What Viktor Orbán means for Hungary’s cultural memory

what Viktor – A personal recollection grows into a broader cultural argument: Hungary’s political shift under Viktor Orbán resonates because it was built on earlier traditions, fueled by the post-2008 recession, and sustained by a mix of coercion and consent—while European

I remember Viktor Orbán coming to our house once. when I was a child—him with his wife. Anikó Lévai. Her family. I was told. had grown up in a flat next to my grandmother’s in a midsize town on the Great Plains of Eastern Hungary. Even though our families later fell out of touch. we weren’t strangers in the way city people sometimes imagine: we came from the same sociological stratum. Provincial elites, the kind whose descendants could climb once the world of ideas started to open for them.

People like that tend to treat ideas with a seriousness that can look almost literal. Add naivety and you get boundless idealism. Add cynicism and you can end up with a devotion that feels less like belief than submission.

In recent years. my mother—who is neither a cynic nor an idealist—has complained bitterly about Orbán’s resentment. the kind he never bothers to hide. She believed he probably never learned to cope with a simple story: as an exceptionally talented villager with immense ambitions. he hadn’t been given due respect within the narrow elite layer of Budapest’s liberal intelligentsia.

The resentment didn’t stay private. In the 2010s, Orbán launched a vile campaign against his former patron, George Soros. He then invested heavily in building an alternative, illiberal global network. It all made it easy to see the moves as something more personal than political: the sense that Orbán still wanted to prove to those liberal intellectuals what he could achieve single-handedly—by challenging. even humiliating. the largesse that Soros represented. The method, in this telling, was misappropriating public funds on a vast scale.

That kind of narrative fits the way history can start to feel when you’re living inside the aftermath.

When Hungary’s political opposition faced Orbán’s rise, it had its own blind spot. For years, it wasted time on a mistaken strategy: centering their politics around blaming Orbán. As Orbán accumulated immense unchecked powers, his political style hardened. And gradually, the opposition began to mirror him. They aimed at the lowest common denominator too. They started claiming that Hungarian politics was defined by clear and essential differences—that the other side stood for could only ever be wrong.

Not all critics accepted that mirror.

More realistic intellectual voices—Kristóf Szombati. Gábor Scheiring. and Stefano Bottoni—kept insisting that Orbán’s coercive edge was real. but incomplete without the other side of the story: the regime also fostered forms of consent. The opposition, they argued, ignored that at its peril. If the opposition wanted to challenge Orbán’s rule more effectively. it first needed to understand what made Orbán’s crude political strategies socially and culturally resonant. After that. they needed to undermine Fidesz’s legitimacy not with slogans alone. but with a better and more credible offer.

That is, in this account, exactly what Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party managed to accomplish.

Yet the opposition’s failure to imagine alternatives wasn’t just a domestic problem. In mainstream European discussion. for a long time. attention seemed to concentrate almost exclusively on the regime’s problematic. even unacceptable aspects. That moral focus may have been understandable—but it ultimately didn’t help. It made room for a kind of export that Europeans rarely want to name: the successful spread of shallow partisanship.

Normative critiques are necessary, the writer insists, but politics is always contextual. You can’t defeat right-wing populist hegemony by simply rejecting its abhorrent elements. You can’t change society all at once. To succeed, you first need to understand people where they are.

Europe, he argues, preferred not to do that. It built a stark binary that constructed a fictitious innocence—Europe as the moral center—while treating it as if the Orbán regime’s legitimacy and sustained popularity had not been guaranteed in earlier years by EU institutions and their lavish funding.

His own approach tried to combine critique with understanding. Still. he says he kept getting questioned by colleagues from more fortunate parts of Europe. even as he was attacked in parts of the Hungarian press controlled by the government. The pressure pulled him toward silence. “It was difficult for me not to draw the conclusion. ” he writes. “that European publics are often eager to moralize about political developments elsewhere but cannot really grasp the dilemmas of those actually confronting an authoritarian turn.”.

The urge to fall silent doesn’t come from agreement. It comes from exhaustion.

There’s also a deeper European geography to this story—one that sits underneath every election result and every cultural argument about “exceptions.” The piece points to places in Europe that were once part of the Axis powers. later Sovietized. alongside Hungary: Romania. Slovakia. and the former GDR. Add an imperial form of nationalism that had been institutionalized both before and after the First World War. despite the vast territorial losses that followed the end of the Habsburg Empire. and you start to see why some people talk about a ‘Hungarian exception’.

But the writer doesn’t treat “exception” as fate. He says Orbán’s regime, innovative as it may have been, couldn’t have happened without the great global recession of 2008–09.

What does that mean for how Hungary was led to see itself over the past sixteen years? What did Hungarians experience that others might have missed—and what might still matter beyond Hungary?

Here the cultural contradiction becomes sharper. Hungary’s positionality is described as profoundly ambiguous, bordering on self-contradiction. Hungarians were citizens of a member state that would no longer have qualified for entry if it hadn’t already been a member. That hypocrisy was not theoretical to many people. It shaped skepticism toward the idealistic and often moralizing tone in the wider discourse on European integration.

Hungarians also, he says, perceived a democratic dilemma rarely raised on European fora: how to play hardball with a regime while supporting citizens.

Higher education capture is given as an example. The EU is described as having diagnosed problems “fairly decent[ly],” even if belatedly. But it is criticized for failing to produce countermeasures that would have given Hungarian students a more modern and open education. The media. too: the EU is said to have failed to develop any strategy for giving citizens access to independent. reliable information—leaving the standards and quality of public life in the country to be preserved in a way that served the regime.

By the time many citizens viewed the Orbán regime as anti-democratic and dangerously subversive. the argument goes. they had also come to realize that the EU’s policies were too defensive to avoid hypocrisy in their moralizing. That painful realization, the writer suggests, might be the meaning of Viktor Orbán in European politics.

And yet the human story doesn’t end with institutions.

When he listened to Magyar give his first major public interview in early 2024, he says it took him only a few minutes to understand that Magyar must come from the conservative establishment—and therefore probably views Orbán as a semi-educated parvenu.

He describes his own stance across camps. Even though he and Magyar belonged to opposed ‘political camps’. he supported Magyar’s political rise as the best possible thing that could have realistically happened in an illiberal state. Being born one year apart. he adds. political sociologists would insist he and Magyar have belonged to the same cohort all along. In his telling. their generation grew up in a well-reputed and increasingly successful country after 1989. when numerous new opportunities opened up.

That background makes the later reality feel like a wound: the country has remained impoverished and peripheral. Many in that cohort are upset at how Hungary’s reputation was squandered under Orbán’s wayward rule.

That disaffection—even anger—has consequences. It helps explain why some mistake the political sentiments driving their generation as comparable to those that drove Orbán. At times, he admits, they may sound similarly assertive or even blunt. But the experience of the consequences of Orbán’s resentment. he says. should push them toward a different path: more self-critical. and more cooperative.

In the end, what Viktor Orbán means here is not only a political strategy or a personality. It is a cultural memory written into social life: ambition from the provinces treated like a claim to power; resentment turned into a campaign; consent and coercion braided together; and a European moral narrative that. for many Hungarians. never matched the lived truth of support. funding. and hypocrisy.

Viktor Orbán Hungary Anikó Lévai George Soros Tisza Party Péter Magyar Fidesz Kristóf Szombati Gábor Scheiring Stefano Bottoni EU funding 2008-09 recession cultural identity