by Katalin Balog
The battles fought by our forbears
Our memory will dissolve into peace
To set our common house in order
This is our task – and it will not come with ease.
— Attila József, “By the Danube” (final stanza, trans. K.B.)

I have arrived in my hometown, Budapest, just before the election that delivered a decisive blow to Fidesz, Viktor Orbán’s party. Péter Magyar, the leader of the opposition party Tisza, is now the prime minister, and his party holds more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament, enough to restore the constitution and reverse Hungary’s autocratic backsliding. The night of the election, after the results were announced, entire subway cars burst out in spontaneous, triumphant chants of “two-thirds, two-thirds!”. Péter Magyar, in front of a huge, delirious crowd, with the Danube and Parliament in the background, promised a free, fair, and democratic Hungary. Street celebrations all over the country went on till dawn. Everything, it seemed, had changed that night.
Fidesz has dominated, subjugated, and run roughshod over the country for the last 16 years, reaching into virtually every aspect of life: the judiciary, the media, the economy, politics, government, education, science and culture, and everything in between. During this time, it has harassed and stigmatized politicians, business people, actors, teachers, students, and ordinary citizens, and became, according to political scientist Bálint Magyar (no relation to Péter Magyar), a “mafia state”. Ever since the election, a large part of the country has been living in what someone here called a “suspended moment of triumph”. According to the latest polls, among likely voters, today 23% would choose Fidesz, and 71% would vote for Tisza, Péter Magyar’s party. The emotions that took hold of the majority of the population, and certainly of everyone I know well in this city, can hardly be captured in ordinary language; something larger than life is taking place.
The fall of Fidesz has been spectacular; Orbán is somewhere in hiding, his all-powerful commissars acting like stuttering, cowed children in encounters with the new regime. People say even coffee tastes better in the morning. There are fewer lines on people’s faces, at least it appears so. While people thought, even a couple of months ago, that Fidesz would never give up power, now everyone is talking about whether they will end up behind bars.
Hungary is a small, landlocked, relatively poor country with a dismal history as a plaything of greater powers to the east and the west, from the Mongol invasions to Habsburg and Ottoman rule, its uprisings crushed by a rotating cast of intervening powers, most recently by the Soviet Union in 1956. The victory over Orbán is perhaps the first successful regime change in Hungary, brought about not by outside forces (as at the end of World War II or in 1948-49 by the Soviets) or by the elites, as in 1989.
This time, it was a unified push by the great majority of people in the country. Read more »














