« Last night didn’t just feel like an election victory, there was something of 1989 about it, the way people were dancing on the roofs of bus stops, forming a huge conga line that went down to the Danube and back. Going up the metro escalator, shouting ‘Ruszik hasa!’ ‘Russians go home!’ »
— Alex Faludy is speaking from Budapest; he is the British-Hungarian journalist who wrote in ERB#9 about Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa. Faludy has spent all Sunday night in Budapest’s Batthyány Square with the election-night crowds celebrating Péter Magyar’s landslide defeat of Viktor Orban: Magyar’s party Tisza won a staggering 138 seats in Parliament to Fidesz’s 55.
Fernanda Eberstadt: Were you surprised by the extent of Magyar’s win?
Alexander Faludy: I still can’t quite believe it! But there were growing signs. In the last 48 hours, in rural Hungary, members of hunting associations were saying they didn’t plan to vote for Fidesz! There was a disparity in their campaigns: Orbán was appearing in one place, every evening, choosing to speak in tiny squares so you wouldn’t notice how small the crowds were. Magyar was speaking in up to seven places a day. He did what the old opposition had always completely failed to do, which is to get out of Budapest and shake lots of hands, not just in provincial towns but in villages. And if you go back to those villages again and again, over two years, word trickles through.
What finally defeated Orbán?
Grinding social reality. Hungary under Orbán has become one of the poorest countries in Europe. The economic mismanagement, the collapse of public services, the soaring inflation, has been quite stunning. There is a game on the Hungarian internet. On one side of the screen, you see a currently functioning Hungarian hospital. On the other side, you see an abandoned building inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You have to guess which is which, and it’s really hard! Patients are now told to bring their own toilet paper when they go to the hospital. Teachers have quit their jobs and are working in Aldi or Lidl because the pay is better. And meanwhile, in 2020 Matthias Corvinus Collegium [the academic institute that’s been a training ground for Fidesz elites] received a one-off endowment using state funds that was larger than the whole national education budget for that year.
One interesting thing for me has been to see the radical change in people’s attitudes towards corruption. Certainly up until 2022, if you tried to talk to people about corruption, they’d say, ‘Oh well, the old left-liberal government stole as well. At least the money is going to Hungarians, unlike in the 1990s when foreigners came and bought up all our industries.’ The economy was good, so people tolerated high levels of corruption, but once their own living standards started dropping, then the conspicuous consumption among those in the wider ecosystem of Fidesz supporters and oligarchs became an absolutely toxic issue.
The overwhelming comparison is with the Kádár Era [János Kádár was Hungary’s Communist ruler for thirty-six years, he promulgated a somewhat relaxed version of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy known as ‘Goulash Communism’] where there was this deal that the Party would not interfere in your daily life, living standards would rise, and in return everyone would shut up and not complain. But then the deal stopped working.
How much can Magyar–a recent defector from Orbán’s party–change, after 16 years of Orbánism?
He’s made it clear that there will be real consequences for people in the system, that we can expect investigation and prosecution of corruption cases. With a two-thirds majority, he can overturn Orbán’s 2011 Constitution. And unblocking the [16 billion euros in] EU funds will make a big difference. But Magyar’s not like Orbán, for whom anybody who wasn’t with Fidesz was against the nation—in his speeches, he’s reaching out to people who supported Fidesz, he’s not seeking to continue the politics of polarization, which have been appalling.
Hungary is not just a polarized society, it’s highly atomized. I was really surprised a few years ago when I read a study showing that among European countries, Hungarians and Romanians have the greatest need for distance in social interactions. I thought it would be the British, but the British have clearly succeeded in becoming more chill! This is true of the Hungarian diaspora as well. I’m a product of it [Faludy was raised and educated in Britain, but now lives in Budapest], and unlike the Polish community in Britain – which has strong social institutions dating back to the Second World War – Hungarians living abroad kind of avoid each other.
One of the things Magyar did at his events was get people in the crowd to join hands, which was a small but very targeted way of addressing this issue of Hungarians’ social atomization, suggesting a real desire to make a cultural shift in getting people to come together.
It’s a challenging job, but there’s so much excitement and hope and will to make it work, and so many things about this country that are fantastic.
Do you think we’ll see a lot of business people who were in the Fidesz orbit now coming over to Magyar?
It’s clear from the last two years that Magyar has retained some important sources within Fidesz that have been feeding him information. So there might well be people who have been waiting to cross the floor. Or, as a former foreign minister said to me (using the Hungarian form of my name), ‘Sandór, I think there could be a traffic jam on the road to Damascus!’
