary’s representation can move from embarrassment to something closer to pride.

I have felt that shift myself. In Barcelona, when Hungary comes up now, people congratulate me. They are pleased that Orbán is gone. For over a decade, being Hungarian in political conversation meant embarrassment or silence. Now, for the first time in my adult life, it can mean pride.

But pride alone cannot rebuild a state. Now is Hungary’s chance to show it can repair institutions and reputation. Image is no substitute for substance. Approval is not an end in itself. The benchmark is whether international support leads to tangible improvements for Hungarians: a justice system free from political interference, media that informs, and public money spent in the public interest. Europe can offer encouragement and open doors, but the actual work of repair must be done in Hungary. It will take more than a single election to end the habits of Orbánism.

Magyar’s victory brings opportunity and risk. He promises regime change and new leadership. The moment requires both rapid reform and restraint. The agenda includes independent courts, fair media, anti-corruption, and fair elections. Some changes are moving. Others will test the constitution. The challenge is to dismantle the old order without making a new one in its image. Hungary’s renewal must be institutional and last beyond the tenure of leaders.

Europe should understand this too. Brussels, Berlin, and Paris may wish to celebrate Hungary’s apparent change: fewer blockades, more smiles, and re-engagement with Europe. Relief is understandable. But there remains a difference between procedural acceptance and earned trust. Acceptance lets Hungary back into the room. Trust can only be won by demonstrating an independent commitment to democratic rules, even in the absence of direct scrutiny.

Real trust shows when prosecutions reach the powerful. It is visible when courts and media are free from politics, contracts are truly competitive, and rights are defended under pressure. Hungary’s path from tolerated to trusted will be tested by these principles.

Hungary has been invited back into the room. But being present is not the same as being trusted. That distinction will define what comes next.

Magyar’s first European tour showed Europe a different Hungary, one that negotiates rather than obstructs, repairs rather than performs, and seeks belonging without surrender. That is a serious beginning, but beginnings are not proof.

Hungary once drew attention by being difficult. Today, it seeks recognition for seriousness.

The tour charted a new course. Power will decide where it leads.

There was always a faint current running beneath the surface, an understanding that queerness set you apart, sometimes through violence, more often through a thousand small hesitations. I saw friends fold themselves into smaller shapes, cautious in gesture and word. Until Hungary, I had not grasped how swiftly a government could amplify that undercurrent, recasting private fear into accusations and threats.

There is a point at which someone in power realises, almost with relief, that a persecuted group can be made useful. The hatred remains, of course. The contempt remains. The usefulness is the discovery.

Reduce people to a slogan, a warning, the supposed barrier between the nation and collapse. Take ordinary lives, first loves, families, teachers, books, clothes, names, bodies, voices, and place everything under suspicion. Visibility is turned into propaganda. Dignity becomes provocation. Existence itself becomes something that children must be protected from.

In 2026, Pride endures because it must.

Suspicion has acquired laws, police forms, school rules, and campaign language. Children are turned into props in a story that harms the children it claims to defend. Self-respect is reimagined as defiance. The simple act of being seen becomes a political problem.

Pride is not a seasonal display or a marketing opportunity. It is human, unruly, commercialised at times, forgetful at times, still carrying the memory of those who made it necessary. Its power lives in the reminder of who endured, who refused shame, and who still needs the street.

That is why we still have plenty of work to do.

Pride is still absolutely essential as attacking LGBTQ+ people has become politically trendy again in the ugliest corners of public life. It is a shortcut for the right and far right: a way to sound moral without solving anything, to perform courage without confronting power, to turn anxiety into votes. Again and again, the accusation returns in slightly different costumes: LGBTQ+ visibility is dangerous, children are under threat, and civilisation itself is apparently so fragile that a book, a teacher, a flag, a drag performer, a trans teenager, or a family can bring it down. The evidence is never there. The fear is the point. After years of inventing a threat and then congratulating themselves for fighting it, they still ask why Pride has to exist.

The answer is simple, and it stings.

Because people are still told to disappear politely. To treat their existence as an inconvenience. To apologise for being seen.

The backlash against LGBTQ+ people is neither distant nor theoretical. In sixty-two countries, consensual same-sex relations are criminal. Seven UN member states retain death penalty provisions for some forms of same-sex conduct. Fifty-nine restricts the open expression of sexual and gender diversity. Only 35 countries and Taiwan have legalised same-sex marriage. These figures follow people into police stations, airports, hospitals, classrooms, registry offices, family courts, and government. They decide whose relationship is recognised, whose body is documented truthfully, whose family counts, and who learns early that the law can be cold, long before it evolves into violence.

The forms vary, but the pressure is everywhere. In Uganda, the law calls for the death penalty. In Ghana, even advocacy is treated as a crime. Russia has gone further still, branding the so-called international LGBT movement “extremist”, as if identity itself were a security threat. In Turkey and Georgia, Pride has been met not with protection, but with police lines, detentions, and far-right violence. In the United States, the pressure often comes through state capitols, school boards, lawsuits, library shelves, clinic doors, and the administrative language of “parental rights”. The target shifts from healthcare to books, from bathrooms to sports, from flags to pronouns, from drag to the question of whose childhood is allowed to be visible. The system is different, but the direction is routine: make LGBTQ+ life smaller, more exposed, and more dependent on permission.

Laws shift from country to country. The method travels intact: identify a vulnerable group, isolate them, turn them into a symbol, and use them as a political means. Fear remains one of authoritarianism’s most trustworthy exports.

The same trick repeats itself in different inflexions. A book is no longer a book. It is cast as danger. A teacher becomes a suspect. A family becomes an attack on the family. Even a child beginning to understand themselves is made to sound like proof of someone else’s conspiracy. Regular life is dragged, piece by piece, into the language of peril.

Hungary became one of Europe’s clearest laboratories for this politics.

Viktor Orbán’s government understood something ugly and effective about power: if you want to build an illiberal state, you capture more than courts, newspapers, universities, prosecutors, public contracts, and television studios. You capture the social imagination. You teach people who may appear in public without explanation, and who must always arrive as a controversy. You decide which citizens get to be ordinary, and which citizens become second-class.

That is what Hungary’s so-called “child protection” politics did.

In 2020, Hungary informed transgender people that the state’s paperwork mattered more than the truth of their lives. Official documents could no longer be changed to match who they were meant to be. Later that year, the constitution tightened the state’s definition of family, leaving many real families no longer fitting within it. Same-sex couples were pushed further from the possibility of parenthood, not because they lacked love, care, patience, or home, but because the law had decided their family was the sinful kind of family. In 2021, the government forced into classrooms and onto screens, treating honest conversation about LGBTQ+ lives as something children had to be shielded from. By 2025, the same apprehension had reached the street. Pride itself could be treated as a danger, as if people walking together in daylight were the threat, rather than the politics teaching LGBTQ+ children to look at themselves with fear.

Every statute narrowed the world a little more. Every measure trained the public eye. Vulnerability became spectacle. Individuality became a problem to solve. Human beings became targets for collective hate, polished into symbols for political use.

The Hungarian state tried to teach the public how to think about LGBTQ+ people. It placed them inside a vocabulary of contamination. LGBTQ+ presence in books, schools, media, advertising, or on the street was no longer representation. It was dangerous. Visibility itself became suspect.

The words were always soft enough to pass through a press conference.

Children. Family. Morality. Protection.

The effect was permission.

Permission to stare, to mock, to suspect, to report. Permission to treat some citizens as acceptable only when they are silent, private, grateful, and small.

Polite political language often misses this. Anti-LGBTQ+ politics seeps into daily life. It changes the atmosphere in a home. It teaches people how to look at each other. It tells a teenager that the thing they are beginning to understand about themselves is dangerous. It tells a teacher to change the subject. It tells a parent to panic before they have listened. It tells a neighbour that cruelty has been authorised by the evening news.

And it tells everyone else that this is just politics.

Perhaps the most obscene part is how ordinary people are stripped of their ordinariness. A teenager trying to understand themselves becomes a symbol of national decay. A couple holding hands becomes an imported ideology. A teacher answering a question becomes a threat. A family that does not fit the government’s preferred picture becomes evidence of collapse. Power takes private lives and enlarges them into monsters, not because the danger is real, but because monsters are useful. They distract. They mobilise. They give frightened voters a place to vent their anger.

I did not come to this through theory. Rather, I came to it by watching Hungary become fluent in a kind of brutality I recognised too quickly: the old political trick of isolating, mocking, and making people useful to power. At first, I tried to treat it as politics. Then I realised that distance has its own kind of shame.

Some causes call you from principle. Others call you to account. The test is never whether you are the target. The test is whether you can watch public humiliation and still pretend neutrality is clean.

Writing about LGBTQ+ rights became heavier than commentary. Silence has a politics. Looking away has a politics. Treating this as a culture war has a political aspect. In Hungary, I saw shame become law, and law become habit.

It rarely begins with the worst thing first.

It starts before the law. That is the part people forget. The law is usually the last thing to arrive, not the first. Before it, there are jokes that teach everyone who can be mocked safely. There are headlines that turn a minority into a problem. There are dinner-table silences, schoolyard insults, television panels, and little pauses before someone says “those people”. By the time the state acts, society has already been softened for cruelty. The poster, the speech, the police decision, and the court case all land on ground that has been prepared. Cruelty rarely becomes routine in one dramatic moment. It becomes routine because enough people learn to look away in stages.

This is why the phrase “protect the children” lands with such cruelty.

Children do need protection. They need protection from violence, poverty, abuse, humiliation, neglect, hunger, loneliness, and adults who turn fear into policy. LGBTQ+ children need that protection too. They are not hypothetical. They are sitting in classrooms, scrolling through their phones, listening from the back seat of cars, eating dinner while adults on television explain that people like them are dangerous. They hear the message long before they have the words to answer it.

What does a child hear when the state treats their existence as harm?

They hear that safety means silence. They learn to lower their voice before they have even found it. They become experts in reading rooms, faces, jokes, and pauses. They work out which part of themselves can survive the day and which must be suppressed. They tell themselves to wait: until they are older, stronger, elsewhere. Love is not forbidden exactly, but it is shelved. It is placed in a future country, a future body, a future life where being seen might not feel so dangerous.

Isolation is written into law, a quiet ache that seeps into young lives and lingers for years.

Pride becomes more than a march.

Pride is a gathering in full daylight, unmistakable and unashamed. Faces lifted. Hands trembling. Banners catching the light. Voices shaking with anger or relief. Friends and families stepping out together. Music breaking the old hush. Joy refusing the terms set by fear. Showing up in public is not decoration or performance but the embodied refusal, made visible when disappearance becomes the price of safety.

A society reveals itself through whom it tolerates in the street. Heterosexual life is public by default. It appears in wedding adverts, family photographs, school forms, films, songs, tax codes, casual conversations, and assumptions so ordinary they almost disappear. Nobody calls that propaganda. Nobody says children must be shielded from it. Nobody asks why it has to be so visible.

When LGBTQ+ people do the same thing, visibility suddenly becomes political.

The demand to keep it private is a hierarchy. It allows one group to live openly while forcing another to negotiate the terms of visibility. This is permission with conditions.

Pride refuses that bargain.

Attacks on Pride test how far the state can go in deciding which citizens are allowed to appear in public without apology. When a government proclaims the power to decide who may gather, whose stories may be told, and whose visibility counts as a threat, it redraws the borders of citizenship.

That is what made Budapest Pride so important. It was targeted through law, police action, and official rhetoric, then pushed into defiance by attempts to restrict it. Around 200,000 people reportedly attended in 2025. Budapest Pride showed what the state had tried to deny for 16 years: shame can be refused in public, not as a private act of bravery, but as a collective fact.

When assembly rights were bent around child protection, when a peaceful march was treated as a threat to public order, the issue was no longer only LGBTQ+ rights. People felt is as democracy at the street level. The question was whether a state could decide that a minority’s visibility itself constituted a violation.

The people who marched answered no.

No, you do not get to turn citizens into contaminants. No, you do not get to call humiliation protection. No, you do not get to decide that dignity depends on electoral usefulness.

This is also why Pride reaches beyond LGBTQ+ communities. If a state can do this to one group, it learns a method. It learns that fear works. It learns that enough people will accept cruelty if cruelty arrives with pleasure.

Yesterday it was migrants. Today, it is LGBTQ+ people. Tomorrow it may be Roma communities, women, teachers, journalists, the poor, the disabled, anyone whose dignity becomes inconvenient to power. The names recycle. The structure remains: find a group, isolate them, make them symbolic, present their equality as someone else’s loss, and punish those who object.

This is why Pride has never been a narrow concern. It asks a question every democracy eventually has to answer: who gets to belong in public without negotiation?

The real ordeal of democratic repair is not only whether power changes hands, but whether life changes shape. It is whether people can walk through a city without feeling like a provocation. It is whether belonging becomes ordinary, not negotiated, rationed, or granted as a favour.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled against Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law, finding its logic incompatible with fundamental EU values. Budapest Pride is again expected to take place. A new political context has opened a space that did not exist before.

The more serious question remains: what happens to a society after the state has spent years teaching it that LGBTQ+ people are a threat?

Laws can be repealed faster than fear can be unlearned. A court can strike down a discriminatory measure. A new government can allow a march. But what happens to the teenager who absorbed years of official contempt? What happens to the teacher who learned caution? What happens to the parent trained to confuse love with danger? What happens to a society taught to treat dignity as negotiable?

That is the work Pride still does.

It does not erase violence. It does not solve everything. It does not make the backlash disappear. It interrupts the lesson. It replaces shame with witness. It tells people who feel alone that they are not imagining the cruelty, and that they are not facing it alone.

There is joy in that. Not the decorative or commodified kind brands display each June, but a harder joy. The joy that appears when those who have been threatened still show up. The joy of knowing that survival is not silence. The joy of seeing authoritarian politics, for a moment, forced to retreat.

There is something almost pathetic about the fear of Pride.

All that state power. All those speeches. All those laws. All that manufactured panic. And still, what is the supposed threat? People gathering in solidarity. People refusing to be shamed. People insisting that their existence is not subject to political permission.

Authoritarian and reactionary politics have always relied on the idea that some people must ask permission simply to exist. The real challenge to this system lies in living openly and unapologetically, in showing up without seeking approval. What unsettles those in power is the insistence that dignity and presence do not require consent from the state or the majority.

Pride is imperfect. It has been co-opted by corporations and softened by liberal rituals that forget its origins. It can marginalise those already at the margins. It can create barriers. It can expose some people to greater risk. These tensions are real, and criticism should make Pride more honest. Drawing back in the face of rainbow capitalism leaves the field to those who want to sell it or erase it. Corporate appropriation can dilute Pride’s meaning, but it does not abolish the forces that made Pride necessary in the first place.

What endures beneath the slogans and branding is this: people standing together, even when the world makes that dangerous.

I am a heterosexual man, but some of the safest, kindest, funniest, and most accepting rooms I have ever known were LGBTQ+ spaces. Some of my closest friendships, best memories, and deepest conversations came from people who had every reason to become harder after what the world had done to them, and somehow became more generous instead.

That is one of the things bigots never understand. They imagine a threat because they have refused the friendship or relationship that would have disproved it.

I defend Pride because I have watched what happens when states discover they can win power by humiliating people. I defend it because I have seen how quickly ordinary cruelty becomes law. I defend it because the people targeted by this politics are not symbols, slogans, electoral blocs, or issues. They are human beings who deserve more than conditional permission.

The community under attack has given the world far more than it has ever been thanked for.

Art. Language. Defiance. Care. Chosen families. Political courage. New ways of surviving. New ways of loving. New ways of telling the truth about the body, the self, the state, the family, the street, the home.

A society that attacks LGBTQ+ people does not defend civilisation. It targets those who have helped make life more bearable for everyone.

So yes, Pride still matters because cruelty is organised, because children are turned into shields in ways that endanger LGBTQ+ youth, and because visibility is still treated as provocation. Democracy is not confined to the ballot box or the courthouse. It must reach the street, the classroom, the teenager’s bedroom, and the private moment when someone chooses whether to hide or step outside.

For the teenager listening from the dinner table, for the teacher changing the subject, for the friend who still checks the street before holding someone’s hand, Pride is a signal that the world has not yet fully surrendered to those who want it hidden.

Who is allowed to be visible without apology?

If the answer is still conditional, the work is not done. And if the work is not done, Pride is not a party we have outgrown. It is the promise we still owe each other: that no one should have to apologise for being themselves.

The first month after the fall of Orbán’s regime was marked by a strange quiet. The ordinary returned almost immediately.

The trams ran, the shops opened, and Brussels did not arrive as an occupying force. Ukraine did not, in fact, invade Hungary. Then, almost rudely, the new government travelled to Brussels and began retrieving the money.

Orbán’s longest-running trick was to make dependency sound like protection: without him, Hungary would be exposed to Brussels, disorder, humiliation, and every threat his politics needed to keep alive.

This month, that argument bled profusely.

Orbánism has moved from the podium into the shadows, where the old regime always did its most patient work. Yet something essential has shifted. The spell of inevitability has cracked.

In a captured political system, the first democratic victory often happens in people’s heads. A country stops mistaking power for fate.

Orbán’s power once felt like the architecture of daily life. You learned its angles, joked about its absurdities, avoided its pressure points, or built a life in the narrow spaces it allowed. It felt permanent, and even resistance became exhausting.

That architecture has begun to shift. The old voices still speak, yet people are listening with suspicion, dark humour, impatience, and the dangerous realisation that the sermons from above were written by men with unimaginable salaries, old scripts, and sometimes Russian instructions.

The first month was real

The first month produced tangible results.

The European Commission has agreed to release €16.4 billion in previously frozen funds to Hungary after rapid reforms by Péter Magyar’s government. The details give the deal its force: €10 billion from the NextGenerationEU recovery facility, €4.2 billion in cohesion funds, and a further €2.2 billion tied to reforms including academic freedom. The money had been frozen under Orbán because of rule-of-law and corruption concerns. Magyar’s meeting with Ursula von der Leyen changed the central fact of Hungary’s relationship with Brussels: the European Union is dealing with a government that has begun replacing permanent bad faith with reform.

In a country where Brussels was turned into a permanent stage prop for domestic fear, that reversal cuts deep. The institution Orbán used as an enemy is now being treated as a negotiating partner, and the money is beginning to move.

Hungary has also moved towards joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. EPPO is precisely the body Orbán refused to allow near Hungarian EU money cases. The refusal to join was one of the system’s most revealing habits. A government that constantly said there was nothing to see worked very hard to make sure the European prosecutor could not see it.

EPPO accession would put European prosecutors inside the fraud cases that Hungarian institutions spent years avoiding. The application is only the first move; the test comes when actual EU money starts crossing actual desks.

The ICC reversal was even cleaner. Hungary’s parliament voted 133 out of 199 to remain a member of the International Criminal Court, undoing Orbán’s attempted withdrawal before it could fully take effect. The symmetry is almost too perfect: in 2025, Orbán’s side had pushed the withdrawal through with 134 votes in favour, 37 against and 7 abstentions. One year later, the new parliament reversed the direction. That vote told the world something simple: Hungary was done treating international law like a restaurant menu.

Erasmus is also coming back. Erasmus may sound like a soft student-exchange issue. In Hungary, it became something harder: one of the clearest examples of how Orbán’s system punished ordinary Hungarians for institutional capture they did not create. Students were made smaller because the state had been made dirtier.

Together, these developments have reopened a public space that Orbán spent long, dark years narrowing. A space where facts can travel without first asking permission from power.

The propaganda press is still speaking. The audience has changed.

Orbán built one of the most sophisticated propaganda ecosystems in Europe: public television, regional papers, KESMA, friendly oligarch-owned outlets, state advertising, Facebook pages, Megafon-style influencers, and the daily discipline of repeating the same political script until it felt like common sense. International reporting has repeatedly described the dominance of Fidesz loyalists in Hungary’s media environment.

That network still reaches deep into the country. State television still speaks into kitchens and village living rooms. Regional papers still carry the same central script in local ink. State advertising still gives friendly outlets oxygen that independent media can only dream of.

And yet the election revealed something brutal: the editors, strategists, presenters, and paid online warriors no longer understand the country as well as they thought they did.

Its monopoly on inevitability has slipped.

Orbán’s media empire survived by creating enough noise, suspicion, disgust, exhaustion, and alternative reality that no shared democratic conversation could survive. It rarely needed people to love Fidesz. It needed them to believe everyone was equally filthy, equally bought, equally ridiculous, and therefore nothing could ever really change.

Magyar broke that spell by becoming undeniable. Public media treated him as an intruder until he became the main event. The propaganda press cast him as a Brussels puppet, a traitor, a narcissist, a temporary scandal, then watched him become prime minister. Fidesz had spent years teaching the country to expect chaos without Orbán. Orbán lost, and the sun came up.

For a mythology built on indispensability, that is ruinous. The day after a supposedly irreplaceable leader lost power, ordinary life has a way of carrying on, and the real humiliation for the old mythology came when a different government walked into Brussels and got the money moving.

No state-funded chorus survives that comparison unscathed.

Independent Hungarian media now lands differently, too. Telex follows the mechanics of government; G7 and Válasz Online show where money has settled; Direkt36 traces hidden ownership and protected business circles. HVG, 444, Magyar Hang, Átlátszó, and Klubrádio kept public reality alive while the state tried to replace it with endless theatre.

Until now, Hungarian journalism could reveal a great deal and still watch power continue as if nothing had happened. That silence is no longer as secure. A documented ownership chain should lead somewhere. A procurement story should not vanish after two news cycles. A Telex explainer should not have to compete with a publicly funded alternate universe pretending to be news.

The propaganda press is losing force because Hungarians have begun to hear the penmanship behind the headline. Once the wires are visible, the magic cannot return unchanged.

The same lesson applies to public media. Magyar has pledged to suspend state media news broadcasts until public service standards are restored. Replacing Fidesz television with Tisza television would only repaint the old habit. Public media has to recover a more basic democratic instinct: viewers are citizens, not material to be processed. The point is not to make public television recite kinder lines. The point is to break the habit of speaking to the country from above.

Orbán, posting from the afterlife of power

Orbán has not yet found the right size for himself.

He still writes with the muscle memory of a man who expects the state to echo back.

That is why his posts now feel spectral. When he warns of democracy, betrayal, Brussels, hidden pacts, and traps, he sounds like a ghost haunting his own former office. The language is familiar. The pose is familiar. The suspicion is familiar. The authority has diverted.

One of the most revealing scenes of the month was Orbán, the man who spent years hollowing out checks and balances, posting anxiously about what Magyar might be doing to democracy.

His “free cheese is only in the mousetrap” line about the EU funds deal did the old work in miniature: take a material achievement, wrap it in folksy suspicion, and make relief sound like danger. It landed differently because the factual situation had changed. The money was frozen because Orbán’s own system created corruption and rule-of-law concerns serious enough for the European Union to withhold billions.

Magyar’s Brussels trip made Orbán’s mousetrap line look ragged: the country had been trapped by corruption conditions of his own making, and the first bars were finally being loosened.

This is why Orbán’s opposition style may become increasingly bizarre. He can still perform victimhood, now as the man whose system left the unpaid bills. Every warning now drags its own record behind it: the courts, public television, frozen EU funds, the Russian embrace, Chinese loans, secretive deals, and the endless Brussels fights that made Hungarians poorer in the name of being proud.

Orbán remains dangerous from a diminished position: a politician with a record to defend, a smaller party behind him, and a media empire scrambling to explain why reality ignored the script.

Tomorrow’s showdown at the Sándor Palace

Tomorrow morning, at 8 a.m., Magyar says he will go to the Sándor Palace with his newly appointed justice minister, Márta Görög, to confront Tamás Sulyok, the president who has refused to leave.

The deadline expires at midnight today. Magyar’s warning also applies to a wider circle of Orbán-era office-holders: the chief prosecutor, the Constitutional Court, the Kúria, the judicial administration, the State Audit Office, the competition authority, and the media authority. Resign by 31 May, or face legal removal.

This is where the velvet part of the transition ends and the constitutional knives come out.

Magyar says voters chose regime change on 12 April. Sulyok says his mandate runs until March 2029, that there is no constitutional ground for his resignation, and that he has asked the Venice Commission to intervene. A fresh 21 Kutatóközpont poll cited by Telex says 64% of Hungarians want Sulyok to leave office. The politics favours Magyar. The legal route is much narrower.

Tomorrow brings the first major collision between democratic mandate and constitutional discipline. Orbán’s people were placed in offices designed to outlive democratic defeat; removing them requires more than majority force. Constitutional repair has to look like repair.

The old system protected itself with time: five years for the president, nine for the chief prosecutor and several top judicial and media posts, twelve for Constitutional Court members and the head of the State Audit Office. These mandates were time capsules planted inside the future.

Tomorrow will show whether Magyar can open them without shattering the glass around the whole institution.

The NER is fraying

The Sulyok confrontation is the live version of the larger problem. The old order governed by embedding itself.

The word NER needs to be spelt out for readers outside Hungary. It stands for Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, the “System of National Cooperation”, Orbán’s post-2010 name for his political order. The blandness was part of the trick. In practice, it became the operating code for a party-state: loyal businessmen, loyal media, loyal prosecutors, loyal regulators, loyal foundations, and public money moving through private hands with the calmness of something that had stopped expecting consequences.

That order was built to survive exactly this moment: four supermajorities, a rewritten constitution, thousands of public contracts, and offices with five-, nine- and twelve-year mandates.

It is fraying.

The men who built fortunes and influence beside Orbán no longer operate under the same political roof. That changes behaviour before a single verdict is handed down. Magyar has repeatedly claimed that figures from the old world are already trying to make contact, explain themselves, or distance themselves from the people they once served. No guilt is proven by that. The nerves are visible. In the NER, proximity to power was an asset; in the first month after Orbán, proximity has begun to look like exposure.

The financial numbers are no longer abstract. Hungarian reporting has traced around 1,452 billion forints, roughly $4.6 billion, in private-equity funds linked to major NER circles, before the less visible layers are counted. Reuters has reported that prosecutors seized around 92 billion forints, roughly $294 million, in funds and securities in the central-bank foundations investigation, a case linked to public assets placed into structures around the Pallas Athene Domus Meriti and Neumann foundations. The same report said the probe involves 97 individuals, 36 businesses, 11 private-equity funds, and searches or document seizures across 17 legal entities.

This is the kind of detail that changes the mood in boardrooms. Asset recovery sounds abstract until prosecutors start seizing securities.

The NER economy still represents enormous embedded power through Mészáros, Tiborcz-linked interests, Matolcsy-era networks, Szíjj, Garancsi, Jellinek, the private-equity world, university foundations and state-connected business circles. The old world lived through ownership, concessions, advertising flows, construction contracts, bank relationships, media holdings, and the quiet beauty of proximity to power turning into wealth with almost devotional regularity.

The legal incentives are changing, too. Magyar has promised to establish six parliamentary investigative committees into Orbán-era abuses and alleged corruption, including the Central Bank Foundations affair. EPPO accession, EU conditionality, the proposed asset recovery office, prosecutors already moving on the Matolcsy-era foundations, and parliamentary committees all change the risk profile for people who previously assumed the state would protect them. Justice has barely packed its bag. Impunity has started to lose its relaxed facial expression.

The old emotional formula is weaker, too. Orbánism lived on a loop of fear, enemy, protection, loyalty. There was always someone allegedly coming for Hungary, and Orbán was always standing at the border of the imagination. After sixteen years, the country looked tired of being permanently rescued from invented emergencies while hospitals, schools, prices, wages, and futures deteriorated in plain sight.

The optimism this month is earned. A political order that loses power, part of its audience, part of its protection, and part of its immunity is no longer whole.

Read more

I was six, in the back seat of a car from Hungary to Slovakia, when Europe first became real. The border checks had disappeared. I remember the unfamiliar lightness of crossing a line that no longer held us back. The absence itself was enough. Europe arrived not as a speech or treaty, but as a road that no longer ended where it used to. This was in 2004, and Hungary had just joined the EU.

At that age, you do not understand Schengen or treaties, accessions, Council decisions, funding periods, or the slow bureaucratic miracle that dissolves a border. You only sense that something which used to stop you no longer does.

The barrier was gone. The road just kept going.

That was probably my first political experience of Europe, although I only understood it much later. I did not know what had been negotiated or signed. I only knew the passage had changed. The road felt open in a new way, and even as a child, I could sense that this meant something.

That is still the Europe I trust most, the one that enters life quietly, almost without announcing itself. One day, a border guard is part of the journey. Next, he is gone. Nobody gives a speech in the car. The road carries on, and the world feels a little less fenced in.

Erasmus continued this European revelation for me. It gave movement a human scale. A classroom, a city that stopped seeming foreign, the rhythm of ordinary days lived somewhere else. It turned Europe from a structure into something I could recognise in my own life.

Erasmus started quietly in 1987. A few thousand students crossed borders, often unremarked. By 2024, roughly 16 million people had participated in Erasmus and Erasmus+, with more than 1 million departures and returns each year. Billions in EU funding turned into one of the engines of European life. Every trip changes something, even when the change is not visible at first. A student returns with a new language, a new friendship, a new doubt, a new direction.

There is something almost reckless, in the best sense, about that bet. Send people away while they are still young enough to be changed. Let them see their own country from elsewhere. Let them come back with comparisons no government can fully manage.

Years after that childhood journey to Slovakia, my sense of Europe shifted again. I moved to Ireland, and Hungary began to look different from the edge of Europe and the beginning of the Atlantic. Ireland was beautiful, strange, and generous, but not home. I missed Budapest badly. I missed my friends, my grandmother, Hungarian voices around me, lángos, pogácsa, and all the small tastes of home I had barely noticed until they were gone.

Ireland gave homesickness a shape. It gave me distance, a gentler rhythm of life, and another picture of what ordinary days could feel like. I missed Hungary more sharply there, but I also grew from the distance. Europe, when it works, allows that double feeling. You carry home with you, and another place changes how you carry it.

By my third year of university, I had run out of money. Erasmus, which can look like a privilege from the outside, became a loophole. I chose a teaching project over a semester in lecture halls. That is how I ended up in a public school in Gavà Mar, near Barcelona, with mornings blown open by the salt air.

Standing at the threshold of that school, it still feels unlikely. A classroom by the sea. Children careening through echoing corridors. Teachers drawing me in before I had found my footing. I was out of my depth, trying to teach English while learning the codes of another place. I filled a notebook with Catalan fragments, copied gestures, and waited for meaning to catch up.

Adaptation was not fluency but rather was presence. The school became less foreign as I stopped being so afraid of mistakes.

I loved it more than I expected.

The school called out a version of me I had not expected. I picked up the day’s pace, the quick jokes, the signals traded in the staff room. Teaching stopped being someone else’s job and, for a while, I let myself imagine doing it. Weeks before, I was still broke and drifting. Suddenly, I was walking by the sea, hearing my name in the corridor, feeling useful in a place that had only just stopped being strange.

Access is central to all of this. Erasmus can open a life, but only if the door is not blocked by money. Those who can pay deposits and wait for grants cross more easily. For others, Europe’s openness is still conditional. In 2024, around 265,000 Erasmus+ students were counted as having fewer opportunities—18 per cent.

For students who count every euro, the path is narrow but not closed. Extra support, a good coordinator, or a student network can make the difference. Sometimes, all it takes is someone who understands what it means to get through.

Some people I met that year are still with me. Erasmus friendships form quickly because everyone is a little uprooted. You borrow each other’s certainty. You eat badly and laugh about it later. (I lived on pot noodles and crisp sandwiches). You get lost. You tell someone who was a stranger last week things you might not yet know how to say to people back home. Those friendships still carry the memory of who I was then, younger and less certain, trying to become someone in a city I had just met.

No number can measure that, but the research catches part of the afterlife. Impact studies have found that former Erasmus students are half as likely to face long-term unemployment. Other research links Erasmus to better job outcomes, faster starts, and higher pay. The statistics tell only one part of the story. The stronger effects show up intimately, years later, as a life bends in a new direction.

Those findings make sense to me. Abroad, you learn things that do not look like skills at the time. You arrive not knowing how you will manage. You misread a room, then learn to read it. You start to separate what is yours from what is merely familiar. The world stops looking inevitable. Normal becomes local. Local becomes provisional.

Then Covid arrived.

At first, it still felt unreal, the kind of news you followed from a distance even as it moved towards you. Then Barcelona shut down, and the Erasmus year I had been building a life around was suddenly over. My friends began leaving one by one. Every goodbye made the city feel less like the Barcelona I had arrived in and more like a place closing in on itself.

I was frightened in the immediate, practical way of a young person abroad, trying to work out whether they could still get home. Flights were disappearing. Rules were changing. The easy European movement I had grown up trusting became a race against closure. I was lucky to get back on one of the last flights to Ireland, where I quarantined with my sister.

You learn what movement means when it stops. Airports empty. Borders harden. Everyone tries to get home. For me, Erasmus is inseparable from that rupture. It was a year of sun and sea, and also the moment I understood how easily freedom can vanish.

This experience stayed with me.

What stayed were the small dislocations. A school day had a different rhythm. Warmth sounded different in Spanish. Home looked clearer from elsewhere. Moving between Hungary, Ireland, and Spain did not give me a boxed identity. It gave me a wider frame of reference and showed me how each place shifted my sense of self.

By the ripe old age of 27, I have lived different chapters of my life in three EU countries. Budapest is home, in the deepest and most literal sense. Europe has become the larger frame around it. Not a replacement for Hungary. A wider and more fulfilling life around Hungary.

That is the quiet power of Erasmus. It leaves you with more than one emotional address. Budapest stays home, and so does a corridor in Gavà Mar, a room in Ireland, a language you once struggled with and later understood. Identity is not a locked room. It is a set of keys. Each experience abroad opens another way of seeing, another way of belonging.

Once Europe enters a person’s biography, it rarely stays inside the study-abroad box. It follows people into friendships, work, love, family, and the languages spoken around kitchen tables years later. There is a famous expression about one million “Erasmus babies”. It is an estimate based on extrapolated survey data, not a census of EU-funded romance. Still, the image holds something true. A rather large number of European lives exist because two young people once met in a place where neither of them fully belonged.

This points to something serious. Europe becomes part of a family history as the reason two people met.

Here, Erasmus becomes political. Evidence suggests that participation strengthens European identity and civic engagement. One Erasmus Student Network survey found that students’ sense of belonging to the EU rose after mobility, and that 76 per cent intended to vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections. Causation requires care. People who choose Erasmus may already be outward-looking. Still, the evidence points to something important. Institutions can reward openness rather than fear.

Erasmus does that.

Erasmus is Europe’s quiet answer to propaganda. It does not tell you to love Europe. It lets you live it.

This, Viktor Orbán never grasped. Or perhaps he did.

Erasmus unsettles authoritarian politics because comparison unsettles power. A young Hungarian leaves for a semester to collect credits, improve their English, and see how another university works, how another city functions, how a classroom sounds when people are not measuring every word against authority. They return with private evidence. That is harder to confiscate than a newspaper and much harder to counter with a billboard.

Hungary’s exclusion from new Erasmus+ funding agreements for many universities therefore cut deep.

In December 2022, EU institutions moved to block new Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe funding agreements with Hungarian institutions controlled by so-called public-interest trust foundations. These were not obscure bodies in the margins of education. They sat at the centre of Orbán’s university model. Foundation boards. Loyalists. Patronage. Conflicts of interest. Political control dressed up as reform. The freeze affected 34 institutions, including 21 universities.

Brussels did not invent this wound. Conversely, Orbán’s system made students pay for the capture of their own universities.

Universities should be places of free thinking, argument, experimentation, and doubt. Orbánism treated them as territory. Once that system wrapped itself around higher education, even Erasmus became vulnerable.

For Orbán, that suited the deeper project.

Students who never get to leave are easier to surround. The outside world can be reduced to a threat, Brussels to a billboard, freedom to a foreign trick. Erasmus breaks that enclosure in the most inconvenient way. No lecture. No slogan. Just ordinary evidence. A classmate. A landlord. A teacher who answers honestly. A city that works differently. A life that proves the propaganda was too small.

It was Orbán’s little iron curtain. No tanks at the border. No barbed wire. Just administrative rot around the universities, corruption dense enough to keep students in.

Hungary’s path back into Erasmus carries such weight because a route is being reopened.

It will not cleanse the universities of what was done to them. The foundation boards remain, as do the habits of obedience and the damage to trust. None of that vanishes because a student can fill in a mobility form again. But a Hungarian student can look at Barcelona, Lisbon, Bologna, Prague, Dublin, or Utrecht and see more than a name on a map. They can see a semester, a classroom, a possible self.

That opportunity should never have depended on surviving Orbán’s system first.

They should be able to go.

To study, to teach, to make mistakes in another language, to get lost in a city that slowly becomes yours. To return home with a life wider than the one you left. Freedom does not always arrive with drama. It might be a public school by the sea. The first conversation you manage without translating in your head. Or a child in a car, realising the border is gone.

The European Union is far from perfect. Its decision-making is rather slow. Its speech can be evasive. Its programmes do not reach everyone. Moral clarity often arrives late, if at all. Official language can drain the human meaning from what has been achieved.

Erasmus gave me a life that would have been smaller without it. What I found was Barcelona, first as a city I tried to understand, then as a place I knew how to return to. It left a door open in my life. Years later, I walked back through it. Barcelona stopped being a chapter and became home.

Orbán taught Hungarians to see Europe as a battlefield.

Erasmus enabled me to see Europe as a life.

Mine would have been much duller without it.

The mass of Samsung SDI’s battery plant rises beside a town that was never asked whether it wanted to become a symbol of Europe’s electric age. Residents live with the hum, the traffic, the rumours, the official reassurances. Zsuzsa Bodnár, a local journalist and environmental activist, told Le Monde that the noise barriers were not always enough to cover the “constant humming.” When locals were told that the smoke was only water vapour, she did not hear reassurance. She heard a reason to inspect more, not less. The factory uses around 30 hazardous substances, including nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

Another Göd resident, László Tóth, told Reuters that he watched large plumes of steam rise from the plant at night, a sight that turns official language into something intimate and frightening. “These battery plants were not supposed to be located next to human settlements but in deserts,” he said. “We did not need them. We used to have farmlands.”

Begin here, with the sound of Europe’s green transition beside somebody’s home.

Hungary’s battery boom was sold as the centrepiece of Orbán’s industrial future. In government speeches, it sounded clean and inevitable. Jobs. Technology. Sovereignty. A country pulling itself into the new electric age. In towns like Göd, the national triumph arrived as a decision made elsewhere. Factories came before answers. Workers carried the risks, residents carried the fear, and the state handled its deals with more care than the people living beside them.

Before anger hardened into politics, the battery boom had the shine of a national project. It gave Orbán’s ministers the language they liked best: jobs, investment, sovereignty measured in production lines. The ritual repeated itself across the country. A field became an industrial park. A foreign executive stood beside a Hungarian minister. Cameras caught the handshake, the hard hat, the ribbon, the announcement of another billion-euro future. In Budapest, each factory proved that Orbánism could still make the world come to Hungary. In the towns around them, the proof arrived more heavily, through traffic, noise, unanswered questions, and the feeling that the decision had already passed over their heads.

By the mid-2020s, battery production had become one of the government’s flagship economic projects, a way to sell Hungary as an EU manufacturing base for Chinese, South Korean, and German-linked electric-vehicle supply chains.

Then the miracle acquired a scent.

In Göd, the Samsung SDI plant turned the promise into a measurement. Átlátszó, a Hungarian investigative outlet, reported that official pollution data showed the plant released 88 tonnes of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, or NMP, into the air between 2019 and 2022. The name is dull enough to vanish on the page. The risk is not. NMP is a solvent linked to reproductive and developmental harm. Inside the plant, the numbers became uglier still. In 2021, workplace levels of nickel and cobalt reportedly exceeded permitted limits by factors of 10 and 20. Later reporting suggested that nickel-cobalt-manganese dust exceeded limits by up to 510 times.

Here, the economic miracle begins to leave a toxic residue.

Orbán’s government invited foreign industrial power in, backed it with public money, hurried the paperwork, and left Hungarian communities to fight for answers after the fact. Public money prepared the ground. The paperwork moved with unusual ease. By the time journalists, NGOs, workers, and residents forced real scrutiny into the open, the important decisions had already been taken. The government called it patriotism. Hungary building the future. Hungary attracting the world. Hungary refusing to be left behind. For people living beside the plants, modernisation arrived after their consent had been edited out.

Where the Promise Became Exposure

The disgrace was in the ease of it. The approvals moved quickly, the scrutiny remained thin, and local people were pushed to the edge of decisions that would shape the air, roads, noise and water around their homes. Industry supplied the image of national strength. The public was managed after the announcement.

Göd showed the sequence early. First came the investment, wrapped in the language of progress. Then came the permits, the official calm, the long struggle for documents. Journalists and NGOs had to pull the facts into daylight. Residents had to learn the vocabulary of chemicals and exposure limits. Workers remained closest to the danger, inside the factory that was supposed to prove the future had arrived.

Átlátszó reported that in 2021 and 2022, 133 workers at Samsung’s Göd plant were exposed to carcinogens on seven occasions. In 2023, another 44 workers were exposed to chemicals. Behind those numbers are shifts worked under fluorescent light, protective routines that failed, and bodies entered into official records only after exposure had already happened. At SK’s Komárom site, a gas leak hospitalised 14 people in January 2022. The company paid a HUF 1.5 million fine, about €4,000, a sum so small on the scale of the industry that it could be loose change.

That is why the controversy spread. What began in permits and subsidies ended in the air, in the dust, in wells, in factory shifts, in night noise, in waste streams, in lungs.

For years, Orbán’s critics had described corruption through contracts, loyalists, foundations, media ownership, EU funds and friends of friends. Many voters could push that away. Procurement scandals are complicated. Oligarch stories blur into one another. EU money can disappear into Brussels theatre.

The battery plants made the old accusations harder to brush aside. For years, corruption could be made to sound distant: a company registry, a procurement notice, an EU fund, another friend of another minister appearing in another contract. The battery boom brought it closer. It put the logic of Orbán’s Hungary at the edge of people’s towns, where it could be heard at night, smelled in the air, traced through exposure records, and felt in the private terror of parents wondering what their children were breathing.

You cannot call that Soros forever.

The Map of the Battery Boom

Outside Debrecen, CATL’s planned battery factory covers more than 220 hectares, roughly 300 football fields. The project was described as Hungary’s largest-ever foreign investment, worth about €7.7 billion. The Hungarian government committed nearly HUF 88 billion, around €227 million, in subsidies toward a HUF 3,000 billion development. Its first phase alone was projected to reach around 100 GWh of annual capacity.

The numbers showed what Hungary was being asked to become. Around Debrecen, the factory did not remain a factory. It began to pull the landscape into its orbit. Farmland, roads, power lines, water, permits, subsidies, labour, and even the silence of officials all began to bend toward battery production. The country was not simply hosting an industry. It was being reshaped around one.

CATL was only the beginning of what Debrecen was being asked to become. Around it, the rest of the battery world gathered. Separators, cathode materials, suppliers, roads, power lines, water needs, and promised jobs. Semcorp, another Chinese company, announced a €183 million separator-film plant and 440 jobs. EcoPro BM, a South Korean battery-materials company, planned roughly €715 million in investment in cathode materials, with reported production capacity of 108,000 tonnes. On paper, the figures had the grammar of development. In the towns and fields around Debrecen, they read more like a future arriving before consent.

The numbers kept swelling. Local media estimates put total state aid to battery companies at around HUF 1.5 trillion, about $4.2 billion, or 2 per cent of Hungary’s annual GDP. The state was betting a visible share of the country’s future on the battery chain.

And it spread. Göd had Samsung SDI, with around 40 GWh capacity by 2022 and a later planned expansion. Komárom had SK On. Iváncsa had another SK-linked battery operation and a “European validation plant.” Sóskút had Dongwha Electrolyte, a South Korean company planning two units, one for electrolyte production and one for NMP recycling, through a €32.1 million investment that would create around 90 jobs.

This new Hungary was presented as Orbán’s European triumph. Beneath it sat the familiar habits of his rule. Foreign capital above public interest, communities sidelined, favoured contractors near opportunity, oversight thinned, investors placed ahead of the people living beside them.

The Solvent State

NMP belongs near the centre of this story.

The name sounds technical, forgettable, bureaucratic. That dullness matters. It lets danger pass through public life as paperwork.

NMP does not need drama to be frightening. It enters through breath and skin. It follows the worker home in the ordinary language of exposure, limits, shifts, gloves, ventilation, pregnancy, and risk. A generous permit writes the uncertainty into daily life. How much vapour a worker may breathe. How much risk a pregnant woman should quietly carry. How much fear a nearby town is expected to absorb.

In Hungary, Átlátszó reported that the Pest County Government Office set the maximum NMP emission limit for Samsung’s Göd factory at 150 mg per cubic metre. The Komárom-Esztergom County Government Office reportedly authorised the same 150 mg/m³ limit for SK’s battery factory and NMP processing plant in Komárom.

The German figure cited in the research was 1 mg/m³. In Hungary, the reported limit was 150.

A number like that travels outward from the permit, into factory air, into local suspicion, into the quiet calculations of workers and families trying to decide what official reassurance is worth. The permit carried the hierarchy of the Orbán years in plain sight. Investment first, public health somewhere further down the page.

The Business of Being Close

The battery boom made the Orbán-era choreography of opportunity visible again. A major investment arrived, public money prepared the way, and private gain gathered near the project.

Direkt36 reported that the CATL project near Debrecen generated significant revenue for Verbau Kft., a company owned by Szilárd Benkő, described as a longtime friend of Péter Szijjártó. According to documents cited by the outlet, Verbau was awarded contracts worth nearly HUF 7 billion for construction work related to the factory. The reporting does not allege illegality or direct wrongdoing. However, the regime's proximity to it stands out like a sore thumb. A flagship state-backed project, public money, foreign capital, and a familiar name close to the contracts.

The CATL project arrived through channels Orbán’s Hungary had spent years perfecting. A government priority became a construction site. Public money softened the ground. Foreign capital supplied the scale. Around the edges of the project, familiar names appeared where access mattered most. In that world, proximity to the state was business logic. Opportunity moved through permits, procurement, obedient offices, quiet pressure and the discretion of people who knew which investments were meant to succeed.

Across the map, the pattern changed form without losing its character. In Debrecen, it appeared as land and subsidy. In Komárom: a gas leak, a fire, an explosion, and a fine. In Iváncsa, as noise and missing environmental procedures. In Sóskút, as waste.

The miracle, once paraded as green and modern, lingered in the air, in the land, in the permits granted, and in the promises that bound the political class to the factory floor.

The Towns Left Beside the Future

Resistance followed the factories.

In Debrecen, residents and farmers sued the Hajdú-Bihar County Government Office over the CATL factory’s environmental permit. They argued the plant posed pollution risks and should not operate so close to homes. The authority rejected the claims.

In Iváncsa, Átlátszó reported that SK On Hungary had been granted a licence for a “European validation plant” next to the battery factory, where safety testing and destruction of 124,000 battery cells and modules per year were planned. According to the report, the Hungarian authorities did not require the facility to be subject to an environmental and disaster management permit.

Residents complained for months about noise from the battery factory, just 600 to 700 metres from their homes. Six hundred metres is a short walk, the space between a factory and a bedroom window.

In Sóskút, a town about 20 kilometres west of Budapest, the battery chain took another form. Waste. Dongwha’s planned electrolyte and NMP-recycling units alarmed locals. A Heinrich Böll Stiftung report described significant quantities of waste being sent to Sóskút and noted that the mayor had to be escorted away by police after public outcry at a January hearing.

On the ground, the green transition looked like residents packed into town halls, mayors leaving under police protection, journalists chasing documents, monitoring questions, lawsuits, exposed workers, fines, disputed permits, and ministers still speaking of strategic success.

Around Debrecen, the resistance also became personal. Éva Kozma, president of the Association of Mikepércs Mothers for the Environment, told Le Monde that after her group requested documents on the factories’ environmental impact, the state’s sovereignty apparatus cast her as part of an alleged Soros network. “Then they labelled me a traitor to the homeland,” she said. “For my parents, who have always voted for Fidesz, you can imagine the shock it was to see their daughter portrayed as a foreign agent just because we asked the authorities for documents.”

The public anger came from a sacrifice imposed from above. People rejected the role assigned to them inside the clean European economy. Host community. Risk absorber. Taxpayer. Mute observer.

The Waste Nobody Wanted to Name

The waste question may be the most underdeveloped part of the public story, and potentially one of the most dangerous.

Research by Heinrich Böll cautioned that Hungary’s battery factories may be producing hazardous waste in quantities exceeding the country’s capacity to regenerate, neutralise, or recycle. According to the report, residues not managed by these methods may have been disposed of at both documented and undocumented locations, although public information on storage conditions and long-term waste management remains limited. These observations are based on available data and do not, in themselves, prove regulatory breach or legal noncompliance.

That warning carries weight, however. Environmental scandals rarely end when the smoke clears.

Air pollution surfaces first, drifting from headline to household. Workplace exposure becomes a campaign line, spoken at rallies and whispered in factory break rooms. Waste waits. It becomes hidden archaeology, unearthed later in files, landfills, transport records, and permits that faded into bureaucratic oblivion. Contaminated soil and cleanup costs quietly pile higher. The most expensive truths stay where power prefers them, in the ground, in the archives, and out of public view.

A new government will have to ask questions beyond a single factory or official, down to the choices that allowed these dangers to multiply.

Where did the waste go?

Who transported it?

Who was paid?

Which sites received it?

What was recorded?

What went unrecorded?

Which permits were granted without proper scrutiny?

And who decided that the public did not need to know?

Sovereignty for Samsung, Suspicion for Journalists

The pressure around the reporting revealed as much as any chemical reading.

Átlátszó reported that Telex had cited a leaked March 2024 document in which Samsung SDI management in Göd discussed possible measures to shut down Átlátszó or prevent it from continuing to report on the factory. The company reportedly expected the government to restrict Átlátszó’s work in some way. Three months later, the Sovereignty Protection Office, an Orbán-era body created to investigate alleged foreign influence, launched an investigation into Átlátszó.

Read that again.

A Hungarian investigative outlet reports on a foreign-owned factory. Management reportedly discusses ways to silence the outlet. A state body, invoking “sovereignty,” inspects the journalists.

That moment belongs to the twilight of Orbán’s era.

Sovereignty, in this usage, gave Hungarians no right to know what was happening in their towns. It gave the state a language for intimidating those who asked.

The contradiction proved fatal. Orbán’s government spent years warning about foreign interference, networks, money, and influence. When Hungarian journalists investigated a foreign-owned industrial giant, pressure fell on the press, not the company.

The word “sovereignty” had been emptied and refilled with bogus menace.

When Fidesz Voters Started to Suspect

The battery factories did not bring Orbán down on their own. That would be too neat, and too false.

His downfall came from a wider collapse of trust. Inflation, exhausted public services, corruption fatigue, EU isolation, the pardon scandal, foreign-policy arrogance, and the sudden rise of an opposition movement capable of turning resentment into power. The battery boom gathered those failures into a story people could see, smell, measure, and map.

It struck Orbán where his mythology was supposed to be strongest.

The scandal cut into the roles Orbán had spent years writing for himself. His family politics now sat beside fears about reproductive toxins. His sovereignty politics sat beside dependence on the Chinese and South Korean giants. His labour politics sat beside imported workers, wage pressure and crowded dormitories. His economic miracle sat beside subsidies and public anger.

By early 2026, the political damage was visible. Le Monde reported that the controversy over the battery industry had become a central element of Tisza’s campaign. Péter Magyar interviewed a former employee of the Göd plant who spoke about serious abuses and health risks. In Debrecen, Tisza’s local candidate Zsolt Tárkányi publicised alleged irregularities and claimed that at least two employees had suffered poisoning. Tisza launched a petition calling for a public investigation and for those responsible to be identified directly and politically.

Then came the polling.

A poll cited by Le Monde found that 72 per cent of Hungarians believed government officials were likely aware of the health risks at Samsung’s Göd factory.

An environmental scandal becomes a scandal of power when voters begin to suspect that the state knew.

The Moment Corruption Got a Body

By then, the old language of scandal had changed texture.

Corruption became a construction contract. Sovereignty took the shape of a Chinese mega-plant.

Family policy became a question about reproductive toxins.

For the better part of a decade, Orbán’s government decried illegal immigration, casting itself as Hungary’s protector. Meanwhile, as the battery industry grew, the state issued nearly 100,000 new work permits to non-EU nationals from 2019 to 2025, tripling previous numbers. Workers arrived from Vietnam, Indonesia, Mongolia, and beyond to staff plants in Göd, Debrecen, Iváncsa, and Komárom. The Hungarian Trade Union Confederation found that many earned just 60-70 per cent of the local average wage and lived in crowded dormitories. Unions and NGOs noted that the influx of foreign labour pushed down wage offers for Hungarian applicants. In battery towns, job postings listed pay below past rates. Researchers observed that manufacturing wages stagnated or fell, even as the state poured in subsidies.

The worker's story has its own silence. At BYD’s Szeged site, Chinese migrant workers told The Guardian of seven-day working weeks, excessive overtime, recruitment-related debt, and crowded dormitories. One Chinese worker said some employees choose to work seven days a week because “only those who come from China choose to.” Asked what conditions were like inside the site, another worker replied, “Nothing out of the ordinary, when you’re a migrant worker.” A Szeged resident put the other half of the question plainly. “As a resident of Szeged, I feel that there was not enough information.”

The official rhetoric of protection gave way to a harsher reality, with cheap labour, weak disclosure and industrial speed doing the real work.

Economic competence shrank into subsidies for industries facing public anger. Towns protested, sued, documented, and still remained unheard. Brussels, Soros, liberals, migrants, NGOs. The old vocabulary kept conflict at a distance. The enemy was always somewhere else.

The battery scandal brought the conflict home.

The argument over the rule of law moved from courtrooms and reports into vents, air, workers’ breathing, permits, company measurements, state knowledge, and public experience.

Orbánism had always asked Hungarians to tolerate indignity in exchange for stability. The battery boom revealed the next demand. To absorb the risks of investment.

That was harder to sell.

Europe’s Dirty Workshop

Europe’s battery rush found in Hungary a place where it could move faster, cheaper, and with fewer questions.

The European Union’s Green Deal and commitment to electrification created pressure to build battery production capacity and strategic supply chains inside Europe. The official language was technological sovereignty and climate necessity. On the ground, countries competed to host the industrial mess behind the clean image of electric mobility.

Germany and France brought stricter standards, stronger oversight, and more institutional scrutiny. Hungary offered incentives, flexibility, political centralisation, lower labour costs, and speed. For companies seeking an EU production base away from Western European resistance, that package had obvious appeal.

Europe wants electric cars, supply chains closer to home, and less dependence on Chinese imports while still relying on Chinese technology, capital and production capacity. Hungary gave that contradiction a convenient address, inside the EU, cheaper than the West, politically centralised, strategically eager, and willing to move fast.

Orbán understood the bargain.

To Europe, Hungary could be a battery hub.

To China and South Korea, it could be a subsidised production base inside the EU.

To German carmakers, it could be a nearby supply chain.

To Hungarian voters, it could be sold as national success.

Beneath those overlapping promises waited a harder reckoning. The failure was not the ambition to build a cleaner economy. It was the bargain Hungary made around the factories, and the way that bargain passed through a state shaped by entrenched interests, weak oversight, and contempt for local consent.

The clean image of electrification could be sold in Berlin, Brussels and Paris. The solvents, dust, dormitories, water anxiety, and public hearings were left to towns that had already discovered the future had been approved.

In Orbán’s Hungary, public purpose kept becoming a private opportunity.

What Must Now Be Opened

For the new government, this is a test.

Investigating Orbánism through spectacular scandals will be easier. Villas, foundations, propaganda contracts, pardon files, oligarchs, ministries, media empires. The battery state demands a deeper inquiry into the development model itself.

Not just who got rich.

Who was exposed?

Who approved the permits?

Who set the NMP limits?

Who decided that 150 mg/m³ was acceptable?

Who inspected the factories?

Who saw the reports?

Who knew about workplace exposure?

Who compared the company’s internal measurements with official submissions?

Who accepted fines that looked microscopic beside the scale of the projects?

Who tracked the waste?

Who protected the journalists?

Who threatened them?

Who told towns that the future had already been decided?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question. How much of Orbán’s Hungary was built on the assumption that ordinary people would simply absorb the cost?

The Poisoned Miracle

Follow the factories and the Orbán years become legible. Foreign capital flowing in, public subsidies lavished, familiar intermediaries near the contracts, oversight grown thin, secrecy spreading, intimidation practised, propaganda refined, and local communities left at the edge of the spectacle.

Orbán’s fall did not come from a single plant in Göd or a construction site outside Debrecen. Yet these places shone a light on what the country had lived under. This was a government fluent in the language of nationhood, yet practised in the art of exemption; a state that exalted investment, yet distrusted its own people; a politics that wore the mask of protection while asking citizens to live with risks they could never fully understand.

Hungary was promised the future.

Some towns received solvents, toxic dust, noise, lawsuits, police-escorted hearings, and silence.

This is the bitter dividend of the miracle.

Sources and Further Reading

Main reporting and investigations used for this article:

• Le Monde: “The battery plant scandal that could scuttle Viktor Orbán’s election campaign”

• Reuters: “Hungary PM Orbán’s battery bet turns into election headache”

• Átlátszó: “For years, battery factories in Hungary may have emitted up to 150 times more teratogenic solvents than in Germany”

• Direkt36: “Szijjártó’s old friend made billions from the Debrecen battery factory”

• The Guardian: “Seven-day weeks and ‘debt bondage’: China’s first electric car plant in Europe mired in allegations of worker abuse”

Background on the battery boom and major investments:

• Reuters: “Chinese battery maker CATL expects Hungarian production to start by early 2026”

• Reuters: “Companies investing in EV battery factories in Europe”

Hungary cannot simply step past Viktor Orbán. Behind him is a state trained in his syntax. Ministries learned delay as a form of loyalty; prosecutors learned that stillness could speak; editors and business owners learned the cost of misunderstanding a hint. Power did not always need to give orders. Often, it only had to create a climate in which everyone knew what obedience sounded like.

That is harder to vote out than a prime minister.

After every rupture, the same script waits nearby. Citizens are urged to let go, rebuild, and show restraint. The language comes dressed as maturity, sometimes even as kindness. Do not reopen old quarrels. Do not divide the country. There are hospitals to fix, schools to rescue, prices to tame, wages to protect, and bills to pay.

There is truth in that exhaustion. Hungarians have every right to want ordinary life again: hospitals that heal, schools that teach, wages that survive the month, and a state that no longer sorts citizens by loyalty, usefulness, or threat. After sixteen years of politics, the hunger for quiet is human, entering the room before the person does.

But quiet can also be a hiding place.

Hungary cannot build normality over sealed files and call it a repair. Orbánism was never confined to Orbán’s office, his speeches, or the theatrical cruelty of his campaigns. It seeped into appointments, media ownership, prosecutors’ calendars, advertising budgets, emergency decrees, regulatory bodies, public assets, and the professional instinct to ask what power expected before asking what the law allowed.

Explaining that requires evidence. Without it, the old system will begin its second life, not as government, but as a story.

Orbánism Was Built to Survive

Give the Orbán years enough silence, and they will return with more energy. Their afterlife will not begin with EU funds, public contracts, captured outlets, obedient boards, or the prosecutor’s empty desk. It will begin with a sigh. Things worked then. There was order. Hungary was respected. Families were protected. Brussels feared us. Nostalgia rarely asks for audited accounts. It only needs to feel useful.

This is how defeated systems preserve themselves. They leave the office and take up residence in memory. Their worst habits shrink into anecdotes, their crimes into excesses, their corruption into folklore. The longer the record remains incomplete, the easier it becomes to sell the myth.

Magyar’s first constitutional moves matter for that reason. The proposed eight-year limit for prime ministers is not simply a lock placed on Orbán’s personal return. It is a recognition that Hungary allowed power to settle too comfortably in the hands of one individual. The planned dissolution of the Sovereignty Protection Office and the recovery of assets transferred into public-interest foundations point to the same buried fact: Orbánism was not only electoral dominance but also possession disguised as governance.

Treating these measures as routine housekeeping after a long occupation of the state would miss their real significance. Hungary needs a public reconstruction of how the system protected itself. Not one grand confession. Not one theatrical day of televised catharsis. The country has to follow money until it stops moving, read minutes no one expected to matter, restore meaning to signatures, appointments, tenders, legal opinions, media deals, university transfers, and the administrative details that made capture look respectable.

This is the work of repair when a state has been bent without formally breaking. Courts will have their role, but courts alone cannot rebuild the factual world. The deeper task is civic: to make the old methods visible enough that they lose their innocence. What happened has to become knowable, teachable, searchable, and impossible to deny.

Orbán’s system was the kind of capture Europe spent years telling itself it would recognise: legalistic, procedural, almost boring until one looked at the outcomes. The language of law remained. Offices kept their brass plates. Forms were filed. Votes were counted. The danger lay precisely there. The shell stayed familiar while the animal inside changed.

Orbánism’s most important innovation was making the theft of democracy look like mundane bureaucracy.

The Press Became Infrastructure

The media system shows the method. Outlets were pressured, bought, starved, merged, intimidated, or surrounded until the old forms of pluralism remained visible long after the market had been bent.

Reuters recently described Orbán’s media empire as one of the pillars of his sixteen years in power, with state media under increasing government control and private outlets shut down or taken over by pro-government businessmen. KESMA, the Central European Press and Media Foundation, was created by Orbán’s allies in 2018 and gathered nearly 500 outlets under a pro-government umbrella. Magyar has pledged to cut state advertising flows to the group and review its creation.

The damage went beyond the daily lie. A captured media environment changes how people relate to reality. Facts become weapons. Investigations become conspiracies. Journalists become agents. Questions arrive already suspected. Over time, cynicism starts to feel like sophistication, when in fact it is one of authoritarianism’s cheapest forms of protection.

The human part matters. People do not enter politics as clean instruments waiting for better information. They bring identity, fear, pride, resentment, memory, and a sense of belonging. News reassures as much as it informs. It tells people who is on their side, who threatens them, and which facts can be ignored without feeling dishonest.

That is why the record matters even when many people will refuse it. Some Orbán voters will reject the evidence before it is printed. Some will blame Brussels, Soros, the new government, foreign journalists, and revenge. A public record is not built to win every argument in the present. It is built so that future lies have to work harder.

Ten years from now, when someone says things worked, there should be ledgers to prove it. When someone says the theft was minor, there should be procurement records to back it up. When someone says the media was free, there should be ownership files and advertising flows. When someone says the foundations were private, there should be a paper trail of asset transfers. When someone says prosecutors did their job, there should be a public account of the cases that never moved.

Without a record, rumour becomes the archive.

Nostalgia Is Not Innocent

The Fidesz response will be familiar. It will avoid the contracts that are hardest to defend, the foundations that are hardest to explain, and the audits that cannot be answered cleanly. The argument will move to safer ground: patriots persecuted, sovereignty under attack, enemies at the gate, accountability recast as vengeance.

When evidence threatens belonging, belonging often wins. Hungarians know the street version of this long before anyone gives it a theoretical name. “Us” must be defended. “Them” must be suspected. Evidence from “them” arrives contaminated before anyone reads the first page.

Orbán industrialised this reflex.

He understood that people are more willing to excuse corruption when the corrupt are presented as protectors of the community. Cruelty becomes tolerable when sold as a defence. Failure becomes survivable when blame can be redirected. Over the years, the targets changed according to need: Brussels, George Soros, migrants, independent journalists, NGOs, teachers, judges, opposition figures, while the emotional mechanism stayed steady. The country was kept inside a permanent bubble of threat.

Hungary cannot answer that atmosphere with a few cathartic hearings and a press conference arranged for maximum solemnity. The record has to be colder than that and more durable. It will be built from the unglamorous materials of power: contracts, ownership maps, procurement records, legal opinions, ministerial signatures, foundation documents, media spending trails, and testimony from people who saw how decisions were made. The truth will not arrive as one grand revelation. It will gather, page by page, until denial has less room to breathe.

The old system will be waiting for the first sloppy accusation, the first performative hearing, the first unnecessary cruelty that can be turned into martyrdom. Orbánism knows how to survive inside grievance. It has been practising for years.

The Danger of Doing It Badly

There is risk here, and it should be taken seriously. Accountability can curdle if it becomes a performance of victory. A captured state cannot be answered with another captured state facing the other direction. Files have to be opened as evidence, not trophies. Public hearings need law, documentation, and procedural discipline. Fidesz voters are citizens, not defendants. Former officials have rights. Courts cannot become stages.

A vindictive process would hand Orbánism the story it wants: the new Hungary as the old Hungary with different enemies.

Silence will not solve that danger. Seriousness might.

The work begins with the paper trail, followed wherever it leads and not merely where it is politically convenient. Public money has to be traced through the channels where influence travelled: tenders, foundations, advertising contracts, emergency decrees, media bodies, and prosecutors’ offices. Whistleblowers need protection before they become martyrs. The public broadcaster and Media Council need reform because a captured microphone remains a captured institution, even when the voice behind it changes. Cooperation with European anti-corruption bodies should not be treated as a favour to Brussels, but as a way to make Hungarian accountability harder to sabotage at home.

The record has to survive hostile readers. That is the test. Not whether it satisfies the angriest voters, not whether it produces the best headline, but whether it still stands when every comma is attacked.

The aim is to place the Orbán years where they belong: not inside national nostalgia, but inside the public record.

The European Union’s own rule-of-law concerns show why this matters. Its 2025 report on Hungary raised issues around party financing, surveillance, media pluralism, emergency powers, judicial independence, and pressure on civil society. Around €18 billion in EU funds remain inaccessible due to unresolved rule-of-law issues.

Two Warnings From Elsewhere

Other democracies have already shown how incomplete victories can sour.

The US’s warning is about speed, narrative, and the terrible advantage of shamelessness. After January 6, the institutions spoke in the grammar of institutions: hearings, reports, referrals, indictments, motions, filings. Trump spoke in grievance, which travels faster. He converted each legal development into proof that the system feared him, turned courtrooms into campaign scenery, and fed every charge into a persecution story already waiting for evidence. By the time special counsel Jack Smith moved to abandon the federal election-interference and classified-documents cases after Trump’s 2024 victory, the law had not pierced the myth. It had been swallowed by it. Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed the election case without prejudice; prosecutors stressed that the decision said nothing about the merits. Politically, the essential damage had already been done.

Hungary should not borrow the US’s legal drama, but it should study the timing. Truth can arrive with documents, hearings, and procedural care, and still lose the room if myth has already moved into people’s identity. A reckoning that moves too slowly, speaks too cautiously, or fails to explain itself can become raw material for the forces it is meant to contain.

Britain offers a quieter warning about the seductions of a large majority. Labour’s 2024 victory looked overwhelming from inside Parliament, where Keir Starmer’s party won more than 400 seats. Outside Westminster, the mandate was thinner: just over a third of voters chose Labour, while Reform UK converted a substantial national vote share into only a few seats. The electoral system produced authority, but authority is not the same as deep consent. For a moment, the result looked like a clean break. Less than two years later, Reuters reported Labour polling at 17 per cent, Starmer’s future under scrutiny, and cost-of-living anger still dominating public life.

The point is not to turn Britain into Hungary or the Conservatives into Fidesz. The point is narrower and more useful: elections can remove governments without curing the vulnerabilities that made old poisons attractive. A landslide can appear to close while leaving the deeper story unresolved.

Hungary’s victory over Orbánism cannot become grand, emotional, historic, and then strangely unfinished.

The Country Knew the Line

Orbánism was never only about Orbán, which is exactly why closure becomes so uncomfortable.

If this were only about one man, the country could remove him, rename a few offices, change the locks, and move on. The real story lives in the etiquette of power that formed around him. A mayor could understand which company was favoured without needing written instructions. An editor could learn which story would make life expensive. A civil servant could discover that a missing document sometimes served power better than a signed order. A businessman could hear patriotism and profit begin to rhyme. A minister could learn that loyalty outlived competence. A voter could sense something was wrong and also sense the cost of saying so.

This is how a system becomes ordinary. Power stops needing to shout. Norms harden. People begin to anticipate the wish before it is spoken. Sometimes the most efficient authoritarian instruction is atmosphere.

Fidesz created a country where many people knew the line without needing to see it written down.

The reckoning, therefore, has to examine crimes and habits together. Theft matters, and so does obedience. Propaganda matters, and so does the emotional economy that made it useful. Signatures matter, and so does the silence around them.

Hungarians deserve that memory. They deserve to know what was done with their taxes, institutions, EU funds, universities, courts, media, flag, fears, and history. They deserve to know how much was hollowed out, how much was sold, how much was captured, and what can still be repaired.

They deserve that knowledge without a new lie painted over the old one.

A Reckoning Without Humiliation

The post-Orbán reckoning has to be cleaner than the system it examines. It needs to resist the cheap pleasure of humiliation. It has to be precise when precision is less dramatic, and honest when evidence runs thin. It must distinguish corruption from bad policy, criminality from complicity, complicity from cowardice, and cowardice from ordinary fear.

That distinction is the point. A democratic reckoning proves itself by telling the truth without becoming addicted to power.

If Hungary gets this wrong, Orbánism returns as grievance. If Hungary gets this right, Orbánism becomes evidence.

The danger is selective memory: triumphs loudly celebrated, shame kept private, useful myths printed on billboards, inconvenient facts buried in footnotes. Polite forgetting means rushing past the files in the name of unity, mistaking exhaustion for wisdom, and letting old networks survive because exposure would be uncomfortable.

Democracy is protected by structure.

Closure is the inventory, the inspection, the public record, without which every reform becomes guesswork, and every future crisis becomes an opening for return.

Hungary cannot build a cleaner future by stepping politely around the wreckage. It has to examine it honestly enough that the next generation knows what was assembled here, how it functioned, who maintained it, who profited from it, and which screws must never be tightened again.

The country does not need to stare at Viktor Orbán forever. It does need to understand how a state was trained to move around him: how courts adjusted, how media bent, how money travelled, how loyalty was rewarded, how fear became professional common sense, how silence became a career strategy, and how public life was taught to doubt its own eyes.

Only then can Hungary move on.

Not by forgetting.

By finishing the record.

Hungary After Dark is my weekly dispatch from post-Orbán Hungary. A personal reading of what surfaced, what shifted, and what the week revealed once the official noise faded.

A small note before we begin. The Hungary Report is my one-person project: researched, written, translated, edited, and produced by me. Hungary After Dark is the paid Sunday edition, where I try to give readers the deeper weekly reading rather than another scroll of headlines. Every issue means hours inside the Hungarian press, government notices, interviews, investigations, budget lines, speeches, and political noise, then the slower work of turning all of that into something clear enough to be useful outside the country.

I am at the stage where a stronger base of paid readers would make a real difference. It would let me move closer to doing The Hungary Report full time, with more original reporting, deeper weekly analysis, better explainers, and a more consistent English-language window into Hungarian politics. One subscription will not save independent media. But it does help keep this small desk open: reading closely, translating the chaos, and refusing to let Hungary be explained only by the people who made it harder to understand.

All week, I kept thinking about what happens after a country steps inside the building.

The first days of transition were carried by images. Cordons falling. Emergency rule ending. Citizens entering public spaces that had been sealed off for years, places treated as private scenery by a state that forgot who owned them. It felt physical, almost intimate. The public moved into rooms it had been trained to approach from a distance.

Then the week changed register. The open doors led inward, toward records. The pardon file led to the budget. The budget led to signatures. The signatures led to appointments, deadlines, old obligations, and the kind of official paper that does not look dramatic until someone finally reads it closely.

This is where regime change leaves the square and enters the archive.

A country does not wake up clean because a government falls. It wakes to contracts, debts, favours, loyalists, legal snares, and sudden converts to procedure — people who, until very recently, treated rules as an inconvenience.

Hungary spent the week reading what was left behind.

The files did not flatter the country.

The pardon file moved

The Endre K. pardon scandal returned this week in the form that now carries the most weight. Documents.

This is the case that blew open Hungarian politics in 2024, after President Katalin Novák pardoned a man convicted in connection with the cover-up of abuse at a state-run children’s home. Novák resigned. Judit Varga, the former justice minister who had countersigned the pardon, left frontline politics. The wound never really closed.

The released material showed that warnings existed inside the system. The Justice Ministry had material pointing against clemency. The Sándor Palace also had an internal rejection draft. Yet Novák granted the pardon anyway.

The question is sharper now. Why did the warnings lose to the favour?

Then Tamás Schanda, Novák’s former chief of staff, told 24.hu that Zoltán Balog had “firmly and emphatically” asked for Endre K. to receive clemency. Balog later said the story stops with him.

That sentence carries more than it admits. Balog was no distant petitioner. He was a former Orbán minister, a Reformed Church bishop, and one of those figures who moved easily between morality, state power, and personal access. The old system called this national seriousness. In the file, it looks like influence in ink.

The documents tell us more. They still stop short of responsibility. We now know more about who pushed. We still do not know enough about why the institutional warnings failed, why the pardon moved forward, and whether anyone else stood behind the request.

This case now reaches beyond Katalin Novák, Zoltán Balog, or Judit Varga. It exposes the old system’s moral plumbing. Pressure entered through one pipe, resistance collapsed in another, and responsibility evaporated before it reached a name.

Disgust has already done its first work. It broke the silence. Now the file needs a room, a chair, and a name across the table. Someone has to ask, calmly and in public, how a warning became irrelevant, how a favour moved faster than the institution meant to stop it, and who learned to look away before the signature landed.

The missing budget line

The next document belonged to a colder part of the state.

After the pardon file, with its moral heat and human disgrace, the budget seemed almost dull. That is where its force lies. Budgets are where governments leave fingerprints, not in the language of confession, but in the placement of a line, the absence of one, and the quiet confidence that nobody will read closely enough.

The Magyar government says it found HUF 286 billion — roughly $925 million at Sunday’s Telex exchange rate — in spending missing from the visible budget. Telex obtained the handover document and checked the budget law. The three disputed items were not where they should have been. They concern expressway availability fees, the Hungarian section of the Budapest–Belgrade railway, and the Iváncsa battery-plant rail connection.

A budget line should exist.

Orbán’s Hungary taught the public to watch for the spectacular object — the stadium, the castle office, the yacht, the propaganda poster, the oligarch’s estate. Corruption came dressed for the camera. The deeper inheritance resists photography because a state can be quietly warped through budgets, procurement tricks, deferred obligations, creative accounting, and lines that surface only after the old government has left.

Fidesz denies wrongdoing and insists the previous government played by the rules. Good. Keep the fight on paper. Show the handover material, the signatures, the omissions, and the choices. Let the facts do the work before they harden into slogans.

If the missing money becomes a chant, the old state claims a small victory. If it becomes a clear trail of obligations, signatures, dates, and names, then the country gets something harder to dismiss.

Read more

On the playground, I watched boys perform, and I performed alongside them.

Some boys got louder around other boys, rougher, harder, more certain of themselves, or at least more determined to look certain. From early on, I understood that boyhood, at least in the Ireland around me, came with rules nobody admitted were rules.

I grew up in an Ireland where the Catholic Church was no longer untouchable, but it was still everywhere in the afterlife of its power. Its scandals were not sealed away in the past. I had friends whose fathers had been abused in Catholic schools. Clerical abuse, shame, silence and authority were not abstract national history; they lived in families, in conversations, in what people said and what they could not say. Nobody gave me a lecture on masculinity. You absorbed it from faces, jokes, glances and pauses. You learned who was allowed to be soft, and who paid for it.

Be tough. Don’t be too sensitive. Don’t have too many girls as friends, but make sure you could attract girls if you wanted to be taken seriously. Don’t move differently. Don’t speak too softly. Don’t stand out. Masculinity meant caution. Never let your guard down. Never give the boys around you material.

Years later, I would recognise the same fear in politics. The far right saw lonely, angry, humiliated men and treated them like an audience waiting to be sold a script. It told them their shame did not need to be understood; it only needed a target. Someone else had stolen their place. Someone else had made them small. Someone else had to pay. The small humiliations I knew from the playground, the bench before a match and the group chat were given better lighting, louder microphones and a list of people to blame.

Long before I saw it in politics, I saw it close up. Cold tiles before a match. Corridors where everyone measured one another. Playground circles where a joke could tell you whether you were safe. I cannot point to one day when I realised I did not fit the version of boyhood everyone else seemed to know by heart. It was more like carrying a quiet suspicion that I had missed an instruction everybody else had received.

I arrived in Ireland as an outsider, learning English while also learning the older divisions of the place. Boys with boys. Girls with girls. Anything else treated as suspicious, childish, flirtatious or weak. My closest friendships often crossed those lines, and that alone confused people.

With girls and women, I could breathe more easily. I was not constantly proving the same dull things about myself. Around many boys, every gesture felt available for inspection. A look. A laugh. A pause. A friendship. You had to be straight enough, hard enough, casual enough, never too soft, never too emotional, never too close to the wrong person.

Boys were already policing one another before we had the language to know what we were enforcing.

People quizzed me more times than I can count, usually over things that should have meant nothing and somehow meant everything. My voice. My clothes. The way I stood. The fact that most of my friends were girls. That alone became evidence. Evidence of what, I was never quite sure, which was part of the point.

Boys and men would ask what I was getting out of those friendships, or whether I had some hidden motive, as if friendship with a woman had to be a long con, a romantic strategy, or a waiting room for sex. The possibility that I simply liked their company seemed to break something in their imagination. Even now, some men treat genuine friendship with women as if it needs an explanation. It doesn’t. Their confusion is the explanation.

I did not move the way they expected, and I did not wear the armour they recognised, so I learned to notice everything. Who looked too long. Who laughed too quickly. Who repeated a word in a tone that meant it would follow you for the rest of the day. The message arrived long before anyone said it aloud. Stay inside the lines, or others will draw conclusions for you.

That kind of attention gets under your skin. You start hearing yourself through someone else’s ears. You check your voice, your clothes, your posture, the way you laugh, the people you stand beside. You become your own little censor, which is a ridiculous thing to ask of a child and a very efficient way to produce men who fear themselves.

That was the strangest part. So many boys seemed miserable inside the very thing they were defending. I remember the set of their jaws, the glances before a joke landed, the relief when someone else became the target. Everyone knew the laughter could turn, and everyone behaved accordingly. So they got there first, laughing first, hardening first, joining in first, anything to avoid becoming next.

I used to love football. I loved the game itself: the rhythm, the movement, the physical belonging, the feeling of being part of something alive. Then came everything around it. The pre-match cruelty. The need to be one of the lads. The jokes about girls. The casual homophobia. The emotional poverty dressed up as camaraderie.

The sport still mattered to me, but staying inside the culture around it became harder and harder. That is one of the quieter losses of this kind of masculinity. It drives boys away from things they love, not because they are too fragile for those spaces, but because the spaces become too narrow for honesty.

I saw how boys and men spoke about women when women were absent. I saw how quickly a person could become a body, a rumour, a screenshot, a joke. Boys performed cruelty for each other and called it friendship. What unsettled me most was the normality: the easy tone, the familiar rhythm, the sense that everyone already knew their part.

One scene has stayed with me.

Before a football match, when I was a young teenager in Dublin, I remember boys talking horribly about girls we knew, classmates, sometimes even teachers. A name would be thrown into the air and suddenly a whole person became material. A rumour, a body, a joke, a story to be bent into something uglier before we walked onto the pitch.

No one paused. No one said, wait, this is cruel. That almost shook me more than any single comment, how easily the meanness became ordinary.

I remember my body more than the exact words. The knot in my stomach. The hot, useless discomfort. The sudden awareness that a girl we knew had been dragged into the middle of the group without ever being allowed to answer. I kept thinking of her finding out. Of knowing that boys she recognised had spoken about her like that, and nobody had stopped it.

The comments came easily. The laughter did too. There was a dreadful smoothness to it, as if everyone already knew this was part of the ritual before the whistle.

I wish I could give my younger self a braver role in that memory. I can’t. Maybe my face gave me away, and maybe I said something privately afterwards, but I did not break the circle. I did not make the moment stop. I was not brave enough, quickly enough.

That is what stays.

She was nowhere near the bench, but everything bent around her absence. Her humiliation became a way for boys to recognise each other. I understood something then that I still struggle with now: misogyny survives through cruel people being loud and uncomfortable people staying quiet.

It begins there, before manifestos, before politics, before anyone admits what they are learning. A laugh. A rumour. A boy looking away. You learn the rules by watching what nobody challenges. Contempt begins to sound like confidence, silence begins to pass for consent, and the trick is old, pathetic and brutally effective.

Platforms turned what was once a passing moment of cruelty into a permanent, unscrollable feed.

I know what happens when you challenge it in public. I have been called a soy boy, a lefty, a radical leftist, whatever phrase was circulating that week among men who seem to think politics is a personality transplant. When I called out Andrew Tate, some of his supporters sent death threats. That did not make me quieter. If anything, it clarified the point. A movement that answers criticism of misogyny with threats is telling on itself.

This is close to my heart because the people I love most are not theoretical entries in a culture-war. For me they are women. They are members of the LGBTQ+ community. They are people who have had to measure their safety, soften their truth, or wonder whether the room, the family, the street or the comment section would turn on them.

Even as a child, I could not understand the cruelty around sexuality. I had friends who could not come out to their parents. I had friends whose parents withdrew from them after they did. That always seemed obscene to me in the simplest possible way. Why did anyone care who someone loved? Love was love. I never needed a more sophisticated argument, and I still don’t.

I had no clean distance from any of this. I performed too. I made mistakes. I stood by when jokes about women were said aloud. Sometimes I stayed quiet because I did not want to become the problem in the group, and sometimes I wanted belonging more than confrontation.

That sadness has stayed with me. For a long time, I treated discomfort like proof that I was innocent. I thought knowing something was wrong, feeling it in my body, meant I had somehow escaped responsibility. I had not. Silence has a function. It cushions the joke. It protects the boys laughing around it. It tells the target that no one is coming.

I knew it was wrong before I had the courage to say so.

That is one of the things I am trying to understand as I write this. Why do men become cruel? Why do boys who know better stay quiet? Why does the fear of losing your place in a group overpower the thing in you that already knows the truth?

By sixteen or seventeen, I started pushing back more, imperfectly and awkwardly, but more often. Around male groups, when lads passed around pictures of girls and made comments, I would try to interrupt the ritual: why are we doing this? That is a person, not an image. Imagine hearing this as her father, her brother, her friend. Imagine hearing it as her.

It was late and awkward, and it probably made me unwelcome among those who preferred the comfort of everyone laughing along, but it mattered. I started to understand that feeling bad in silence did not make me brave. Knowing better privately was not enough. I had to become the kind of person who could make cruelty less comfortable, even if it made me less comfortable too.

As I got older, I found myself closer to women, gay men, liberal-leaning men, people who did not treat softness as a crime scene. No group is morally pure. Spare us that little bedtime story. Around them, I could usually stop performing.

I could be funny without proving I was hard, soft without being treated as suspicious, political without being dragged into a contest of dominance. I could wear pink, wear jewellery, be expressive, be open, be myself without constantly managing the temperature of my masculinity.

There is a particular relief in finding people around whom your body stops bracing for the joke. You feel it in ordinary places: a kitchen, a pub booth, a dinner table, a friend’s flat. Your shoulders drop. Your voice comes back. You stop measuring every gesture before it leaves you. Tenderness no longer feels like evidence against you.

That is how I learned to separate men from the performance men inherit. One of my oldest friends is a straight man I met in my first days in Ireland. Twenty years later, he is a father I admire deeply. His masculinity has never felt like a warning. It is gentle, loyal, funny, responsible and present. He listens, apologises and cares openly without treating care as a form of humiliation.

Men like him made it impossible for me to mistake the performance for the whole story. The far right makes the opposite move.

It understands something ugly and intimate about masculinity. It understands that many men were raised inside a test they were terrified of failing. It understands male shame, male loneliness, male humiliation, male sexual insecurity and male fear of irrelevance. It keeps men trapped inside the performance and hands them enemies to blame.

In recent years, that script has only become louder. Influencers who sell hatred as self-improvement are treated as guides for lost boys. Men with enormous political power model grievance and domination, and boys around the world are expected to call it strength. There is no mystery here, just a very old sickness with a new face.

Women became too free. Feminism made you weak. Gay men made masculinity ridiculous. Migrants took your place. Liberals humiliated you. The modern world stole what was yours.

The lie is perfectly timed, and that is why it works. The far right gives men a villain before anyone else gives them a language for their pain. It takes the boy who was told not to be soft and tells him softness is the enemy. It takes the man who feels lonely and tells him women are to blame. It takes the man who feels economically powerless and tells him migrants stole his future. It takes the man who feels ashamed and gives him permission to feel angry instead.

Anger replaces grief. Resentment replaces self-knowledge. Domination replaces vulnerability.

I also do not want to let men off the hook. Too many men talk as if feminism, liberalism or modern life suddenly arrived and ruined everything. As if the world was built by some mysterious committee of women, queer people and migrants while men were innocently out for a walk. Men built much of this system. Men benefited from it. Men defended it. Men still teach boys, directly or indirectly, that shame can be escaped by putting someone else beneath them.

Women have more choices now than they once did, and even that remains a fight. The backlash to those choices reveals something ugly. A lot of male power depended on women having fewer exits.

The far right offers men a fake rescue mission. It tells them they can recover themselves by controlling others. Control women. Mock queer people. Worship strength. Despise weakness. Return to an imagined past where men knew who they were because everyone else knew their place. A masculinity that needs enemies to survive is panic in costume.

The tragedy is that many democratic, liberal and progressive spaces have still not answered this properly. Too often, they are excellent at naming what is wrong with men and much worse at offering boys something better to become.

Telling boys to avoid toxicity solves too little. Shame is not a politics. Another performance with better vocabulary will not save anyone. Boys who are told masculinity is poison and then left alone with the shame become easy prey, and that vacuum is where the far right waits.

The alternative has to be stronger than that. It has to tell boys that strength is not cruelty, protection is not ownership, friendship does not need humiliation, desire does not mean entitlement, humour does not require a victim, and fatherhood is not authority theatre but care. Courage means feeling fear and still risking status on the bench, in the corridor, at the table, because someone else’s dignity matters more.

Empathy has to be practised until it becomes stronger than the fear of losing face.

When I think about the boys I grew up around, anger is mixed with sadness. So many were trapped inside the same script. So many had no idea what to do with tenderness except mock it. So many were taught that women were mysterious, threatening, desirable and inferior all at once. So many were handed emotional illiteracy and told it was manhood.

Some became cruel, some became silent, and some became easy prey for politics that told them their pain was someone else’s fault. That is why this matters far beyond personal memory. A man taught to see equality as humiliation is easy to radicalise. A man taught to treat compromise as weakness is easy to recruit into authoritarian politics. A man convinced that women’s freedom caused his loneliness will never ask who actually profited from his isolation.

Private insecurity, organised at scale, becomes public danger.

Still, men are not doomed. More men have to speak up, not as saviours, not for applause, and not because doing the bare minimum deserves a parade. They have to speak because silence is part of the system that trained us. The boys watching now deserve better than another generation of men who notice the cruelty and look away.

I know too many good ones to believe that. I have seen male friendship be gentle. I have seen fatherhood be beautiful. I have seen men love their families without needing applause for basic decency. I have seen gay men build forms of courage that should shame half the men who call themselves strong. I have seen women carry emotional weight men refused to touch, and still insist on better for the boys coming after them.

The alternatives exist. They just rarely have the loudest microphones.

I am writing this mostly to understand it for myself: to understand the boy who knew something was wrong but did not always speak, the men who seemed so terrified of softness that they turned cruelty into a social language, and the far right that has become so fluent in that fear.

I cannot go back and be braver on every bench before a football match, in every school corridor, in every circle where laughter asked for my silence. I cannot undo every silence or rewrite the moments when I knew better and still said nothing. I can refuse to romanticise them.

The alternative begins much earlier than politics. It begins with your mates, in the school corridor, around the lunch table, in the group chat, wherever someone decides whether cruelty will be allowed to pass as humour. It begins when the girl is mocked, when the gay friend becomes a warning, when the easy laugh is waiting, and the boy who knows better feels that small, awful second before he either speaks or disappears into the group.

I know that second. I have lived inside it. I chose silence too many times, and I still carry the shame of that. But I also know this: the world does not change because men privately feel bad about the things they let happen. It changes when they finally speak up.

I stayed quiet too often. I am trying not to anymore.

Trump is not the US’s Orbán. Orbán is often invoked as the template for democratic backsliding, but Trump is something else, an evil force that moves with a velocity and unpredictability that outpaces the system’s ability to recognise, let alone restrain, what is happening.

There is no distance here. The collapse that shaped me was intimate, not theoretical. Growing up in Orbán’s Hungary meant watching public life contract, institutions wear their emptiness behind official facades. Corruption was not an event but a plague, inescapable, ordinary. Each memory threads into the next, forming the fabric of what is now recognisable elsewhere.

Expertise in US law or electoral arithmetic is not my claim to fame. Technical knowledge is not what I offer. Even at a distance, the thread of attention held firm. For many Europeans, the United States stood as the reference point for democracy itself. Over time, that sense of wonder calcified into a kind of urgency. Horror sharpens when the unthinkable becomes routine. Not a scholar of constitutions, but a witness; what remains is what erosion leaves behind.

To live through this is to lose the luxury of detachment. Innocence is replaced by vigilance. Every new headline, every constitutional twist, arrives with the force of memory and reminds me how quickly vigilance becomes necessity.

For sixteen years, Orbán has demonstrated how democracy can maintain its rituals while its core is carved out. Rituals persist, but substance recedes. Elections are held, courts convene, newspapers appear on doorsteps, ministers invoke the people, and the system continues, hollow. Around these forms, rules are altered until competition is emptied of force. Districts are redrawn, courts stripped of independence, media transferred to friendly hands. State advertising becomes a reward for loyalty, public procurement a tool for consolidating power. Look closely, and resilience is often just a habit, one that can be sharpened into a weapon.

Orbán’s innovation was managed legality: the slow conversion of democratic procedure into permanent advantage.

The comparison to Donald Trump is tempting, but it misleads. The American story is not a simple echo. Armed with the global power of the presidency, Trump transforms the threat, stretching adversaries and distorting institutions at a pace and scale Orbán could never command. The effect is amplified, and the stakes are global and even more devastating.

The phrase “America’s Orbán” once carried the weight of a warning, echoing dangers already visible in Hungary. But what once echoed now reverberates. The American landscape has shifted, and the old warning is too narrow to contain what comes next.

The year Fidesz took power is vivid: the city changed, conversations shifted. The constitution was rewritten, the courts filled with loyalists, and the media silenced or bought. The press became a tool for the party; corruption slid from scandal into background routine. Each new index, each international report, made official what was already felt: Hungary was now only “Partly Free”.

The language of democracy became a shield. Every move justified as reform or sovereignty, every loss of freedom reframed as protection. The circle of real choice shrank, even as promises multiplied. That sequence would become hauntingly familiar elsewhere.

Orbán was unambiguous. In his 2014 Tusnádfürdő speech, he promised Hungary would become “an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” Democratic rituals persisted, but the substance was quietly dismantled. There was no pretence of secrecy. The consequences travelled, spilling beyond Hungary’s borders and shaping ambitions elsewhere.

Daily life changed in ways that pressed close. A neighbour complained about a contract lost to a party official’s cousin, her voice dropping when I drew near. A friend paused before a political joke, scanning for unfamiliar faces. Expectations shifted quietly. Public money vanished to insiders, and only silence followed. Names on buildings remained, but rooms shrank, and staff became guarded. The loss was legal and personal, a slow surrender visible in my family’s warnings and hushed conversations, and in the clear sense that outside the powerful, rules no longer offered protection.

Through this lens, US events come into focus. Recognition arrives with a jolt, followed by confusion. The rhythm is unfamiliar, the scale overwhelming. Hungarian instinct reaches for a parallel, but the comparison slips. Trump does not replay Orbán’s script. He adapts it to a larger stage, amplifies it, accelerates it. The same illness enters a new body, and the pulse grows wild.

From afar, pressure arrived in unpredictable waves. Headlines tracked the tempo. Executive orders, dismissals, loyalists rewarded, lawsuits multiplying. Friends in the US described the exhaustion of never knowing which institution would be targeted next. Universities, law firms, prosecutors, civil servants, and state governments all became targets. That sense of permanent response, once so familiar in Hungary, now stretched across a continent.

I watched the headlines pile up and felt the pace quicken. Twenty-six executive orders on Trump’s first day, 143 within his first hundred. Reuters tallied at least 470 targets, people, institutions, and agencies marked for retribution. Legal battles multiplied. Lawsuits, injunctions, reversals, and emergency rulings stacked one atop another. Among friends and colleagues, fatigue settled in. Resistance, once sharp, became ritual and then habit. Some measures were blocked, others slipped through. Every independent centre felt the pressure. No one’s footing was sure.

This is governance by saturation, a method I recognise from Hungary, but executed at a different pace and intensity. The ultimate goal is exhaustion.

Orbán relied on gradual normalisation. Trump relies on overload. Orders land before the last is absorbed. Targets are named before the previous one has finished defending itself. Legal fights overlap, each unfinished before the next begins. Public attention slides from outrage into exhaustion. Bureaucrats learn that legality may not protect them. Opponents spend their energy reacting; the ground beneath them always shifts.

Trump performs domination in public. Legal limits are recast as corruption. Institutional independence becomes a conspiracy. Prosecutors are enemies, judges obstacles, journalists liars, universities ideological nests, civil servants agents of a hostile state.

At a 2023 rally, Trump told supporters: “I am your retribution”. In a Fox News town hall the same year, he was asked whether he would abuse power, and he answered no, “except for day one”. Democracies treat such lines as performance until they become policy. Political language gives permission. It tells supporters what may be done in their name, officials what loyalty will be rewarded, and opponents what kind of state they face.

Orbán gave illiberalism a doctrine, a strategy for democratic backsliding in Hungary. Trump gives it velocity and reach, using US power to amplify the risk far beyond its origin. The danger is not imitation but an escalation.

I have watched democratic erosion unfold in Hungary, seen its lessons misread as provincial until they returned in amplified form from Washington. My friends in Budapest felt the sting as Orbán blocked EU measures; in Brussels, diplomats whispered about the shifting tide.

Hungary’s influence is bounded; the US’s is not. The decisions of its president ripple across continents.

For Hungarians, distant power is never distant. Unease settled quickly in Budapest whenever Washington’s posture changed, uncertainty trickling down to everyday life.

When Trump turns diplomacy into barter and grievance into policy, reverberations are felt in real time. Warning sirens sound in NATO, in Kyiv, in Budapest alike.

America’s systems are stronger, but not immune. Technicalities — district maps, court rulings — shape the field long before the public arrives. Waking up to find the contest already decided elsewhere is a familiar experience.

The world is improvising its defence, but history records what happens when vigilance lapses. The differences are real, but so are the dangers.

Courts can block unlawful orders while absorbing repeated attacks. Judges issue rulings but face intimidation. Law firms win cases yet still receive warnings that representing the wrong client may trigger government retaliation. Universities defend academic freedom while fighting funding pressure. Stories from civil servants, those who upheld the law and still found themselves purged, sidelined, or quietly replaced, do not fade. Plaques and titles on doors remained, yet the air in the corridors grew cautious, voices lower, trust thinner. Each assault left institutions standing in name, but something essential slipped away: the quiet faith that a boundary could still be held. There is always a moment when belief gives out.

Now, the US is viewed through the prism of those memories. Freedom House still calls the United States Free, but the decline is visible to anyone who has learned to read the signs. The V-Dem reports reveal the same patterns: indicators of liberal democracy falling sharply, numbers that trace a direction all too familiar.

Electoral manipulation, often dismissed as technical, remains one of the most consequential moves in the silent unravelling of democracy. In Hungary, district maps became the province of specialists, even as they quietly tilted the contest. Boundaries were redrawn, campaign rules adjusted, public media leaned toward the government, and state resources amplified one side. When voting day arrived, outcomes felt preordained. That morning-after feeling of futility, the realisation that the loss came long before the ballot, became all too familiar.

Across the Atlantic, the United States has not yet reached that level of distortion. Elections remain genuinely competitive; direct comparisons risk simplification.

By 2025, escalation forced itself into the open. News from Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina reported that Republican officials were pushing new maps to lock in power, while California Democrats responded in parallel. Representation became a technical battlefield. Voters, once the heart of democracy, became obstacles to be arranged and neutralised. The feeling was all too familiar.

Texas is the proof. Officials redrew the map to flip five Democratic seats. Watching the Supreme Court allow Trump’s objectives to advance through redistricting, I felt horror and disgust. The decision revealed how easily a pillar of democracy can be weakened through procedure. The Court let the map stand, citing timing. The language was procedural. The effect was unambiguous: district lines shift before a vote is cast.

I know why the Hungarian example matters. I lived through the slow realisation that the greatest damage to democracy often comes from instruments that sound procedural until the moment they decide everything. I remember conversations after elections, friends, neighbours, parents, realising that the rules around the vote had determined the outcome before a single ballot was cast. A map, I saw, could be an act of political force. A timing rule could decide who was heard. The rituals of democracy continued, but fairness slipped further away with each cycle. This lesson became personal long before it became theoretical.

The $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponisation Fund sits at the heart of this new logic. Even Senate Republicans worry it will become a slush fund for loyalists. Accountability is recast as persecution. Prosecution becomes victimhood. Political loyalty becomes a claim on public money.

Retaliation moves from rhetoric into institutional design. “Lawfare” ceases to be a slogan and becomes an account line. The state begins to create mechanisms through which loyalists, defendants, allies, and self-described victims of government can be compensated for their proximity to the leader’s grievance.

Hungary is the earlier version. I watched enrichment become routine, the legal system drift into sleep. Impunity was engineered through loyal prosecutors, captured press, state advertising, and public procurement. Under Trump, the forms differ: settlements, funds, commissions, lawsuits, grievance media. The principle is unchanged. Power defines who is a victim, who is owed, and which acts of accountability must be called abuse.

Law remains visible, its moral force under attack. A conviction becomes proof of persecution. A prosecution becomes evidence of conspiracy. A person punished by the legal system is recast as someone owed money by the state. The leader is defendant and accuser at once, citizen and exception in the same body.

This is the US variant: impunity through loyalty, legal spectacle, grievance converted into public money.

Trump’s power also operates through the party remade around personal loyalty. The defeat of Thomas Massie in Kentucky, orchestrated by Trump’s endorsement, served as a warning to other dissenters.

The lesson is unmistakable. Dissent carries a price. Independence can be made electorally fatal. The party does not require formal purges when the primary system, campaign money, presidential endorsement, and public humiliation do the work.

Orbán’s party discipline operated through state media, public contracts, party hierarchy, and access to patronage. Trump operates through a looser but ferocious ecosystem of endorsements, money, media attention, and threats. The effect converges: legislators learn to anticipate the leader’s anger, and ambition adjusts before coercion is required.

Authoritarian politics requires enemies. Enemies simplify the moral universe. They turn complexity into threat, loyalty into duty.

Groups targeted as threats shift with circumstance: journalists, academics, and election officials. This is not mere negative campaigning. It is the reorganisation of public life around threat.

Once retaliation becomes a governing principle, independence begins to look like sabotage. Journalism is recast as conspiracy. Courts become traps. Prosecutors become enemies. Civil servants become traitors in waiting. Universities become hostile territory. Migrants become proof of invasion. Political opposition becomes evidence that the nation has been stolen.

The leader then occupies every role at once: victim, ruler, prosecutor, witness, judge, redeemer. Every investigation proves persecution. Every court order proves corruption. Every protest proves treason. Every defeat proves that the system itself must be cleansed.

I have listened as the language of democracy is turned upside down. I remember hearing friends of mine, once supporters of independent courts and journalism, suddenly accused of betraying the nation. I saw how those who defended the guardrails of democracy were recast as enemies, while the leader who attacked those limits spoke as if only he could embody the will of the people. Each speech, each slogan, twisted meaning until it became hard to tell the difference between democracy and its opposite. I felt the confusion and anger that came when words lost their weight.

Orbán’s version is ideological, state-centred. Trump’s is personal, theatrical. Both point toward the same destination: pluralism is rendered illegitimate, and only the leader’s side is permitted to stand for the nation.

Trump and Orbán should not be treated as identical figures. Orbán is disciplined. Trump is chaotic. Orbán’s system is complete. Trump’s project is unstable. Orbán used a parliamentary supermajority to embed loyalists across the state. Trump uses executive force, spectacle, party submission, and constant conflict. Orbán’s Hungary is the mature form of illiberal capture. Trump’s America is the stress test of a much larger system.

These differences sharpen the comparison.

Orbán shows how democratic capture hardens over time. Trump shows how quickly a leader can test a system’s strength when every restraint is treated as an enemy. One offers the architecture of consolidated illiberalism. The other delivers the shockwave of attempted domination inside a superpower.

The old phrase no longer fits. It cannot contain what has happened.

Trump is not simply the US’s Orbán. He is what happens when similar instincts are fused with the American presidency: more speed, more power, more visibility, more instability, and consequences that travel at the speed of a tsunami.

Orbán is alarming as a model. Trump is alarming as an event.

Orbán taught the world that democracy could be dismantled without abolishing elections. He showed that law could be used against legality, media capture could be disguised as market change, public money could buy political loyalty, and a ruling party could turn the state into its own extension while still speaking in the name of the people.

Trump is testing whether democratic resistance can be overwhelmed by speed, noise, retaliation, and scale. The test is not over.

The danger is not that the US will simply become Hungary. It lies in treating Hungary as a local abnormality rather than a working demonstration. The techniques were visible. The vocabulary was visible. Mutual admiration was never hidden. What was missing was a state powerful enough to turn the experiment into a global shock.

The US has not fallen into Orbán’s world. The question is whether a larger and more powerful democracy can recognise the method before speed and scale do their damage. I recognise enough of it to distrust reassurance, and enough to know that recognition alone, however clear, is useless unless it galvanises judgment and action.

Hungary showed how far democratic forms can be emptied while still standing. Trump is testing how much faster the process can move when the office at the centre commands the world’s attention, its markets, its alliances, its weapons.

A small country taught the method. A superpower is testing the speed. The world is watching.

One thing is clear to me, though: if Hungary can achieve regime change after sixteen years, then no captured democracy is too far gone to fight back.

I know readers will see this differently. I hope to collect more experiences of democratic erosion for a follow-up essay.

The map was drawn to obey.

For years, it did. Hungary’s electoral system was recalibrated, weighted, and polished until it could pass for democracy from a distance while serving a different master up close. The largest party was rewarded. Fragmentation was punished. Rural strength translated into parliamentary dominance. Single-member constituencies bore the system’s weight. Pluralities became supermajorities. Fidesz received what every long-ruling party eventually mistakes for fate: a map that seemed to know its owner.

Then the voters moved.

April 2026 broke the pattern. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won 53.2 per cent of the vote and 141 of Hungary’s 199 seats, securing a constitutional supermajority. Turnout reached 79.56 per cent, the highest in Hungary’s modern democratic history. Fidesz, after sixteen years in power, was left with 52 seats. The collapse was most visible at district level: Fidesz’s single-member constituency victories fell from 87 in 2022 to just 10 in 2026. Tisza claimed the ground that once secured Fidesz’s hold.

This is the logic of engineered democracy. Rules built to serve power do not inspire loyalty. They deliver outcomes. A system designed to favour one party can, under enough pressure, become ruthlessly available to another.

Fidesz engineered a country of splintered opponents and reliable strongholds. Tisza arrived as a single, credible national force. Reality refused the script.

Orbán lost because the ground beneath his rule shifted. High turnout swept the country. Opposition forces that had spent years scattering themselves found a common vehicle. Rural anger sharpened. Economic exhaustion deepened. A challenger who spoke the regime’s language turned private discontent into public momentum. Moral outrage had long circled the system. Numbers, geography, fatigue, and strategy finally broke through.

The system did not break from guilt, but rather misfired under pressure.

Gerrymandering is clever until the ground shifts beneath it.

Ingredients: One Rigged Map, One Tired Country, One Opposition That Finally Stopped Splitting Itself

Hungary’s electoral system is complicated enough to send even political obsessives toward the garden. The essentials are these: Parliament has 199 seats. Of those, 106 are elected in single-member constituencies, and 93 come from national party lists. Constituency races are winner-takes-all. The list system also includes compensation mechanisms that can reward votes beyond the basic party-list tally.

In practice, the party that wins constituencies efficiently receives a parliamentary windfall. Geography is rewarded as much as popularity.

After 2010, Orbán’s government rewrote much of Hungary’s electoral framework. Parliament was shrunk. Boundaries were redrawn. The majoritarian element gained force. Compensation rules gave the dominant party additional advantages. In 2014, Fidesz-KDNP won 96 of 106 single-member constituencies and secured a two-thirds majority with 44.87 per cent of the party-list vote. Such a system does not need to ban opposition parties. It merely needs them to be divided, demoralised, and poorly distributed.

For years, Fidesz had exactly that.

The old opposition had the evidence: corruption, state capture, propaganda, the quiet vandalism of public services, constitutional sabotage carried out with bureaucratic calm. Yet politics is not a courtroom. Proof does not deliver power. The opposition splintered, rebranded, mistrusted itself, and too often spoke in a register that reassured only those already persuaded.

Fidesz did more than gerrymander districts. It gerrymandered its opponent in the public imagination: urban, fractured, stamped as liberal, designed for mockery, presumed too narrow to govern.

Péter Magyar broke that assumption.

Step One: Let Him Build the Tilted Table

Orbán designed the structure tilted just enough for every close contest to slide his way.

For more than a decade, the system converted Fidesz’s political geography into parliamentary dominance. Rural constituencies mattered. Fragmented opposition mattered. Small shifts in votes could produce large shifts in seats, especially while Fidesz remained the largest force and its opponents divided the rest among themselves.

Authoritarian engineering rarely announces itself as theft. It arrives as reform: fewer MPs, simpler rules, new boundaries, technical language, institutional tidiness. Each change can be defended in isolation. The sum is where the damage lives.

When the work is done, the rituals remain. Ballots are printed. Candidates campaign. Television studios host debates about strategy. International observers call the contest competitive, then bury the caveats in footnotes so thick they require their own shelving.

The system has learned to lean.

For Fidesz, the arrangement had a clean internal logic. If the opposition splintered, Fidesz won. If Fidesz held the countryside, Fidesz won. If voters believed change was impossible, Fidesz won before the first ballot fell.

Such was the formula.

Then one ingredient changed.

Step Two: End the Fragmentation

Magyar was not a perfect politician, which was useful, since perfection was neither available nor required. He became effective in a way the old opposition had forgotten.

He addressed more than one Hungary at once. He did not demand that former Fidesz voters become liberals. He did not build his campaign on ideological display. He spoke of corruption that emptied pockets, hospitals that emptied hope, schools that failed, wages that shrank, dignity that vanished, and a state dressed in patriotic ceremony while run as a run-down private estate.

People listened.

Fidesz’s system thrived when voters scattered across party lines, old grievances, and inherited identities. Tisza offered them a single vehicle. It gave disillusioned Fidesz voters a way out that did not require confession.

Coalitions grow when betrayal is named, and people are given a way to set it right, rather than by shaming voters.

This was one of Magyar’s most brilliant political moves. He made switching sides feel less like confession and more like correction.

The old opposition often behaved as if voters had to purchase its entire worldview before they could help defeat Orbán. Magyar was more practical. He focused on shared anger. He left disagreements intact and made it easier for those who had once kept Fidesz in power to join the anti-Fidesz majority.

That shift made a system built on fragmentation far less effective.

Fidesz had prepared for a familiar opponent: divided, apologetic, urban, easy to push into cultural corners. Tisza was harder to categorise. Magyar came from the broader Fidesz world. He spoke in a national register. He could talk about corruption without sounding like an NGO report read in a conference room with cold coffee. He did not seem to despise the voters he needed.

The simple things in politics are too often mistaken for radical acts.

Step Three: Reimagine Old Strongholds

The map was drawn for a country Fidesz still believed it owned.

This may have been the deepest miscalculation. Electoral engineering is a wager on time as much as space. It assumes tomorrow’s voters will resemble yesterday’s closely enough for the boundaries to hold. Fidesz’s system was built for a Hungary where Budapest seethed with dissent, the countryside remained loyal, the opposition splintered, and disillusioned Fidesz voters had nowhere to go.

By 2026, that country had changed shape.

Magyar’s campaign did not wait for urban anger to reach critical mass. It moved outward. He travelled through towns and villages long treated as Fidesz property, or as lost ground by an opposition resigned to defeat. His countryside tour did not conjure miracles. Politics is not sorcery, but the tour sent a national signal.

It showed that Tisza was more than a Budapest uprising with better optics.

It also carried a warning to Fidesz. Rural Hungary was not property. It could be persuaded, engaged, courted, and moved. For a ruling party that had spent years treating whole regions as captive extensions of itself, that was dangerous.

Magyar’s travels split the government’s fantasy from the country’s reality. In Hungary’s small towns and villages, life was not a propaganda film. People woke to potholes, shuttered clinics, and paychecks that barely lasted the week. Buses vanished from schedules, homes turned cold, children slipped away toward other lives. The government conjured foreign enemies, while reality lingered in empty plates, overdue bills, and the hush left behind by those who had gone.

Orbán hunted for enemies abroad because facing the country at home would have meant facing the record of his own rule.

By 2026, Orbán seemed remote from that country. He ruled from the Castle District, from the Karmelita, from a stage set of national grandeur that pushed ordinary Hungary to the margins. After long enough in power, leaders stop meeting the country's needs. They receive summaries. In time, the summary is more comforting than the place.

Magyar offered a sharp contrast. He was not yet insulated by power. He showed up where the old opposition arrived too late or not at all, listening, provoking, arguing, and making himself unavoidable.

The map did not find justice; it simply became obsolete. Its lines endured, but the country moved on.

Step Four: Let Reality Overtake Propaganda

Propaganda is powerful, but daily experience edits stubbornly. People stop believing politicians long before they stop believing their own eyes.

For years, Orbán’s media system helped him define the emotional landscape of Hungarian politics. It named the threats, selected the enemies, and explained every failure as the work of someone else. Brussels was to blame. Soros was to blame. Migrants were to blame. Ukraine was to blame. Ursula von der Leyen was to blame. The outside world was always guilty, which was convenient because it did not run Hungarian hospitals.

This worked for a long time. Too long. Fear is politically productive. So is resentment. So is the constant suggestion that only the ruling party stands between the nation and humiliation.

Repetition extracts a price. After sixteen years, the script was too familiar and reality too insistent. Inflation, wages, healthcare, schools, local neglect: these were daily conditions. A government can survive a scandal while people still associate it with competence and protection. Once that bargain erodes, the same propaganda that once sounded like authority begins to sound like evasion.

Here Magyar’s campaign found its opening. It did not need to persuade every voter that every institution mattered in the abstract. It needed to connect the country’s condition to the structure of power. Corruption was the missing doctor, the exhausted teacher, the delayed project, the stagnant wage, the connected billionaire, the public contract circling inside a closed world.

The message was no longer only that Fidesz had lied.

The lies had acquired a price.

Step Five: Make Corruption Personal

The word “corruption” weakens with repetition. Everyone invokes it. Everyone denies it. Everyone claims to oppose it. It hangs over public life permanently.

Magyar’s advantage was that he could make it less atmospheric. As a former insider, he did not need to describe Orbán’s system as something discovered from the outside. He could speak as someone who knew its wiring. Voters who once tuned out opposition warnings listened differently when the accusation came from someone who had lived inside the system and knew its habits.

Politics rots when words are bent out of shape, when theft is recast as virtue and obedience is dressed as patriotism.

A stolen state is hard to picture. A hospital without staff is not. A missing teacher is not. A delayed bridge is not. A billionaire enriched by public contracts is not. The political task is to show how one produces the other. Public money becomes private wealth. Private wealth becomes political protection. Political protection becomes another four years of patriotism recited by those standing near the till.

Stories about figures like Lőrinc Mészáros gave corruption a face. The details were almost comic: Orbán’s childhood friend, a former gas fitter from Felcsút, transformed into Hungary’s richest man, with a fortune built on public procurement contracts. Átlátszó had long documented the scale of the Mészáros empire’s success in public tenders. In another era, this might have become one more scandal. In 2026, it read as evidence. The country had not merely been misgoverned. It had been plundered.

Magyar gave corruption an address. And that address led to the Castle District in Budapest.

His insider status gave him credibility. Fidesz could call him a traitor, opportunist, narcissist, or whatever the day required. It could not make him sound foreign. He knew the system’s language. He knew the emotional codes of the right. He knew how Fidesz spoke of nation, order, family, sovereignty, betrayal. He could accuse Orbán not of being too Hungarian, but of betraying Hungary.

That is a more dangerous argument.

Step Six: Let the Trap Spring Back

Majoritarian electoral systems amplify whoever wins the right pattern of votes.

Fidesz discovered this at the worst possible moment.

The electoral system, which still functioned, had simply ceased to serve Fidesz.

That is the central twist of Hungary’s 2026 election. Fidesz was damaged by the very system it built. A fairer system might have handed Tisza a victory, but not this landslide. The distortions remained. Only the beneficiary changed.

Tisza’s 53.2 per cent of the vote became 141 seats. Fidesz’s 38.6 per cent became 52. In the single-member constituencies, Fidesz fell from dominance to near-erasure. These numbers are evidence of reversal. The mechanism that had once turned Fidesz’s advantages into constitutional dominance helped turn Tisza’s breakthrough into a supermajority.

The trap did not become just. It became portable. The rules survived their maker.

This is what makes the election more than a story of public anger or opposition renewal. It is a story of authoritarian overconfidence ossifying into institutional design. Fidesz built rules on the assumption that it would remain the largest, best-organised, most geographically efficient force in Hungarian politics. It assumed the countryside would hold. It assumed the opposition would divide. It assumed propaganda would keep alternatives suspect. It assumed former Fidesz voters would never find a way out that they could live with.

Then those assumptions failed together.

The result was the system’s logic turning on itself. Hungary’s electoral architecture had long rewarded the party best able to dominate single-member districts. In 2026, that party was Tisza.

The simplest explanation is that Orbán constructed an uneven framework. For years, everything slid toward Fidesz. Then Tisza gathered enough force, and the imbalance completed the work.

Some will call this poetic justice. Constitutions require clearer clarity.

Final Step: Break the System After It Serves You

The real threat after toppling an authoritarian regime is that the system of control remains, waiting for new hands.

Every party that inherits a crooked system faces the same temptation. Keep the spoils, and democracy begins to rot again. Temporary fixes harden into permanent privilege. The promise to heal the state mutates into the urge to possess it. Hungary cannot afford another version of that story.

Magyar and Tisza seem aware of the weight they carry. Magyar has spoken of limiting the prime minister’s term to eight years. The new government talks of transparency, accountability, anti-corruption reform, and the restoration of checks and balances. These are hopeful signals. These signals are also very rare and strange in recent Hungarian politics.

The gap between intention and law is where many political hopes quietly go up in smoke.

Hope is cheap. The public needs results, not assurances. Checks and balances are not ornaments to be restored at leisure. They must be written into law while Tisza still has the power to limit itself.

The real test is whether a party makes abuse harder, including for itself.

Orbán’s Hungary showed how quickly a constitutional majority can become a licence for permanent rule. Magyar’s Hungary must break up power, restore institutions, and ensure the next election is fair. Unfair systems do not become just because new people win them. They breed new abuses unless they are broken.

Fidesz’s defeat was not only about electoral mechanics. Record turnout changed the game. Economic fatigue weakened the regime. Corruption became impossible to ignore. Magyar’s insider status disrupted the narrative. The propaganda machine lost force. Independent media and civil society shaped the environment, though this is not chiefly their story. This is the story of a system built to preserve power, and of what happens when the country it was built around moves.

Fidesz assumed fear would mobilise. It assumed the countryside would hold. It assumed the opposition would remain divided. It assumed propaganda could keep blaming outsiders, even as daily life contradicted the script. It assumed the map still recognised the country.

It did not.

In the end, Orbán did not fall to myth or moral thunder. He fell to numbers, to unity, to rural revolt, to exhaustion sharpened into anger. His own ideas spun against him, and the arithmetic he trusted became his undoing. Tisza forced Hungary’s rigged numbers to speak against their designer.

Hungary’s 2026 election will be remembered for the fall of an autocrat and for exposing the limits of his imagination. Orbán conjured enemies everywhere: Brussels, Kyiv, Washington, the press, NGOs, classrooms, courtrooms, border crossings. What he did not imagine was a Hungary in which enough of his own former voters, and enough of those he had ceased to see, would move at once.

If there is a recipe, it does not comfort.

• Unite the vote without flattening the country.

• Go where the ruling party thinks ownership is automatic.

• Make corruption visible in daily life.

• Speak patriotism without handing it to thieves.

• Win enough places that the rigged rules lose their preferred owner.

• Then, before sentimentality gathers, dismantle what remains.

Tear down the old structures before nostalgia can lay flowers at their feet. Leave nothing useful for the next would-be autocrat to inherit.

The map was meant to obey.

It did.

Fidesz’s mistake was thinking it had drawn Hungary forever.

Hungary After Dark is my paid weekly dispatch from the aftermath of the Orbán era: part analysis, part political diary, part nocturnal record of what is shifting, what endures, and what the week has exposed beneath the surface. This is not a news summary. It is an attempt to chart the rooms where power is being reassembled, in a country that remains restless but hopeful even in the first days of recovery.

May 17, 2026

For the first time in years, Hungarians crossed thresholds that had been closed to them.

Government spaces once sealed off behind barriers, police lines and political choreography stood open. The break with the Orbán era was not only rhetorical. It was physical, visible and, for many people, strangely intimate. Citizens walked into places that had been made to feel distant from them, as if public power had somehow become private scenery.

This is only remarkable because the boundary between public office and private possession had been blurred for so long.

The new government opened the Karmelita and the former Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, two buildings that had become part of the visual language of exclusion. Barriers came down. Rooms were shown. Spaces were reclaimed. Péter Magyar helped remove the fencing around Orbán’s former office and said there was “no place for cordons” in Hungary after the change of regime. AP reported the moment as one of the clearest visual breaks with the previous government.

The image worked because it did not stand alone.

This week, the mood shifted in Hungary. The government turned from the emotional force of transfer to the practical work of governing. The transition left the square and entered the filing system. It became less theatrical, more administrative and far more revealing.

Magyar’s government has began opening the drawers of the public institutions it inherited.

The new government now faces ministries, emergency laws, spending obligations, command structures, media habits, international repairs and institutional routines that survived the regime that created them. This is the first movement toward real institutional change, and it is more hopeful than victory language because it is happening in the part of politics where slogans usually go to die: budgets, decrees, thresholds, files and offices.

The public does not seem to be turning away.

Recent polling shows Tisza with commanding support while Fidesz has fallen to roughly one-fifth of the full population. These are not election-night emotions. These are after-the-fact numbers, recorded after the speeches ended and governing began. A 21 Kutatóközpont poll reported by Telex put Tisza at 60 percent and Fidesz at 20 percent in the full population, while Republikon’s latest figures placed Tisza at 57 percent and Fidesz at 23 percent.

Hungarians are not only responding to the removal of Orbán. They appear to be responding to the early shape of the replacement: open public spaces, less propaganda, an end to emergency rule, and a government that at least begins by treating power as something that must be accounted for.

This is not aftermath.

It is entry.

The old regime lost, and the public is stepping into places that were previously off-limits.

Read more

Around the Karmelita, the fence had become part of the building’s meaning. It marked the edge of Viktor Orbán’s power around the former Carmelite monastery where he had placed the centre of government, high above the Danube, inside the restored theatre of Budapest’s Castle District. Below it was the city. Around it were police lines, cameras, tourists, opposition stunts, legal disputes, and the quiet daily instruction that power lived above the public, close enough to be seen and far enough to be unreachable.

On 15 May 2026, Péter Magyar personally removed fencing around the building that had served as Orbán’s office and announced that the Karmelita would be opened to the public while authorities decided on its future role, according to AP. The line he gave reporters was spare enough to survive the moment: “There is no place for cordons in Hungary after the change of regime.” It was a sentence designed to be seen as much as heard.

The act worked because the object already had a history. The former monastery had become a symbol of Orbán’s rule after being cordoned off in 2021. By the time Magyar touched the fencing, it had acquired the emotional weight of a small monument. A barrier came down around the old seat of power. A building that had long suggested distance was turned, at least for a while, into something closer to an exhibit. No captured institution had yet been rebuilt. No public contract had yet been untangled. But the new government had chosen to introduce itself through the same language Orbán had used for years: space, access, height, ritual.

Magyar seems to understand something uncomfortable about political recovery. Before people believe power has changed, they need to see it standing somewhere else.

Orbán governed Hungary through laws, loyalists, prosecutors, contracts, media ownership, emergency decrees and electoral engineering, but also through atmosphere. His power had a geography. It looked down from Castle Hill. It travelled in armoured cars. It spoke through state television studios, billboard campaigns and “national consultations” that filled the country with the government’s own questions. It rebuilt history in stone, marble and myth, then placed itself inside the scenery.

Orbán’s greatest symbolic achievement was the way public buildings came to feel as if they had owners. The monastery, the ministries, the broadcasters, the billboards, the commemorations and the stadiums carried the same quiet message. The state was not a shared instrument, but rather an estate.

The move to the Karmelita monastery gave that message architectural form. Viktor Orbán’s office moved into the former Carmelite monastery in the Buda Castle in January 2019, after leaving the Parliament building, as Átlátszó reported at the time. The building spoke before any government statement did: elevated, historic, monastic, removed from the ordinary traffic of Pest. It allowed the Orbán state to appear less like an administration than a court, settled into the old stone of national destiny.

The Castle District surrounding it became part of the same visual argument. The official National Hauszmann Programme describes the reconstruction of the Buda Castle Palace District as an effort to restore its old splendour and display the greatness of Hungarian architecture. Such language is never innocent in a country where history is so often asked to perform political labour. Restoration became more than preservation. It became a way of teaching citizens which past was authorised, which rooms mattered, and who had the right to speak from them.

In Orbán’s Hungary, architecture became political grammar. Power performed continuity, grandeur and ownership. The nation’s past had an authorised interpreter, and he worked from the hill.

Magyar’s first gestures derive their force from their placement inside that older visual system. The blue Škoda Superb, which he continued using as prime minister after his campaign tour, signalled a refusal of coronation, as reported by Brussels Signal. The car itself is not the story. Its political use is. It carries the campaign road into government and suggests that the office has not yet swallowed the man who won it. In a country where power spent years armouring itself against proximity, even a vehicle becomes part of the sentence.

The refusal to move into a government residence worked in the same register. Magyar said he would continue living in his Buda family home, according to 444. The claim was personal, since he framed the home as the place where his children live, but it also denied the palace logic of office. It suggested that becoming prime minister did not require vanishing into the private architecture of state privilege.

The Karmelita cordon remains the strongest image because it addressed Orbánism at the site where its style had become easiest to grasp. Opposition politicians had tried to dismantle the barrier before. Access restrictions had provoked legal and political fights. Protesters and police had turned the site into a recurring stage. When Magyar removed the fencing as prime minister, the act resonated because people already knew the prop, the place and the meaning.

The same logic runs through Magyar’s tours of government interiors. After showing the Karmelita and other official spaces, he posted video from the Interior Ministry building and framed it as “Pintér Sándor’s hidden 100 billion-forint luxury ministry,” according to 444. A separate report by Híradó also noted that Magyar had shown the Interior Ministry’s internal spaces in a video using the same 100 billion-forint framing.

These videos changed the meaning of the gaze. Chandeliers, staircases, restored rooms, polished corridors and expensive fittings were no longer presented as national restoration. They became evidence. This is one of Magyar’s sharper instincts: public money becomes politically volatile when it takes on a form. A number is abstract. A corridor is not. Budgets can be debated, while rooms confess. When the public sees the staircase, the wood, the doors and the furniture, the money ceases to be invisible. It takes form, and with it, consequences.

This is also where the danger begins. A palace tour can become spectacle, with each room turned into a provocation and each detail curated for effect. Transparency can harden into performance when exposure becomes a ritual rather than a discipline. Yet the gesture retains force because Orbán’s system often relied on excess becoming ordinary. Magyar’s answer is to make excess visible enough to become embarrassing again.

His first cabinet meeting at Ópusztaszer was the more complex gesture, and therefore the more revealing one. On 13 May, Telex reported that the Tisza government’s first meeting would be held at the Ópusztaszer National Heritage Park, at the Feszty Panorama. The location was chosen partly for its symbolic meaning and partly because of the drought emergency.

Ópusztaszer is one of the country’s heavy rooms of national memory. The National Memorial and Tribute Committee describes it as a national historical memorial site that preserves Árpád Feszty’s monumental panorama, The Arrival of the Hungarians, and as a place connected to Hungarian national belonging through the Árpád memorial and the memory of the millennium, according to its official description. The place is charged precisely because its history is layered with legend, painting, commemoration and politics.

A post-Orbán government could have avoided such sites, as if national memory itself had been contaminated by Fidesz. Magyar chose a harder route. He entered that symbolic terrain and treated it as contested public property. The gesture suggested that the country’s founding myths do not belong to one party, even if one party had spent years speaking through them.

That choice carries risk. National symbolism is never clean in Hungary, where history has often been refashioned as grievance, costume and weapon. Ópusztaszer can easily become another mythic stage, another attempt to dress politics in ancient scenery. Yet the decision reveals Magyar’s deeper method. He is not trying to strip Hungarian politics of symbols. He is trying to rewrite their meaning, and their connection to ordinary Hungarians.

His early symbolism works through reversal without needing to announce itself as such. The hill is answered by movement back toward the city. The fence is answered by access. Heritage interiors are answered by public inspection. State messaging is answered by state exposure. The national past is answered by an attempt to reopen its ownership.

If these gestures are to become more than a rearrangement of images, they need to be followed by institutions that can survive without choreography: public media that can criticise the government without punishment, prosecutors who do not wait for political permission, contracts that remain legible after the lights are off. The first acts of visibility matter. The harder task is to build a state that does not depend on one man’s livestream to prove it belongs to the public.

Dismantling that system is essential, but the method will matter as much as the result. A government that moves too personally or too theatrically risks replacing one executive habit with another. The test is not whether Magyar can denounce propaganda or stage cathartic reckonings. The test is whether he can build rules that would restrain him, too.

This is the difficult part of democratic repair. Symbols open a path that institutions must then make safe. They give politics the shape of a scene, a gesture, a photograph. They let people feel change before they know whether it has settled into law. Sometimes that feeling is necessary, the first breath after suffocation. It can also become a substitute for patience, procedure and the institutional tedium democracy requires in heroic quantities.

Magyar’s early strength is that he appears to understand the symbolic grammar of Orbánism better than most of Orbán’s opponents did. For years, many critics described the system in legal, economic or moral terms, all of which were true. Yet Orbán’s rule also worked on the body. It taught citizens where to stand, where to stop, what to look at, what to ignore, which buildings were theirs only in theory, and which version of history they were expected to inhabit.

Power is most effective when it stops looking like power and starts looking like the natural arrangement of the world. That kind of rule cannot be undone by law alone. It also has to be interrupted visually.

A democracy must be felt as public before it can be trusted as legal. People need to see the door open, the files on the table, the room where decisions were made, the hill losing some of its height. Politics should not be reduced to aesthetics, although Hungary’s recent history shows how thoroughly aesthetics had already become politics.

The direction of Magyar’s gestures gives these first days their charge. Orbán used symbolism to elevate power, protect it, surround it with history and make it feel inevitable. Magyar is using symbolism to lower power, expose it, return it to public view and make it feel answerable. The open question is whether answerability can survive after the first images have done their work.

Magyar understands that power must be made visible again, and that the state must be seen before it can be trusted. Visibility, however, is only the beginning. The records still have to be opened. The money still has to be followed. The institutions still have to learn how to breathe without waiting for a signal from the hill.

A democracy is restored when public access is no longer a performance, but a reality. The room belongs to the public when transparency is embedded in practice, not staged for the camera.

Yet the first images matter. They have returned to Hungarians something withheld for years: the sense that the state can be approached, not as a distant authority to be deciphered or endured, but as a place that can be entered, questioned, claimed. No longer worshipped from below or glimpsed behind police lines, the state stands open to scrutiny. Magyar’s promise remains provisional, but the atmosphere is unmistakably hopeful. Crowds have cheered him, and many Hungarians are embracing his openness and candor. It will be measured by law, by institutions, by the slow tests of money and time. For now, the direction is clear. Power is descending from its height, and Hungarians are moving to meet it with genuine enthusiasm.

Before the story begins, you will see a video of Ibolya Oláh singing “Magyarország.” I have included it because the song’s ache and resilience echo the spirit of this moment and the mood of these pages. When it was sung in Kossuth Square, it became more than music. Thousands joined in, gratitude and grief rising in the crowd, moments thick with memory. The song holds what words cannot always reach. Its presence here is both tribute and invitation: to feel Hungary’s story as it is being lived.

On election night, I held my breath. The phone’s cold light cut through the dark, a silent witness to what was unfolding. Each alert landed with the force of a blow, until I silenced them, hands unsteady.

I had been writing since dawn, caught in that fugue where the cursor blinks and the body forgets itself. By the third cup of coffee, caffeine had surrendered, but stubbornness kept me at the desk. The interruptions arrived quietly at first: a like, a comment, the faint hum of distant attention. Then came the shares, the tags, the messages from people whose work had shaped how I understood politics, democracy, and the slow corrosion of public life under authoritarian power.

The phone ceased to be a device. It pulsed in my hand, restless, lighting up again and again. Something had broken through the membrane. I was exposed to more than pixels, more than the usual distance. The boundary between observer and participant thinned.

A few months earlier, almost no one was reading my work. That is what made what followed improbable.

I began this project in the midst of chaos. My health faltered. My family bent under the hardship of life. Some mornings, exhaustion pressed on my chest before my eyes opened, the news already gathering like a storm at the edge of the day. Hungary’s pull was relentless, reaching through the screen. Each clipped speech, each small absurdity, was not just noise but a pulse, a sign of deeper disturbance beneath the surface.

I did not write from composure or certainty. I wrote between doctor’s appointments, anxious nights, broken sleep, carrying too much, feeling split. Part of me wanted to look away, knowing how much politics had already taken from so many. Yet something in me refused to leave. Hungary was changing, and I needed to pour out fear, hope, anger, and the fierce, stubborn love for a country that drains and claims you at once.

I was drawn by that possibility, and angered by how difficult it was to follow Hungary properly in English. Too often, Hungary appeared only as a prop for someone else’s argument: Orbán, reduced to parable; the country, flattened into a cautionary tale; democracy, shrunk to a line in an op-ed. The living place was nothing like these exports. It was unruly, bittersweet, absurd, mortifying, sometimes comic — a country that refused to fit inside anyone’s narrative.

That was the ground I wanted to write from.

There was no launch plan. I wrote between work, worry, poor sleep, and whatever energy I could steal from the day. If one or two people read, it would be enough. If a single person understood Hungary more clearly, or shared a piece, or saw their own country with sharper eyes, the work would have already surpassed what I hoped.

But on election night, the quiet thing I had been building was no longer quiet.

Now, improbably, the work has found its way to more than a thousand subscribers across 57 countries and 48 US states. Most are in the United States, then the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Hungary, and, places I never imagined. The numbers still feel unreal, sometimes even cold. They tremble beneath my gratitude, a reminder of how quickly stories become data, how easily closeness evaporates into statistics. But the dashboard does not haunt me. What matters are the moments that pulse with honest support, for democracy and for Magyarország. Magyarország: heavier on the tongue, charged with memory, history, language, and wounds that persist with love. In that word, the old longing merges with something like hope, as if democracy and Magyarország reached for each other briefly, once more.

A reader told me they had not known much about Hungary before, but the writing made the country legible. That resonated with me. Hungary’s recent history has been hidden in plain sight, wrapped in official language, softened by slogans, buried under daily noise until the obvious became hard to name. I wanted to write against that mess, to let readers feel the country from the inside out, the anxiety, the slow-burning weariness, the strangeness of daily life. I wanted readers to sense the moments when laughter survived, not in spite of pressure, but because surrendering to heaviness would have been too much.

One message said my work moved someone politically, sometimes to tears—then made them smile. They told me it gave them hope.

I almost flinched.

Hope often sounds too pale, too thin, too untouched by suffering. Sometimes it is sold as a gentle lie, laid over a raw wound before the bleeding has stopped. That kind of hope is useless to me.

But after reading those words, something shifted inside me. I understand the word differently now.

Hope is what remains when you see the danger entire, yet refuse to let darkness claim every corner of the story. It is not blindness. It is the refusal to surrender the last light.

For example, one message came from a reader involved in pro-European organising in the UK, who wrote that he wanted to help in any way he could. Soon, that message became more than a message.

Reading these messages, I felt myself changing. At first, it was only me and the blank page, a message in a bottle sent into the digital dark out of uncertainty and habit. Over time, the distance narrowed.

Beyond any one message, what moved me was the conversation: the questions, comments, corrections, and private notes from people trying to understand Hungary from afar or from those whose lives had already been touched by the same system.

One early supporter carries Hungary’s democratic memory like a quietly tended flame. He stood at the country’s second beginning, piecing together what could be salvaged from the ruins of communism, not from nostalgia, but from a sense of unfinished duty. Over time, we have drifted into friendship. There is still a Guinness waiting in Budapest with my name on it. Through him, I have seen how love of country can be generous, stubborn, patient, and defiantly alive.

Other messages came from unexpected places: politicians, journalists, academics, organisers, and readers driven by the need for someone to name Hungary as it is, unsanded and real.

More than a few said I was giving shape to a gap they’d felt but never managed to name. They wanted to understand Orbán’s Hungary, how bad things had become, how the damage had been normalised, and how a country could still find its way to a different outcome.

Many, especially in the United States, saw something of their own country in it.

That has been the most striking part of this audience. Most subscribers are in the United States. I do not think they are reading about Hungary as a distant curiosity. They recognise the pattern: institutions hollowed out, language stripped of meaning, corruption settling in, fatigue where persuasion once lived.

They see Hungary as a warning with fingerprints still visible.

That tells me something urgent about the readers who gather here, especially those from the United States. In one of the darkest times they can recall, they reach outward, refusing to shut down or give up. They keep reading, searching for independent voices. They seek insight from elsewhere, even from a distant, battered country, because they know, deep down, that democracy cannot breathe in sealed rooms.

That, to me, is real patriotism.

It lives in that restless willingness to learn, to ache for answers about your own country. It is not always loud. Sometimes it is someone reading by the brittle blue light of a phone, long after midnight, unable to let go, urgency wrapped in fatigue, searching for the moment when the ground began to shift. I know that reading. It is not abstract. It is anxious, bruised, half-determined to look away, yet knowing this is the exact shadow where the worst forces thrive. They bloom when we stop looking. After two degrees in politics and years slogging through the relentless churn, the noise, the smirking confidence, the endless reward for shameless spectacle, the daily theatre of lies performed by faces immune to embarrassment, politics became a windowless chamber. The air thickened with every news cycle. I left, lungs burning for something breathable.

But the people who read this work have reminded me: fatigue is not the whole story.

Authoritarianism, when it comes, is not abstract. It finds its way into the private architecture of daily life: the dinner table, the corridor at work, the hushed family chat, the hesitation before honesty. It settles in the small negotiations, the self-edits, the silences people learn to survive. It teaches them to save themselves by shrinking. It wants people tired, suspicious, alone, embarrassed by their own hope, exposed when they tell the truth.

Once that exhaustion settles in, democracy weakens in quieter ways. People stop expecting honesty. They stop asking certain questions aloud. They lower their voices in restaurants, change the subject in family chats, measure a colleague’s face before answering too directly. The damage arrives before anyone names it. What I learned from you is that people are harder to empty than power imagines.

Even in dark times, people keep finding each other. Sometimes it is not dramatic. It is someone sending a piece to a friend with a line: This is what I have been trying to explain. It is a reader leaving a comment because the thought would not let them go. It is a message from someone in another country, with a kind of exhausted recognition, saying they have seen this before or fear they are seeing it now. It is the stubborn work of checking, sharing, asking, refusing to let the official version be the only one left standing.

That is how loneliness begins to loosen. Not all at once, not with speeches or heroic poses, but in the small relief of being understood. Someone else saw the same thing. Someone else noticed the lie, the trick, the cruelty hidden under polite language. Someone else had also been carrying the sick feeling that reality was being rearranged in public, and everyone was being asked to clap. From there, courage does not arrive as thunder. It arrives as permission, a little borrowed nerve, a little less fear. One person speaks more clearly, and another finds their voice beside it.

This is why facts, real facts, checked facts, matter so much.

In Hungary, facts have too often been treated as things to bend, bury, rename, or exhaust people with until they stop looking. That is why I try to do the work properly, even when the news is moving fast and everyone wants a clean answer at once. I read the article, then the documents behind them. I check the date. I check the number. I hunt down the original quote, wary of the versions already mangled and spun by social media’s appetite. I am still learning, always learning. But I know this: in a place where public language has been bent and battered for years, even small slips and shortcuts become part of the harm.

Perfection is a mirage. I have stumbled. I once published the wrong number, fixed it, then added a note for all to see. Admitting fault is never comfortable; no one relishes pinning a small flag to their own mistake for the crowd to notice. But that discomfort teaches its own lesson: readers are owed honesty, even when the truth includes the repair.

But I think people were looking for more than facts when they found my work. They were looking for clarity. Direction. Hope. A way to hold together what they were seeing without being swallowed by it. The sense that someone else was still awake in the room.

It finds its way to people who have brokered uneasy truces with hopelessness, those who have trained themselves to expect less, simply because expecting more hurts too much. Then a country defies its assigned script, and resignation falters.

Hungary cannot be copied. No country can be peeled from its own past and sold as a manual. Each place grows its own scars, strikes its own bargains, invents its own private dialect for surrender. But Hungary has lessons to offer. It exposes how the official version is sometimes the flimsier one. It shows that systems built to appear eternal are often little more than habitual beliefs. It proves that citizens conditioned to silence can return to the streets, carrying their children, their jokes, their fragile hope, their weariness, and tilt a nation’s course. The script is not unbreakable.

That, to me, is the heart of patriotism.

I have seen it in the photos and flickering messages from Hungary these last weeks: crowds spilling into public squares without the clenched jaw of nationalist spectacle, people grinning as if rediscovering neighbours after a long winter, dancers moving as though joy itself were an act of protest. Democracy was not a distant concept. It was flesh and laughter and stubborn patience, a gathering of bodies, voices, songs, and the odd, bright courage of those who refused to let humiliation be the last word.

In its own quiet register, it was a revolution. That, too, is what I’ve learned from you.

People are not giving up.

I see it in Hungary, where people who were taught to lower their voices have begun to speak in public again. I see it in the United States, where readers recognize the old methods of pressure and distortion and keep searching for words sharp enough to cut through them. I see it in Britain, in Europe, and in all the forgotten places where people continue to read, organize, argue, document, remember, and refuse the official story, even when the darkness around them has learned to sound like common sense.

History is not kind. Democracy does not arrive to save itself at the last minute. It has to be carried by people who are tired, imperfect, frightened, busy, distracted, and still willing to do one useful thing, then another.

When I began, I thought I was writing about Hungary.

In some ways, I was.

But I was also learning from the people who came here to read. I learned that facts can steady people when public life is designed to disorient them. I learned that clarity can become courage. I learned that inspiration does not have to be naive. Sometimes it is simply the sight of other people still caring.

And I learned that a place like this can form in the middle of a dark time without pretending the darkness is not real.

Thank you for reminding me what democratic life looks like before it becomes a law, a government, a reform, or a result.

It looks like people asking questions.

It looks like people refusing loneliness.

It looks like people caring about countries that are not their own because they understand that democracy is never only someone else’s problem.

It looks like readers in 57 countries and 48 US states finding their way to a story about Hungary and recognising something urgent inside it.

It looks like attention.

And in an age when so much power depends on exhaustion, attention is not passive.

It is where people begin again: eyes open, one another in view, reality still held between them as something worth defending.