Two Days Out

I am anxious, I am far away, and I cannot stop believing something is about to change. This essay is what that feels like.

Heroes Square, Budapest, 2018, Taken by me on a family holiday

Here in Barcelona, none of that is visible. Today has unfolded with the bland efficiency of any other Friday. People buy coffee. Emails arrive. Someone upstairs drags chairs across the floor. Barcelona carries on with the easy confidence of a city that expects tomorrow to resemble today, as if history were something that happened elsewhere, to other people, in less fortunate countries, on television. I have lived here long enough to love it for that. Today, I cannot quite manage it.

I have lived in Spain long enough for certain things to become ordinary again. That is what freedom does when it is working properly. It withdraws from view. It stops announcing itself. People argue in public, and nothing terrible happens. Couples hold hands in the street without needing courage. Life proceeds without constantly having to prove to power that it deserves to exist.

I am grateful for that. I am also, if I am honest, quietly envious on Hungary’s behalf.

Here, rights are so deeply assumed that their fragility feels almost academic. In Hungary, fragility is the daily headline. Rights are legislated, debated, targeted, and surveilled. Pride is not just contested; rather, nudged toward outright prohibition. I can stand in Barcelona and watch two people walk by, arm in arm, and feel viscerally how the same gesture in Budapest carries a different charge. Authoritarianism is not only a matter of institutions. It seeps into the air, into the texture of daily life. It teaches people to do without fear, until fear becomes the background noise of ordinary existence.

There is a vocabulary for what has happened in Hungary. It is the vocabulary of democratic backsliding, of institutional capture, of propaganda and gerrymandering and the patient corruption of every mechanism designed to constrain power. I have used it for years. It is accurate. It is also, in the end, insufficient — because it describes the architecture of what has been done without quite reaching the people it has been done to.

But two days before this election, what I feel has nothing to do with terminology. It sits lower, somewhere in the chest, somewhere in the jaw. Pressure, anticipation, and, embarrassingly, a touch of superstition. Wanting something so badly that even naming it aloud feels like tempting fate.

That may be one of the more lasting injuries of a system like Orbán’s. It damages courts, universities, the press, and the integrity of elections. It educates the emotions. It teaches people not to trust openings. Not to believe in momentum. Not to get ahead of the facts. It encourages a posture that passes for wisdom: stay sceptical, stay guarded, keep your expectations low, and do not hand yourself over to hope until hope has already hardened into fact.

Given enough time, that posture hardens into instinct.

You stop waiting for the future with any trace of innocence. Optimism starts to look naïve. Lowered expectations masquerade as maturity. This is not a bug in the system; it is the system’s quiet triumph. A regime that endures this long does not just rewire institutions. It rewires the imagination.

This is what sixteen years accomplish. It stretches political time until it feels like the natural order. One man's rule becomes less a political fact than a piece of furniture: always there, slightly in the way, no longer remarkable enough to move. Yet this permanence was constructed, not ordained. The courts were bent, the press subdued, public money converted into ideological scaffolding, and the electoral field recalibrated so that voting remained real, but fairness became optional. Hungary was not persuaded into this condition. It was engineered.

I often think about a relative who shrugged when I brought up an election result years ago. There was no enthusiasm in it. No defence. No belief. Just fatigue. The kind of shrug that says: what did you expect? That image has stayed with me longer than most articles I have ever read about Hungary. It told me more than any of them. It showed me what a patient system produces in the people forced to live under it.

That is why this moment feels so unfamiliar. For the first time in years, the regime’s durability looks exposed.

This does not mean Hungary is poised for redemption. Countries do not recover simply because the ballot boxes close. Years of decay do not vanish between Sunday night and Monday morning. The damage persists in institutions, habits, language, reflexes, and the ingrained belief that public life is always someone else’s to control. Even a defeat for Orbán would not erase what Orbánism has wrought.

But elections like this are not only about what changes immediately. They are about whether history is still open. Whether a country can interrupt the story that has been written for it. Whether the machine is truly invincible, or only begins to look that way once enough people have been trained not to imagine its end.

That is what sets this election apart. The others mattered: some were devastating, some merely confirmed what had already been lost, some closed doors that once seemed fixed in place. But this one feels different. For years, Hungarian politics moved inside a trap whose shape was already mapped. The details changed, the logic endured. Now, for the first time in a long while, even the logic looks unsteady.

Some of that is political. Much of it is personal.

Hungary has occupied my inner life for years, even when everything else conspired to make that seem disproportionate. The adult world has a way of insisting on itself: work, rent, groceries, dinner, the small, relentless machinery of a life in progress. All of that continued. Beneath it, Hungary remained. Not every hour, not every day with the same intensity, but always present, like a note in the room you stop hearing consciously, but never stop hearing.

For a long time, I tuned it out. Years in the corporate world will do that. You become adept at steering yourself toward what is necessary. You make peace with a life organised around what pays, not what matters. Eventually, the gap between those two stops feeling tragic and starts to feel adult. I lost the love of writing. I lost the daily political vigilance that once felt as necessary as oxygen. Quietly, I decided Hungary would not change. The machine would endure. The shrug would prevail. I called it realism.

Lake Balaton, 2018, Taken by me on a family holiday

Then my health intervened, as it has for years and continues to do every day. I will not name it here. It is enough to say that chronic conditions reorganise a life without consultation. They do not arrive as revelations. They simply become the new terms on which everything else must proceed.

What made that bearable was not dramatic. My partner, who understands more than I ever ask her to, has never once suggested I write about something easier. My two cats, indifferent to Hungarian democracy but reliably present whenever the research gets difficult, curl up beside me through hours of reading I could not have managed alone. My family, too far away and too dear. And, unexpectedly, a community formed around this work. These things do not repair a life. They make it possible.

There is a version of writing about politics that is really just writing about yourself at a safe remove. You describe the system, analyse the damage, and name the actors and mechanisms. You stay on the correct side of the line between observer and participant. For years, I thought that was the only honest position available to me.

Then came the march, and something in me sharpened.

I watched from Barcelona for hours. Budapest Pride had been banned. Attending it carried the threat of fines and surveillance. Organising it risked prison. The LGBTQ+ community had been stepped on for decades — legislated against, stigmatised, slowly written out of public life. But something had shifted in the broader population. Hungarians who might once have looked away had started to understand that when a government learns it can take one freedom without consequence, the next one goes faster. The march was not only about LGBTQ+ rights. It was about what happens to everyone when the habit of removal goes unchallenged.

And yet the streets filled and kept filling. Rainbow flags. Hungarian flags. EU flags. Flags mocking Orbán, flags demanding his end, flags that had no words on them at all because some things do not need to be written down to be understood. Hundreds of thousands of people, moving through a city I grew up thinking about as mine, holding signs, holding each other, refusing to be invisible — refusing, specifically, to be made invisible by a government that had tried very hard to do exactly that. At some point, the distance dissolved. I was no longer just someone abroad following events on a screen. In the only way people like me can still be present, I was there. Those were my fellow Hungarians. That was my city. And I knew, with a clarity that left no room for evasion, that I could not keep watching quietly. Not because I thought I could alter the result. But because silence had started to feel like a form of dishonesty.

Writing returned, not as ambition, but as a way through. A way to tether myself to the world when the world felt remote. The subject I could not leave alone was Hungary.

For a long time, writing about Hungary felt like speaking into a space defined by distance: geographic distance, political distance, emotional distance. What surprised me was discovering how untrue that was.

Readers found the work from far beyond Hungary. People who had witnessed democratic moments I knew only through archives and books got in touch to say that someone was still paying attention. A journalist I admired invited me onto her podcast, and I came away from that conversation with the rare and steadying sense that the work was reaching people who understood its seriousness, and that their recognition was making its way back to me.

From that, a real community took shape. It has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. It is built on shared grief, but also on something stronger: a refusal to surrender attention. And once you have written for people like that, Sunday stops feeling like a distant political event. It becomes something much harder to keep at arm’s length.

That may be why this week feels so exposed. The fear beneath it is not simply that Orbán survives; that fear is obvious, and has been for years. The deeper fear is subtler: that I might let this moment mean too much before it has earned that right. That I might lean toward the future and find it receding. That I might finally allow myself to feel the full scale of what Sunday could mean, only to be handed, once again, the old lesson: that power can manufacture enough confusion, exhaustion, and managed hopelessness to keep itself in place indefinitely.

But there is a harder truth underneath that one. This is already not a fair election. It cannot be. Not after sixteen years spent dismantling the conditions under which fairness is even possible. The press is warped, the rules are unfair, and state resources are diverted to the party that controls them. Institutions meant to constrain power have been bent around its needs.

There is a particular kind of hope that only people who know better can feel. It is not optimism. It is not naivety. It is the thing that survives after you have read every study and absorbed every precedent and still cannot stop watching.

When I look at the crowds, at the scale of turnout, at Hungarians refusing to be managed into passivity, I find I cannot stop believing. Even a damaged democracy can sometimes surprise the people who thought they had emptied it out for good. Even a system this deliberately engineered can be interrupted by the people it was built to outlast.

These final days are jagged. You negotiate with yourself constantly: calm down, do not get ahead of it, it is only one day, only one vote. Then, five minutes later: yes, but what if it is not only that? What if this is one of those rare moments when a country gets to tell the truth about itself more clearly than it has in years? What if the shrug finally breaks?

I think about those voting inside Hungary who have had to carry all of this in ways I have not: people without the luxury of distance, who cannot step outside the atmosphere and gather themselves. People who have breathed the system’s distortions every day and still found enough belief in public life to show up and insist on participating. I do not want to cheapen that with grand language. It is simply hard to live in a country whose reality has been bent for years and still act as though your presence matters. Hard, and yet people have done it.

By Monday morning, much will remain unresolved. The damage will persist. The lies will persist. Those already preparing the next manipulation will persist. None of it disappears because the calendar advances.

Still, something important will have happened. Hungary will have spoken in a voice clearer than the one imposed on it for years. Whether that voice carries far enough, whether it breaks through the machinery built to contain it, I cannot say. That uncertainty is the whole condition of these final days.

Two days before the election of my life, I do not feel certainty. I do not feel serenity. I do not even feel optimism in any simple sense. What I feel is the nearness of an answer to something that has shadowed me for years. A country can live inside you so long that its turning points stop feeling external. They arrive in the body before they appear on the screen.

I voted for Tisza. I want to be plain about what that means and what it does not. I am further left than Magyar, and in another political life that would matter more. But politics in moments like this does not offer ideal choices. It offers real ones. The real choice here is not hard to name. One path leaves the future open. The other closes it. Magyar is not my ideal. He is, at this moment, the only realistic path through.

My vote is for Hungary’s place in Europe over the slow humiliation of drifting further into Moscow’s orbit. Not just symbolically but structurally. Through energy dependence negotiated on Russian terms. Through years spent offering cover to Putin from inside the very institutions of the European Union that Hungary’s accession was supposed to anchor it to.

I am aware that caring this widely is its own kind of exhaustion. My heart does not stop at Hungary’s borders, and some days that is a harder thing to carry than others. It breaks for Palestinians being killed while the world debates the language in which to describe their dying. It breaks for Ukrainians who chose, at enormous cost, not to yield. It breaks for everyone forced to live under men who have decided that cynicism is a governing philosophy. None of this is abstract to me. That is part of why this vote feels larger than a domestic contest. It is a small stand against the kind of political world Orbán has spent years helping to build — and that others, elsewhere, are still building.

Above all, I am voting for the ordinary possibility of a normal life: for people to live freely, to be who they are, to love who they love, without a government converting that existence into a political problem. That should not be a radical demand. It is the most basic thing a country can offer.

What happens in Hungary on Sunday is not only a Hungarian story. It is one of the clearest remaining tests of whether a system methodically engineered against its own people can still be challenged at the ballot box. Not reformed from within. Not gradually liberalised. Challenged, directly, by the people it was built to outlast. What Hungary answers on Sunday, other countries will have to answer in their own time.

So I write this from Barcelona, two days out, not as an analyst, not as a journalist, but as someone shaped by a country now deciding whether it still belongs to the people who live in it. I want Hungary to have a chance at something ordinary. Something decent. A life in which the ground does not need to move for people to feel safe standing on it. Something that does not require this much grief to want.

On Sunday, one way or another, the suspense ends. What replaces it, Hungary will have to live with. So will the rest of us, in our different ways, from our different distances.