SpringFish
1mo ago
Suppose you take the latest and greatest LLM and use it to generate a huge corpus of text and use that text to train a new LLM. And then repeat the process a number of times. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse. Because you always lose a little with each iteration. Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.
Where did you hear that anyone is proposing to reach AGI via LLMs by training LLMs on their own generated output? That's clearly dumb and not what people propose. The model has to interact with something real, it has to "touch grass", for it to work. That's the external information. For example a coding LLM can get an informative learning signal by running its generated code through the compiler and running tests and seeing if the resulting program compiles, passes the tests, uses less RAM or is faster, etc. I'm not saying that leads to AGI, but there are clearly ways to obtain information from the outside world, and it's not just about sewing a pipe from the LLM's ass back into its mouth.
I'm more and more drifting to the view that this abstract principles-based reasoning in a vacuum, where you just assert rights and derive things from it and hold to it, is not where real impact lies. You need a social fabric that holds people together where the political differences are bridgeable and the other political parties are seen as legitimate alternatives. For example if one party says that income tax should be 5 percent higher and another disagrees, or one thinks that public healthcare is more efficient with larger regional hospitals, while another wants to prioritize good care being available closer to everyone's homes, etc. then there is no such danger. In other words, the Overton windows have to overlap enough.
Once you let society fracture so much that they see each other's political opinion as an existential threat to themselves, their identity, their deeply held cultural beliefs etc., the tool to reach for is not rules lawyering some better laws from first principles like free association or free speech, but to try to create social cohesion. Politics is downstream of culture, and culture comes from social interaction and exchange. If you have long-term relations to your co-citizens in ordinary contexts, and you depend on them for general life stuff, if you go to each other's weddings and help each other haul stuff or do some construction work or whatever, seeing each other in many different roles, that results in a convergence of understanding, and some degree of synchronization, and interest alignment.
Of course this is what's getting erased with the increasing individualism. There's nothing that ties you to your neighbors, so you're free floating and can take on any political views, without any connection to whatever other people believe. There's less pressure to compromise and more pressure to stand out by being the purest and most vocal, most righteous version of your chosen side and has very little cost associated with fully condemning the other side as pure evil.
Now, many would say that this kind of cohesion is not really possible and there are inherent conflicts of interest that will always remain. Some would point to class differences, others would point to ethnic ones. But if you identify such unbridgeable differences, the tools are also not really the abstract principles to solve this, but some kind of Bosnia-Herzegovina style regulated representation and explicit design around this social fact, because again, politics has to be designed around the social reality. There's certainly some "backflow" and the rules create incentives that have effects on social relations, but in the end the rules are more a codification and stabilization of what the real emotional connections are. It's like Conway’s Law, stating that "organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The political rules of what's allowed, what's normal, what freedoms can be afforded, depend on the social (and interest) relation structures of the people themselves. High-trust cultures where most everyone believes in the same fundamental principles and are generally not at each other's throats can afford to allow unrestricted speech because most people anyway don't want to say things that would upset others too much. A society that's split in two tribes, which shout and plot about how to hurt the other tribe to the maximal degree, will find that they need to have some kind of constraints, but it's not very likely to solve the original problem.
Historically, such pent up tension was often released through war, like the Thirty Years War, after which people realized it's better to come to some kind of compromise, or one side is weakened so much that the tension is released that way. I'd hope that it's not a necessary stage to go through, though. Another thing may be the threat of an external enemy, or an external cause to unite around. I think the end-of-history types thought this could be these neutral inert things like space exploration, climate change and environmentalism, generic 90s elementary-school textbook obviously-good UN/UNESCO/UNICEF charities and human rights etc. But it seems that this is not really enough to form cohesion and are turned into wedge issues as well.
I think people are not inherently motivated enough to cooperate, only if circumstances force them, which is generally not pleasant. The village where everyone relies on everyone is not just sunshine and rainbows to live in. Because relying on others also carries dangers, and it limits your choices and there is constant judgment and gossip and observations, you have to care about your reputation, and the emergent judgments are not always fair.
SpringFish
1mo ago
You can check my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430673?context=8#context
In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was very fresh, the invasion was barely more than a month old at the time of the election. The opposition candidate said a few stupid things in interviews about sending weapons and possibly Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine if NATO would decide so. Or that Ukraine is fighting our war too, and "blood is more important than oil" etc, which were blasted all around the pro-Fidesz media, there were huge billboards etc. saying that Fidesz will keep Hungary out of the war and will keep a strategic calm while the opposition would let Hungary slip into the war. It scared many people.
But even the baseline was different. In 2022, the opposition was a multi-party patchwork which included the despised previous Socialist PM who was in power before Orbán, and there were constant internal squabbles between the opposition parties, leading to an ineffective campaign.
I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.
I don't think this is so black-and-white. Of course some ignorant people claimed that Orbán is like Erdogan or Lukashenka or Putin. He never was that sort of dictator with blood on his hands, people never fell out of windows of tall buildings, journalists were not imprisoned, there was no novichok, etc. The democratic backsliding is about making a joke out of institutions, placing puppets everywhere from his small inner circle including the constitutional court, the public prosecutor's office, the president of the republic, the national bank, etc, funneling about a quarter of all public contract money to his frontmen, making a joke out of the public state media (you cannot imagine it, it is parody-level extreme bias, something you couldn't imagine if your standard is the left-bias of western media), taking over a lot of private media, threatening to pass a law that would crush them under claims of being foreign agents, constantly keeping some state of emergency to make passing laws even easier, and ruling by decree, on a whim. First with the justification of the dangers of migration, then covid, then the Ukraine war, there was always some special emergency state for the legal system. They often passed totally unrelated laws and bypassed the need for public tenders and gave government contracts to their friends and themselves with the justification of the state of emergency. They constantly gerrymandered and originally tailored the electoral law to benefit them. They won a 2/3 constitutional parliamentary supermajority in 2014 with less than 45% of the votes because the voting system they designed benefited them. The system forced parties to join up, since one large party and many small ones simply results in this distorted outcome. But they made sure to give enough media space to small parties to avoid having any one of them grow too big. So in many of the elections a lot of energy was spent on the squabbles of the opposition parties and in what form they should run together, what to do with the party of former PM Gyurcsány who still had significant support, but not enough to win alone, but many voters outright rejected Gyurcsány, so it was a neither with, neither without situation.
Being a former Fidesz insider, Magyar could draw a line and he held to it throughout it all, that he will not collaborate with anyone from the former opposition parties. Every single person of their candidates is someone new, who was never an MP, and never held high political positions. Gyurcsány even resigned from chairing his party and it was taken over by his wife (whom he also divorced). The small parties also just withdrew from the election. But by then they were already led by unknown people and had very low support, each below the 5% threshold, because the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 European elections led to resignations of known figures in those opposition parties.
It's certainly a combination of incompetence (or deals with Fidesz) of the opposition parties, combined with good machinations by Orbán, tending to his little garden of opposition parties well. But he also centralized power in a way that can be labeled authoritarian and made a puppet show out of the institutional checks and balances. The country was basically ruled by Orbán's college dorm friends and his childhood friends.
There's definitely something to be said about the youth involvement in this election. In previous elections, young people were not very politically active and were apathetic. There were always some "activist" types who cared and who Deutsche Welle or Arte could make nice videos about, the slam poetry folks etc, but this time it really was something different. There was a bit of this already in 2022, but the story was much less clear and there was a lot of intra-opposition squabbling and the candidate was just not as talented.
It's also a generational effect. There are now many young voters whose only political memories are from Orbán's system. If, say, you first understand something about politics when you're 10, then everyone under 26 have no memory of anything else than Orbán being in power. And young people really resonated with the appearance of Magyar, it started with a YouTube interview on a channel watched by many young people, and they could follow the story right from the beginning, many "grew up" in a political sense with this story, it required little prior knowledge, and it started with a morally clear cut black and white story, the pardon scandal where Orbán's allies pardoned someone convicted for covering up child sexual abuse in a children's home. This led to a huge protest (independent of Péter Magyar) led by young social media influencers to stand up for children in children's homes overall. Many young people were reached by this campaign and Magyar could channel this moment and flurry around himself and formed a new movement. People were looking for someone to rally around and the 2022 defeat of the opposition had blown up the old opposition, so there was a vacuum. Then in the last summer, 2025, essentially all festivals and concerts were loud with chants of "Mocskos Fidesz!" (literally "dirty Fidesz", meaning something like "scumbag Fidesz" in emotional tone), which is really a new development. Young people used to say they want to get away from politics and propaganda during these festivals and they want to forget about it all for at least those times. This time, though, there was such strong consensus in the youth that there was basically no controversy in this.
As shown in this poll, which turned out to be remarkably accurate to the election results, young people in the 18-29 bracket support Tisza with 73% and Fidesz with 11%, and as you go higher with the age bracket, it gradually moves towards Fidesz majority with 28% Tisza and 48% Fidesz for 65+ (the gender gap that Fidesz is relatively stronger with women than with men is most likely due to men dying earlier, and there being more 65+ women than men). For educated people, it's 63% Tisza, 19% Fidesz. Also in Budapest it's 58% Tisza and 23% Fidesz. If you're an educated young person in Budapest, these all would stack up leading to minuscule support for Fidesz in that demographic you likely saw in Budapest.
There was also a massive concert last Friday, two days before the election, with 50 different musicians and bands performing one explicitly regime-critical song of theirs and it was headlined by one of the most popular singers Azahriah (years ago, even Orbán had a Tiktok video where he claimed he likes Azahriah in an attempt to be with the fellowkids). Azahriah is massive with young people, he filled the largest stadium of Hungary (Puskás Aréna, 67k seats) 3 times on 3 consequent days. On this even, the two hero whistleblowers (one a police captain who uncovered an intelligence plot against Tisza party and one a military captain who drew attention to Orbán's son's role in Hungary's mission to Chad and mismanagement in the military) made a surprise appearance on stage, and gave emotional speeches. I would also not underestimate these moments. Everything came together to "click" right for the election day. (There's also a genuine admiration worthy for a popstar towards Magyar from some young women and high school age girls, which would be worth its own exploration, regarding Tiktok and girls painting their nails with the Tisza logo or Magyar's face etc, though this is not really my space...)
Of course they will be disillusioned. I see it on Reddit that they are very enthusiastic right now, it's their first time seeing a non-Orbán in the role of Prime Minister(-elect), and project all their imagination and wishes for endless possibilities. It's really a honeymoon phase right now. Of course, people will have to learn, but this is how youth is. I had the same hope about Orbán back in 2010 when we finally sent Gyurcsány away and Orbán promised a break with all their corruption and campaigned with very similar sentiment as Magyar today. Including about the media, the "new aristocracy" sitting atop Hungarians, about dumb ads and propaganda etc. But I do think we just need this naive energy sometimes, we can't have everyone be cranky old buggers. Based on today's press conference I think Magyar will hold his position well, he's already proving less than fully eager to please whatever they ask for from Brussels. He was measured and didn't overpromise on Ukraine, LGBT or migration, regardless of what the reporters would have wanted to hear. He still wants the opt-out from the 90 billion credit for Ukraine, he still wants no migration pacts, and gave a balanced answer about LGBT rights, saying that everyone should be able to live as they want and love who they want as long as they don't break any laws.
They know the economy is important and do try things, Orban put price controls on plenty of different products and services
These are basically propaganda tools. He does this then put billboards everywhere, mandates signs in supermarkets, sends letters in the mail, mandates little orange highlighted boxes on utility bills about how the government saved you X HUF on this bill etc. This is a political product.
Their strategy for the economy is not very deep. Keeping the car assembly plants and now they had the big idea to go all in with the electric vehicle transition and brought Chinese battery factories in massive amounts to Hungary, but this gamble doesn't seem to play out. They brought BYD to Szeged, which does little more than launder tariffs, as they just do the last phase of assembly, but they can then claim EU origins and avoid some fees. There is no high-value contribution here. I'm not saying that it's easy, given the free movement within the EU, it's hard to retain the best experts, and the periphery is by default this kind of assembly place. But Hungary doesn't have great natural resources or oil, even the agriculture is not so competitive. Now, I'm not an economist, but it's clear that the trajectory has been disappointing compared to the regional performance of other Central European countries.
But also regarding social policies and culture war stuff, they have such a primitive and utterly incompetent "intellectual sphere" that you will simply not find thinking people who can go along with that. They try to top-down manufacture Youtube podcasts, some kind of Hungarian Joe Rogans, but their viewership is just tanking. They tried bringing in popular trash celebrities, like the primitive rapper Dopeman, to whose podcast Orbán went twice during the campaign, or the other criminal-looking rapper Jaber. Their Mathias Corvinus Collegium think-tank is just a bootlicking scaffold copy of American think tanks. There really is a dearth of thoughtful backing for any of Orbán's social policies. It's all about winning the moment and doing something for the polls, being able to put something on the billboards. But I even doubt that Orbán has any real principles at all. He turns like a sunflower to whichever direction he hopes to gain from.
What Hungary has is the age old népi-urbánus (national / urban) split, which is not very easy to explain. The modern Hungarian national consciousness arose around the reform period after 1825 and the revolution of 1848, and these are intertwined with French Revolutionary ideals, and the movement was anti-monarchic. Hungarian history was split in two by the Ottoman occupation. We are proud of the Hunyadis, King Mathias and the early Árpád dynasty, but that was already legend and myth by the 19th century when those things were revived into symbols especially in the 1896 celebrations of the 1000th anniversary of the original Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin. After the Ottoman occupation ended, the re-urbanization some of the Hungary had the peculiarity that the civic professional urban population was largely German-speaking, and in good part Jewish. There remained some Hungarian nobility too, and they also sponsored culture and development, e.g. the Széchenyis, but still there was a long-standing split in the more worldly cosmopolitan, westward looking side and the more traditional folk-oriented Hungarian-history-centered side. The publicist Róbert Puzsér dubbed this the Hunnia vs Pannonia split, referring to the Hun legendary origin of the Hungarian nation and an identity partially rooted in the East, vs the Roman province of Pannonia, symbolizing our integration in the Western Roman Empire, Western Christianity etc.
It's the same split that was presented in the István, a király (Stephen, the King) rock opera, where it's even symbolic that the author of the lyrics came from one side and the composer from the other. And it was an allegory based on the historical fight between Saint Stephen with his German allies (the Western cosmopolitan who takes on Western Christianity), vs Koppány, the representative of the pre-Christian pagan Hungarian tradition.
Orbán's family didn't really connect into any of these intellectual streams. But he was always, already from 1990, was looked down upon by the Budapest cultural elite who saw him as a loud villager nobody. So over time he stepped into the shoes of this "népi" identity, which would have originally been represented by the MDF and FKGP parties (and KDNP), whom he however chewed up and swallowed.
There is also a lot of inner pressure in Hungarian intellectuals/politicians/academics to be seen as modern enough, despite being on the periphery. Therefore they do like to ape whatever is fashionable in western academia. A perfect symbol of this for me was how Momentum MEPs Katalin Cseh and Anna Donáth glowed and sparkled in the eyes in the EU institutions, or when meeting Macron. What I'm seeing in contrast to this in Péter Magyar, is that he doesn't seem to be fazed by this as much. He doesn't seem to crave the bellyscratches by western cultural elites.
SpringFish
1mo ago
Also Cseh (Czech) and Rácz (Serb) are quite common, and somewhat less common Orosz (Russian), Görög (Greek), Ruszin (Ruthenian).
Orbán defeated
As I wrote about it yesterday, Orbán's defeat was clear from the polls, but the scale of it wasn't so sure and it is massive. If you'd like some background on what the topics and issues of the campaign were (not the typical culture wars that many online threads try to shoehorn this into) check that post, but let's now look at the results and what could come.
It's a landslide with a bigger supermajority (around 138-140 seats of 199) than any of Orbán's victories in the last 16 years (the largest was 135 seats). The turnout was 80%, the largest of all free elections since 1990 by a good margin (Orbán's previous defeat in 2002 held the record with 73.5% turnout).
However, this was not only a defeat of Orbán but also of the old opposition. The Socialist party (the legal successor of the old communist state party from before 1990) and its spinoff previously headed by the former Socialist PM Gyurcsány (2004-2009) have been demolished too. The new parliament will be filled with many new faces, and most of them are young enough that they were not involved with or socialized under the pre-1990 system - which I see as a very positive development - and they were also not politicians of either the left or the right in more recent times.
This parliament will have three parties, the broad-tent center-right pro-EU Tisza (138-140 seats), Orbán's pro-Putin right-wing Fidesz (53-55), and the radical nationalist / antivax-right Mi Hazánk (6). The left-wing and progressive liberal parties did not run for the election and instead supported Tisza. This extra-parliamentary party landscape is quite small, but the liberal-progressive centrist Momentum stands out as one that may have a chance to return in a more proportional electoral system and had at least in the past passed the 5% threshold in an EU Parliament election. The green Dialogue for Hungary is only relevant as being the party of the liberal mayor of Budapest, but never had significant measurable support. Now I haven't mentioned the last party who contested yesterday's election: the formerly joke party Two-Tailed Dog Party received less than 1% of the vote and are on the way to irrelevance. It is therefore a moment where the whole political system is prime for refreshment.
Tisza is unlikely to remain as such a broadly popular party. Their main feature is and was in this election that they could form one unified block under a charismatic leader who could unite all opposing sentiment to Orbán's system, from various disparate directions, while not being tainted by the "old opposition". Previously the opposition block always had in its ranks the despised pre-2010 Socialists and their spinoff Democratic Coalition (DK), which simply could not gather the necessary amount of votes. Magyar managed to win by remaining a blank slate on which anyone can project their desires. He avoided divisive topics in the campaign. He promised to keep the southern border fence and not to accept a migration deal, but didn't talk much about the asylum system and immigration. He does not support a fast-tracking of Ukraine's EU membership, but he is against Putin and much less hostile to Ukraine than Orbán. Magyar did not take part in the Pride march last year, which was banned by Orbán and anyway turned out to become the largest participation ever in a Pride march. He supported it in generic terms, the liberty to love who you want etc., but didn't focus on these topics. Instead he toured the countryside in national costumes, always carrying the Hungarian flag, singing folk songs at rallies, visiting Hungarian communities in neighboring countries, wearing national symbols, referring to historical heroes, national poets etc. However, his party does contain more liberal people as well, and social issues will likely be led by Kriszta Bódis who wrote illustrated children's books about gay love and so on. As I said, it is a heterogeneous block.
The supermajority allows reshaping Hungary from the ground up. Magyar has already promised to create a new constitution, and in contrast to Orbán's single-party constitution, it shall be voted on by the people in a referendum. He already called for the resignation of president of the republic Tamás Sulyok, who is even less significant of a figure than would be implied by the symbolic nature of the presidency in Hungary - he is for all intents and purposes an Orbán puppet who signs all laws without question, just like the previous presidents have been in his system. Magyar promises to also join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and review EU and state fund mismanagement and corruption, to investigate FM Szijjarto's Russian ties and to retrieve stolen wealth by Orbán's inner circle. Such promises we have already seen many times when governments were changed, and usually nothing came of it, there were background deals and the economic sector found new ways to get close to the new system. What may be different this time is that Magyar seems to have a real personal motivation to see the old regime prosecuted. And there is massive public expectation of this and failing to deliver could destabilize this patchwork coalition, as the main topics holding it together are being outraged by Orbán's corruption and the state of public services, and the state of the propaganda media. Improving the education system and hospitals and the punctuality of trains is a much slower and harder task especially when the economy is on a downturn. So he will need some symbolic wins.
Overall, what I see is that post-1990 Hungary had an era of somewhat naive attempt at copying western democracy, switching the governing side each 4 years, until around 2006-2010 which was the first big flip and disillusionment and phase change into the Orbán era, and now there is another big reordering and phase change. I believe Hungarians, mainly the intellectuals, have become much less naive than they were in the 90s. Orbán ditched many unwritten rules and will have a hard time to criticize anything Tisza may do, including using legal trickery to remove Orbán's puppets from high positions even if they were elected for 9 or 12 years (except the chairman of the national bank, whom he said he'd leave there not to scare the markets) and to starve off Orbán's economic empire. Anything Magyar may do, there will be plenty of examples to point to in Orbán's conduct, and backed by an even larger mandate with record turnout, it will be difficult to claim that all this is really done by Brussels and Zelensky. Of course Magyar will want to present himself as not simply copying Orbán's methods. One big promise is to introduce a two-term limit for prime ministers, which is unusual in parliamentary systems, but signals that he doesn't have ambitions for serving as long as Orbán.
SpringFish
1mo ago
It's quite baffling, I've looked at some international coverage and what you're describing is happening on state media like ZDF, too. They have no neutrality it seems. Of course not as blatant and over the top as Hungarian public media has been, but one would expect a bit more neutrality than this messaging that Peter Magyar is not quite holding the obviously objectively correct opinions on all issues...
SpringFish
1mo ago
I agree, that it tends to be more inch-by-inch, and not through some big popular vote. But as I see, the new politically engaged generation is a bit different in Hungary than people in the west may imagine. Even the liberal-left channels like Partizán (who are gender-critical leftists) or young "cosmopolitan" analysts like Nóra Schulz see wokeness as a kind of capitalist excess or an imperial imposition by the US etc. Or take the more centrist but hugely intellectually influential group (for people in their 20s) around Róbert Puzsér, who is anything but woke. I just don't see it in the mood. Even Telex and 444, the mainstream liberal news portals do not agree with all the western socjus stuff.
For western progressives there could be a disappointment, and I already notice that they are calling for caution that this isn't really "their guy".
SpringFish
1mo ago
What does that even mean? In what regard? Economic policies? Social policies? Domination of media and branches of power? Corruption and oligarchs? Relations to Putin and Trump? In what regard will they be similar in your view?
SpringFish
1mo ago
The police investigators weren't instructed to find something fake, it's bad but not that bad. The goal was to get hold of all storage media without having to give a detailed reasoning for the warrant, and the CSAM suspicion is the one where a blanket seizure of all data storage is standard. The standard thing is to make a copy of all the storage media first, and analyze the copy. And in this case the copy was made by the National Security Service, on the insistence of the Constitution Protection Office, instead of the Hungarian National Bureau of Investigation where the whistleblower police investigator worked. In the end the IT people got prosecuted for something else, but it gets a bit complex.
More on the topic: https://www.direkt36.hu/en/titkosszolgalati-nyomasra-tortent-hazkutatas-a-tiszat-segito-informatikusoknal-aztan-kibukott-egy-gyanus-muvelet-a-part-ellen/
SpringFish
1mo ago
The suspicion is that this was a way to move focus away from this scene where in the European Parliament, before his speech, Magyar went to greet Orban, but Orban didn't react for several seconds, then he did shake his hand in the end, but it looks like he is getting dominated. This was important for Magyar as his movement was just a few months old and he could present himself at the same level as Orban, as his rival, while Orban didn't even pronounce Magyar's name in his interviews (he used the same tactic in previous elections, avoiding referring by name to his rivals). So the government media wanted some flurry around some more eyeball-drawing ridiculous thing, which was that Magyar was scratching his penis in the EU parliament, and "it's not the first time" that such scandalous things happen etc...
SpringFish
1mo ago
Orbán's 1998-2002 premiership was perhaps closer to that neoliberal market-oriented thinking, but he realized through his 2002 defeat that this style is not workable in Hungary. His Socialist opponent in 2002 promised large handouts and pay raises in the public sphere, and actually delivered on the promise, which was a disaster to the state budget. But it was popular enough that the Socialists won another term in 2006, which was the first time a party could remain in power in an election since 1990. Orbán learned the lesson that he needs to win over the large rural populations from the Socialists, and started using the same tactics the Socialists used but even stronger. Hungary was never the kind of conscious civic state that some parts of Western European countries had been for long. Hungary had remained agrarian much longer than more western countries, and the feudal thinking is still strong. You have a local lord above you and he has a chain of loyalty to the king, and as long as you remain loyal to the local lord, you can hope the king's mercy will reach you. Politicians are evaluated on "what they gave us", in the most literal sense. Supporters see Orbán as personally sending money and personally raising pensions, reducing the energy bills, he has promised to introduce the 14th month pension (the Socialists had already introduced the 13th month pension years ago but had to cut it back during the 2008 recession, Orbán reintroduced the 13th month and now is introducing 14th month). People need a father figure like János Kádár the leader of the "goulash communism" or "fridge communism" of the 70s and 80s.
The right wing here was never really the same kind of conservatism as in the US. Hungary is also historically very different, it's been 500 years that Hungary was actually a significant and strong player, since then we've been thrown around by the big powers. Multinational corporations are therefore easy to pattern match to external foreign forces that try to colonize and control us. In the US it's very different because America is top dog and its corporations exert power around the world. So the whole relation is flipped.
Why the Orbán Era will end (unless something really weird happens)
Hungary has parliamentary elections tomorrow, and the polls suggest that Orbán is likely to lose after 16 years of supermajorities. You can find plenty coverage of this on your favorite new sources, but as a Hungarian I see those often miss the point. This result, a possible landslide unseating Orbán should not be interpreted as a Hungarian win for the culture war side that opposes Orban in the US or Western Europe, though I predict it will be seen through those lens in international media.
(I've been waiting for a thread on the Hungarian election, but I haven't seen any, so I'll just spill my thoughts anyway. I was too lazy to find English article links for all these topics as they are many, but I can answer with some, if interested.)
The main opposition party is a heterogeneous protest block, formed 2 years ago around a former member of Orbán's party, and this block is united around issues that have little visibility outside Hungary. It would be a mistake to project the western EU / US culture war onto this race. It has been a very intense campaign with many twists and turns that summaries reaching abroad can't fully reflect.
The election is all about a fight of narratives. The narrative of Orbán's Fidesz party has crystallized all around Ukraine, Zelensky, and Brussels. That Brussels will send the Hungarians' money to Ukraine to finance the war, that Brussels will even push Hungary to send soldiers to die in Ukraine, that losing access to Russian energy will make energy prices high, and only Orbán can protect us from this. There has been very little talk about US-style culture wars in this narrative, gender, immigration, woke, etc. in the last 6 months or so. It has been all about war and Ukraine and Zelensky. Orbán phrased what's at stake as follows "We must choose who will form a government, me or Zelensky. I humbly recommend myself". I can attest that this has resonated with many low-information voters who don't follow politics or only catch glimpses of news. Many, especially older people are afraid that their kids and grandkids will go die in Ukraine if Orbán loses. Billboards and public television pushes 24/7 that there will be war and only Orbán can keep us out of it.
Meanwhile the narrative of the opposition Tisza party has been about Fidesz's and Orbán's corruption, arrogance, luxury lifestyle of oligarchs, Russian interference and spies, the crumbling healthcare system, scandals about the treatment of children in several children's homes and their political coverups, and Orbán turning even the intelligence services against opposition civilians. But more than the topics themselves the story itself had a folktale-like narrative arc.
It all started with the 2024 pardon scandal, in which it came to light that the vice principal of a children's home, who helped cover up sexual abuse against children by the principal, had received a presidential pardon and got released from prison, almost a year earlier than this becoming public (the pardon was given on the occasion of the papal visit of 2023, a traditional occasion for some presidential pardons). This led to a massive uproar and large demonstrations. The president, a former Orbán minister, had to resign, and along with her also the justice minister, because she also had to sign the pardon. (It turned out it was through some personal and family ties of the vice principal to the Calvinist Reformed Church, whose leader was a former Orbán minister and the president's mentor and informal advisor - Orbán is also a Calvinist by the way).
Amidst this outrage, still in 2024, Péter Magyar (who is today leader of the opposition), came to the scene, being the ex-husband of the recently resigned justice minister. He himself was a member of Orbán's party, and wrote a Facebook post against the whole Orbán system, from the position of the insider who has had enough. By then Hungarian opposition opinion had long been that only an insider with some "atomic bomb" (some secret information that could lead to prosecutions etc) can change things. So this post drew a lot of eyeballs and he got invited to the largest leftist political YouTube channel for an interview which quickly reached a million views (which is a lot in Hungary with 9.5 million population). In the interview he painted a picture of a morally bankrupt Fidesz who only cares about enriching their inner circles, filling up all positions with incompetent loyalists and causing the country to become poorest in the EU. He accused Fidesz of abandoning their original western-oriented civic principles and said that it is Fidesz who changed and not him. He even told details about how the government tried to interfere in his marriage and divorce. This viral interview was conveniently just a few weeks before the March 15 national public holiday (celebrating the 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs, which was defeated jointly by Habsburg Austria and tsarist Russia.), and he held a public speech in front of tens of thousands, announcing a new movement.
Conveniently again, the 2024 elections for the European Parliament were just about 3 months away. This allowed Péter Magyar to do a campaign with real stakes very early and test the amount of support for real, instead of just through surveys. In this campaign he actually toured the countryside. Lately, there had been quite a split between richer, more educated, urban people (who are against Fidesz) and the poorer, less educated, rural population (who are pro-Fidesz). That hadn't always been the case, the capital used to have some civic-conservative, educated patriotic intellectual strongholds especially areas with villas in the hills of Buda, the sort of people who prided themselves on reading Hungarian national poetry, going to the theater, etc. And traditionally, before the Orbán era, poor countryside people used to vote Socialist, because of nostalgia for the old system when everyone had a job and so on.
The point is, by 2024, Fidesz already lost even those previously culturally right wing rich districts and has gone all-in on the countryside, but those areas had proved very hard for previous opposition parties to reach. Péter Magyar, however, is from this civic right-wing milieu. His parents had conservative intellectual backgrounds, one side Catholic, the other Calvinist. His godfather was Ferec Mádl, respected conservative legal scholar, former president of the republic and former minister of education in the first (conservative) government after the fall of the iron curtain. So Magyar knows the symbols and spefaks the language, and uses national symbols, national clothes, songs and so on. With this campaign, his 2-3-months-old movement got 30% of the EU election votes, compared to 45% for Fidesz. Once he got the status of member of European Parliament, he was able to enter state institutions like hospitals. He made a campaign out of visiting rural hospitals and documenting their bad conditions on social media, contrasting it with the opulent lifestyle of the oligarchs and politicians, their private jets, yachts etc. He leaked conversations he recorded with his ex-wife the then justice minister Judit Varga, where she admitted that another another minister interfered with a case at the public prosecutors office, removing things from documents in a corruption scandal, in which another cabinet member is also involved.
The government media found no good antidote to him. His ex-wife, the ex-minister Judit Varga reacted with accusations of domestic abuse and that she just said what he wanted to hear to avoid abuse by him. This was never proved beyond he said she said. There was another attack surface, where Magyar went to party in a club and someone was recording a video of him and they got into an altercation, at the end of which Magyar took the guy's phone and threw it in the Danube river. The police then sent divers to retrieve the phone from the bottom of the river... These are the kinds of stories in this campaign. Or when the pro-government media tried to "attack" him that in the EU parliament, while waiting for his turn to speak, he had his hand in his pocket and was adjusting his penis, or that the shape of his large penis is sometimes seen in his tight pants on some of his photos. This was a literal news segment in the real evening news of the channel TV2. He responded with banana and sausage jokes on social media.
He has also capitalized on several other domestic scandals, like how the son of the chairman of the National Bank of Hungary embezzled about 2 billion EUR. Or how Orbán is enriching his daughter and son-in-law, and made his childhood school friend the richest man in Hungary. Or how he even keeps zebras on his lands outside his village.
When Trump won the election, Orbán thought he will get back the narrative control, because they were mostly running after Magyar and reacting to him. So Orbán tried to say something big at the start of 2025, and he announced banning the Pride March, and that they will create a "transparency law" that will reveal foreign financing of the pro-opposition media and that this will be a spring cleaning, because "the bedbugs have overwintered", by which he meant "politicians, judges, journalists and fake-civil organizations" who had been bought by Brussels or previously the Biden admin. The goal was to make donations, even from Hungarians, much harder for independent media. Magyar kept himself at arm's length distance from both Pride and the journalists, knowing that the government wants to regain narrative control to their field, to make the national conversation be again about gender, homosexuality, migration etc. In the end Orbán wasn't able to effectively ban Pride. It was officially illegal but drew the largest crowd ever. Going against a peaceful march of hundreds of thousands with police would have been even worse for him than just accepting this. They also paused the whole "Spring cleaning law" idea for now.
Last year Fidesz tried to slander Tisza with a fake, AI-generated 600-page document, which allegedly proves that Tisza is planning to raise taxes and will tax also cats and dogs and so on.
Another big scandal was around a Samsung battery factory in Hungary, where tests revealed that some workers had over 500% above the limit of certain toxic compounds in their blood and the whole facility was constantly failing inspections and had to pay the maximum fine several times, though the maximum was incredibly low (around 25k EUR). Journalists have uncovered that the government knew about this and ordered the intelligence agencies to surveil the plant and the leadership to understand better what is going on. This revealed even more irregularities than was reported by Samsung through official channels. According to the journalists, the cabinet was split on whether to close the plant or not, as they saw a huge scandal potential in it, but the foreign minister argued that closing down the Samsung plant would cause panic in the steeply rising battery and electric vehicle industry in Hungary, such as the Chinese CATL and BYD factories.
Later this year another huge scandal was revealed about a secret Hungarian intelligence agency action against Magyar's Tisza party back in 2024. The topic is quite complex and is like a Netflix crime show with plot twists and turns. The main gist is that it is suspected that state intelligence agencies or perhaps in part some gray-zone private intelligence groups tried to get a 19-year-old IT administrator of the Tisza party to work for them, leak system information, break the IT systems and cause disruptions and data leaks. The IT admin strung them along for some time, but when the unknown people realized the admin is leaking info to Magyar about them and is preparing to gather information about them, they tried to shut down the operation by sending the police on the IT guy with accusations of child pornography. The big narrative moment came this year when the leader of this police investigator group, for child pornography cases, stepped to the public in a 90-minute video explaining the case and how they received "tips" from the Constitution Protection Office to treat this report seriously (the report was submitted through public channels) and that they should seize all data storage media of the IT admins. The police captain and his group found zero trace of child pornography in the storage media, but they found out that they help the Tisza party with IT and found screenshots of chat messages with this mysterious party who was trying to get the admins to mess with the IT system. The government reacted to the scandal by releasing footage from the IT admin's informal hearing at the Constitution Protection Office, where he allegedly admits to having been in contact with Ukrainian spies, and the government tried to connect Tisza to Ukraine with this again. Later, also the IT guy stepped up and gave an interview as well. Both the police captain and the IT guy are now opposition heroes in the folklore. The police captain got about 800k EUR in donations over just a few days, since he was fired and prosecuted for the whistleblowing. The IT guy was signing large photos of him to people standing in line in campaign rallies.
A few days later, a military officer stepped up to reveal insider knowledge about how Orbán's own son (Gáspár Orbán has has one of the best Wikipedia taglines with "Hungarian lawyer, soldier, religious leader and former professional footballer"), who allegedly "found Jesus" in Africa, thought up a military mission to the country of Chad, and was counting with possibly up to 50% loss of life of the Hungarian soldiers sent to Chad (the plan was 200 soldiers). The law had been passed through parliament but the mission didn't start due to changing situations in Chad.
Meanwhile the attempts to re-gain narrative control by Fidesz haven't been effective. One news item and then propaganda fodder was where Hungary stopped a regularly scheduled and announced cash transfer between Austria and Ukraine, carrying 35 million EUR and 9 kg of gold. The counter terrorism police pointed guns at the van, and seized it all. Then the government media story was all about money laundering and that the money was possibly actually for the Tisza party etc. It doesn't have to add up logically, but the images create a demonstration of strength against Ukraine and look good on social media.
During this years March 15 celebrations, Fidesz paid some people to hold up a large Ukrainian flag at the rally of Tisza party, the pictures went through the entire government-aligned media empire, claiming that this party rallied under Ukrainian flag instead of the Hungarian flag. Since there was phone camera footage about this provocation, people managed to find selfies of those people who held up the flag together with Fidesz officials.
One could of course discuss each of these cases in much more detail. And I didn't even mention the leaked phone calls between FM Szijjarto and Lavrov. I just wanted to give a glimpse of the sort of topics that were most active in the campaign season. These are not typical culture war issues. So when you see a landslide defeat of Orban tomorrow, don't think that it means that Hungarians suddenly want wokeness. It's mainly about the state of the economy, corruption, and a good story that people could follow along from the beginnings two years ago to now unseating Orbán.
But why do the leftists and progressives go along with a former Fidesz-member being the one to defeat Orbán? Because the previous opposition imploded in 2022. Half of them were backstabbing each other, the other half had been already bought by Fidesz. Prominent pre-2010 leftist politicians were always in the opposition multi-party groups that ran together in prior elections, and those people got so discredited that they were never able to win. It had to be someone different.
It's also worth mentioning that Péter Magyar has a charismatic personality and good, fashionable appearance. He's about as old as Orbán was back in 2010 when he started his 16-year rule. By now Orbán looks old, and obese, and aesthetics matter. Orbán never got acquainted with social media and tech, while Magyar manages to use social media without becoming cringe fellowkids poster, and he's treated like a rockstar in his multiple-per-day campaign rallies by everyone, including young people and young women. It's perhaps also interesting to note that there is basically no political gender gap in Hungary right now. Men were faster to start supporting Tisza, but by now it's basically equal. The real gap is in educational attainment and villages vs towns and cities.
What will Magyar's governing look like? We don't really know. The supporters are very heterogeneous, and likely only agree on the fundamentals. There will be a new constitution if Tisza wins a supermajority and they will replace many Orbán puppets in high positions, including in courts. Who will come instead, we don't exactly know. There will be a new, more proportional electoral law that doesn't give 2/3 supermajorities so easily and doesn't punish smaller parties as much, such that the incentive to form electoral coalitions is smaller. The idea is that they should introduce a more pluralist political system where there will be more kinds of parties in the 2030 election, and people can vote for someone they agree with in more detail. But the current vote is seen by Tisza voters as more of an anti-Orbán vote, and the details will have to be worked out later. But if I had to guess, it will probably be standard technocratic stuff, since their main economy figurehead is the former global vice president of Shell, István Kapitány. I also predict they will be moderate on culture war issues and the focus will be on more about institutions and they will try to prosecute the oligarchs etc.
An interesting little moment in the marathon 7-hour 50-artist "System-Breaking Grand Concert" two days before the election was when the Jewish Hungarian reggae singer, vegan and pro-Palestine activist GRas called on the crowd to chant the Hungarian equivalent of "Free free Palestine" and then proceeded to diss "IsraHell" imperialism and capitalism. https://youtube.com/live/t6BEQJTqnXY?t=14593 Afterwards, the speaker / show host was quick to say that "we don't all agree in everything" and that this even is for one specific cause etc. All this good little attention afterwards, since the focus was stolen by a singer who flashed his dick and said he'd put his balls on the head of a minister, and everyone, including Orbán made references to that event.
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