Caution lingers, even now.

Orbán has lost. Elation is unmistakable, yet sixteen years of disappointment have trained my instincts to distrust even the clearest numbers.

A note before you begin.

This started as a short piece about my feelings since the election, exactly a week ago. It is now 3,500 words. I have been staring at it for days trying to cut it down, which is, I should tell you, the thing I am worst at. I can write 800 words before breakfast. Removing a single sentence takes me the better part of an afternoon and a small emotional crisis. My editor, if I had one, would be in despair.

I recommend reading this in parts. There are roughly three of them: the personal, the political, and the part where I catastrophise about everything from Barcelona while pretending to be measured. You can stop between any of them, make a coffee, stare out of the window, and return. The essay will wait. It has nowhere to be. It is already far too long.

If you do read it all the way through, thank you. I hope it earns the time.

I

For as long as I can remember, I have imagined Orbán’s defeat more often than I have pictured my own wedding or the birth of a child. Private milestones recede when a country’s survival takes centre stage. I expected euphoria, and for a brief, breathless stretch on election night, it arrived: disbelief, anxiety, something close to joy. Record turnout. A landslide for Tisza. The old regime swept aside. The world was watching, and for once, it saw something worth watching. Perhaps the strongmen can be beaten. Perhaps the game was never really theirs.

A week later, the horizon has widened. I still scan it for hidden snares. When the results came in, my family celebrated together without being in the same place. The group chat exploded, people scattered across Europe suddenly in the same room for the first time in years, and the joy and the distance arrived simultaneously, inseparable. I was on the sofa with five screens open, and I felt both at once. It was the happiest my phone has ever felt. But euphoria and sixteen years of institutional decay do not cancel each other out. One is an emotion. The other is a fact. Habits of vigilance linger. Still, I allow myself a measured relief. Magyar is set to become Prime Minister in early May; coalition talks are underway, and Brussels is already extending a hand. Tisza now faces the task of governing, armed with a historic mandate and the weight of 3.3 million expectations.

There is a name for what many Hungarians learned to do over those sixteen years: defensive pessimism. Keep your expectations low enough, and you cannot be disappointed. The problem is that when the opposite of what you expected happens, the defence turns back on you. You do not know how to let the good thing in. I learned early that in Hungary, optimism could make you look foolish. Not from a single event, but from the accumulated atmosphere of a place where public hope had repeatedly been punished. Adults around me did not teach this explicitly. It lived in the way conversations lowered at certain points, in the pause before anyone said what they actually thought, in the particular Hungarian art of expecting the worst as a form of self-protection. I saw it most clearly in my family. Over the years, something shifted in them, gradually, then all at once. Orbán not only changed institutions. He changed the feeling of being Hungarian, made it conditional, made people who had never questioned their place begin to wonder whether there was still a place for them. We grew quieter about certain things, more careful, more removed. I grew up in Ireland, and when I left as a young adult, it was for Barcelona, not Budapest. The rest of my family followed their own paths outward, each move to a different European city another small severance from the place we had all called home. We became a diaspora family without ever deciding to be one. It was the slow withdrawal of people who had learned, again, that the country they loved did not entirely love them back. What I did not fully register at the time was how much of that I had absorbed myself. I felt it just as strongly, perhaps more so, and kept it inside. You learn, in that atmosphere, that naming what you feel only makes it more exposed. So you carry it quietly. After a while, you stop noticing the weight. After a while longer, you forget it was ever put there. Distance from Budapest did not dissolve it. Watching from outside only clarified it: the caution was not a personal quirk but something the country had taught its people over decades, a kind of emotional thrift that made sense given the history. Even winning would not undo it. The result could be real, and the relief still arrives wearing suspicion.

A political era can collapse in a single night. The habits it leaves behind take far longer to change. I say this as someone who has watched hope curdle before and knows the taste. Tisza’s victory is among the most consequential wins for democracy in recent memory. Autocracy leaves more than institutional wreckage. It leaves personal scars, warps expectations, breeds suspicion of hope, and makes optimism feel like a liability. Psychologists in Hungary have been writing about this in the days since the result: the strange phenomenon of people who waited sixteen years for this moment and still cannot feel joy. One described it as holding something very heavy with sheer muscle power for a very long time. You can do it for a while. Then you get tired. The victory arrives, and the muscles do not immediately know they are allowed to rest. This win has prompted conversations with friends across the US, the UK, and beyond. Many are inspired; many are frightened about the state of their own democracies. Trump’s second term has been a sustained assault on American institutions. In Britain, the rise of Farage is cause for similar unease. The wars launched by strongmen show no sign of abating. Since the pandemic, the world has seemed to contract, squeezed inward by a handful of powerful men and their appetites. For those attuned to these shifts, the burden is daily, and Hungary’s result does not lift it. But it lightens it, briefly.

Bulgaria is voting as I write this sentence. Eighth time in five years. The man expected to win wants to restore ties with Moscow. It is Sunday, a week after Hungary rejected Orbán, and I am at my desk in Barcelona watching four tabs refresh simultaneously and wondering if I will ever be able to write about one country at a time.

This is the tug of war from the inside: Hungary pulling West, Bulgaria possibly lurching East, Spain fraying somewhere in the middle, Trump yanking from across the Atlantic while his own country slowly edges back against him. Every time the rope moves in one direction, something pulls it back. Orbán falls; MAGA takes notes. The anxiety is not background noise. It is the condition in which this essay exists.

I know what losing this fight slowly looks like. My family is scattered across Europe because of it. I am here rather than there because of it. I still flinch every morning because of it.

II

Barcelona gave me back something I had lost so gradually I had stopped noticing. The freedom to be. A body that feels lighter. A mind less braced. A creativity that returns when you stop spending quiet energy on vigilance. It is the first time I have felt at home since leaving Pilisjászfalu, on the outskirts of Budapest, a place I loved and could not return to without grief. Leaving Hungary was one of the most painful things I have done. I left everything I had ever known, moved to a country whose language I did not speak, and built a life from nothing. It felt like loss and, at times, like guilt. I have not resolved that guilt. But leaving was how I kept the part of myself that Hungary was making it harder to be.

Now I watch Vox rise across the country I chose as home. A culture war against immigration, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights, led by a man who flew to Budapest to meet Orbán and stood on a Madrid stage vowing to reconquer Europe. The tightening is familiar. I have felt it before.

None of this diminishes what happened in Hungary, but joy and dread do occupy the same room. My hopes for Magyar are real but tempered. He emerged from one of the dirtiest campaigns in recent Hungarian memory looking as clean as anyone could against the full machinery of a state turned against him. Hungary carries a weight its politics has long refused to honour. One of the highest Nobel laureate rates per capita in the world. A literary and scientific tradition that survived occupation, partition, dictatorship, and the particular cruelty of being told, for sixteen years, that none of it was the point. Magyar’s office will be a success if, in eight years, Hungary has more competitive elections, a freer press, and a political culture that no longer requires a saviour to function. He has promised eight years maximum. If he walks away having brought Hungary back to the West, I will consider that enough, and I will say so.

We have learned, at great cost, to be wary of placing this much faith in one person. The irony is that we had to do it again, just to pry those hands off our throats. What drew me to Magyar was not a programme or a platform. It was the way he listened. The way he went to people, sat with them, and actually heard what they said. He survived more public punishment than most politicians and emerged unbowed. I know that some of what I feel toward him is projection. After sixteen years of Orbán, I needed someone to believe in, and he arrived at the right moment. I have given him my vote and my faith. I am writing that sentence and sitting with how exposed it makes me feel. That exposure is the point. It is what trust costs after everything that came before. Magyar himself has said the government must work for the people, not the other way around. We will hold him to that. Hungarians know what betrayal feels like. We have paid for it before.

I am realistic about what Magyar inherits. After sixteen years of Orbán, standing up to certain powers will not be simple. Hungary’s energy dependence on Russia will require careful management. We need to Westernise a second time and do it better. Budapest has always known, in its bones, what it means to be caught between empires. It could be the heart of Europe again.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the question of Netanyahu, which matters to me in ways that go beyond the political. Budapest is home to the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe, and Hungary’s Jewish community is estimated at around 47,200 people, most of them living in the capital. Hungary’s Jewish history is intimate and devastating: a community central to the country’s intellectual and cultural life, decimated in the final months of the war, when around 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported in less than two months in 1944, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In total, about 550,000 Jews under Hungarian control were killed in the Holocaust. Many of the finest scientists, writers, and mathematicians that Hungary produced were Jewish, many forced to build their lives elsewhere. That history is part of what Hungary is, and it cannot be decorative. During Orbán’s time, he and Netanyahu were close, a relationship built on mutual admiration for consolidated power, even as Orbán rehabilitated wartime figures who had enabled the deportations. The combination was not a contradiction to Orbán. It was a strategy.

Magyar has invited Netanyahu to Hungary while vowing to rejoin the ICC. The contradiction is not subtle. He is likely choosing coalition over conscience, unwilling to fracture a still-fragile society by rejecting Netanyahu outright. But a leader who campaigns for dignity abroad cannot quietly accommodate its violation elsewhere, and a country with Hungary’s specific history cannot treat that question as merely a matter of diplomacy. That is the thread I will pull on hardest. I will not judge him yet. He needs time, and the job he is walking into carries a weight that is difficult to overstate. To be Hungary’s Prime Minister at this moment is not a position of glamour or power in any ordinary sense. It is an inheritance of damage, and the measure of the man will be what he does with it.

The same tension surfaces with Trump. Hungary is a small country and cannot afford to ignore the most powerful man in the world; Magyar will need Washington’s goodwill to consolidate Hungary’s return to the Western fold. That is not naivety but geopolitics. Trump, in his second term, is a different proposition from any American president Hungary has had to navigate before. Researchers at the V-Dem Institute found he accomplished in one year what Orbán took four years to achieve: the suppression of independent institutions, the concentration of power, and the erosion of checks and balances. The US has dropped from 20th to 51st in global democracy rankings in a single term. Weeks before Orbán lost, Secretary of State Rubio publicly endorsed him for a fifth term. The Washington Magyar now needs is the one who, until recently, was cheering for his predecessor. Trump is erratic in ways that harden by the month, destabilising alliances, weaponising trade, drawing the United States into a war with Iran that strains the very European structures Magyar needs to lean on. Magyar must engage him without being captured by him.

I find myself hoping he looks not to Washington but somewhere more sunny. To Pedro Sánchez, perhaps. Spain’s Prime Minister has shown that a European leader can hold a principled line against Israeli military conduct and American pressure without collapsing under either. He recognised Palestinian statehood, maintained his position on Gaza despite diplomatic blowback, and did so without abandoning Spain’s place in NATO or the EU. Drawing a line does not have to mean burning every bridge. Hungary and Spain are not equivalent, but the question facing both is the same: how much of your conscience can you afford to keep? Sánchez has answered that with more courage than most. I hope Magyar is watching.

For all the attention trained on Magyar, I keep returning to one question: what happens if he fails? Not catastrophically, simply turns out to be ordinary, well-meaning, limited, human. The country needs him to succeed, but it needs something more durable than him to survive if he does not.

What matters more than Magyar are habits. A press that holds power to account regardless of whose power it is. Citizens who vote not only when the country is on fire but in the local elections, the municipal ones, the ones that feel like paperwork until the day they do not. The ones that build the habit. Courts that function without fear. An opposition that is permitted to exist, to organise, to lose and return. These are not glamorous things. They do not make for election-night television. But they are the connective tissue of a democracy, and Orbán spent sixteen years cutting through them, thread by thread.

Hungary has been here before, in different forms, under different names. Authoritarian rule could suppress that civilisational memory but never fully extinguish it. The 3.3 million who voted for Tisza voted for the possibility of a country that remembers what it used to be capable of.

Magyar walks into the office, navigating a field of mines, some left behind by Orbán, some freshly laid by a shifting world order. He will get things wrong. What I will be watching is not whether he is perfect but whether he leaves the ground a little clearer for whoever comes after him. That is a legacy that shall last.

III

The thing Orbán leaves behind is not only debt, captured courts, and a rewritten constitution. It is a country that learned to navigate politics by reading one man’s face. Identity, fear, hope: all of it routed through a single point. That is not a political legacy. It is a psychological one, and it is harder to dismantle than any institution. Now I catch myself doing the same thing with Magyar. The relief we feel is real, but some of it is the relief of having found another person to believe in, rather than having built something belief-proof. That is the trap. The emotional structure Orbán built did not disappear when his majority did. It is waiting to be filled. We can fill it again with a man, or we can fill it with something else: institutions, civic life, the unglamorous work of participation. The most important thing Magyar can do is not make himself indispensable but make himself unnecessary, to govern so that Hungary, in four or eight years, does not need to find another Magyar to save it.

What Hungary needs is a citizenry that has stopped waiting to be saved, and no prime minister can provide that. The 3.3 million who voted for Tisza showed they still know how to act collectively. That matters. What matters more is what they do next: the local elections, the letters to editors, the court cases followed, the journalists supported, and the municipal meetings attended. Press freedom, independent courts, a culture of accountability: none of it grows from a single election night. It grows from the unglamorous years between them. Magyar can open the door. Only Hungarians can decide whether to keep walking through it.

The Hungary I want back is not one ruled better by a different man, but one in which politics is finally smaller than that. I do not want heroism. I want competence: a judge who rules without looking over her shoulder, a journalist who asks an ordinary question without encoding it in careful language, a school funded as though the children inside it matter, a hospital that does not feel like an apology. Public office that feels like a service rather than a theatre. Fewer saviours and more procedures. Less myth and more maintenance. The proof of Magyar’s government will not be in its speeches. It will be whether, four years from now, a teacher in Miskolc feels less afraid, a nurse in Pécs feels less exhausted, and a young Hungarian who left for Vienna, London, or Barcelona starts to think, quietly, about going home, and I cannot yet tell you whether I will be among them, because something historic happened and I am still standing in it, still trying to work out where the ground is.

Trust is slower, more conditional, built from evidence that does not yet exist. Sixteen years of watching hope be used against people will do that. There is a name for it: learned helplessness. When excessive control makes you less and less likely to act, less and less likely to believe your actions matter, you internalise it. And then, suddenly, it appears that you can actually shape the future, and you do not quite believe it either. I notice it each morning when I reach for my phone with a readiness that has not yet learned to relax. Orbánism distorted my sense of political time, made the present feel permanent, and the future feel unsafe. Winning has not yet undone that.

What I am protecting, when I refuse to trust too quickly, is the part of me that still believes this can be real. That is not cynicism but the last form of hope available to someone who has been disappointed at scale. Psychologists could describe this as disenfranchised grief: the losses of the last sixteen years that were never collectively processed, never even recognised as losses by everyone who lived through them. Tisza’s victory confronted people with the question of what the country might have been. The grief for those lost possibilities was never named, never collectively held, and now it arrives all at once, inside the joy, inseparable from it. I hold the joy at a slight distance. Not because I doubt it, but because I have learned what happens when I let it in too fast. I know what that costs. I am not ready to pay it again. My happiness for Hungary is real. It is just not untouched.

What I want back from Hungarian public life is something quieter than victory and harder to name. I want Hungarians to reclaim the feeling that politics is theirs. Not a spectacle performed above their heads but a system that belongs to the people living inside it. I wish for politics to stop arriving like a verdict, handed down from somewhere above and applied to a life that had no say in it.

Orbán lost faster than the caution he left behind. That caution is not weakness but memory. Memory is what keeps a democracy honest, and it is what I am trying to keep faith with. The first honest phase of hope is not euphoria. It is the willingness to stay open, to watch, to hold people to account, and to keep believing that accountability is possible, even before you have proof. I want to trust this moment. I have simply forgotten how.