Dispatch from Budapest: Hungary Roils

Restive Hungarians protest Orbán's policies while Trump adopts them. A first-hand look.

My photos of the April 1 Budapest anti-government rally

Hungarians are restless. Hours after arriving in Budapest on April 1, I found myself caught up in a political protest demonstration involving thousands of pissed-off citizens registering their outrage over increasingly draconian policies imposed by Trump pal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The protesters blocked bridges connecting Buda and Pest in defiance of police orders not to do so.

The catalyst behind this protest was Orbán’s ban against Pride Day on the pretext of “protecting children”; a spokeswoman representing Hungary’s lesbian community is in the top right photo above. But a broad spectrum of Budapest’s residents turned out to display opposition to Orbán and his Fidesz Party on a range of issues that only keep growing. This is the third mass demonstration in the capital in as many weeks called by opposition MP Ákos Hadházy, who declared, “We must not stop protesting.” The Fidesz parliamentary speaker, in response, sanctioned Hadházy and five other protesting MP’s with fines and temporary suspensions for their anti-government actions.

Ákos Hadházy

The mood was peaceful yet impassioned, with repeated shouts of “Down with Orbán! Down with Fidesz!” and “Fascist Orbán, get out!” Protests went on past midnight with demonstrators fanning out to block all four bridges linking the two banks of the city. Police units remained on the margins, choosing not to intervene, though they blocked several entry points.

The previous week’s mass demonstration also closed the four main bridges, but, again, incurred no violence. At that rally, Hadházy condemned the growing corruption under Orbán, declaring to the crowd, “While Orbán is stealing our freedoms, he is also stealing our money!”

Hungary’s leading opposition figure, Peter Magyar, led the March 15 protests, which attracted more than 50,000 into the streets in response to Orbán’s pledge to crack down on what he called a “shadow army” of NGO’s and media who received funding from USAID, the E.U. and billionaire George Soros. “Those who cheat on their own nation should end up in the dustbin of history,” Peter Magyar told the crowd. “Our time has come.” He added that his Tisza Party would independently carry out a popular survey on a dozen key economic and political issues to hear the “voice of the nation.”

Hungarians with whom I spoke exhibited great passion, but also great worry about their nation’s future, whether their political actions will be able to bring change.

A young university educated woman told me that people are fed up with “Orbán dividing people using hate and lies.” She said that young Hungarians feel they must fight now before it is late to bring change. She felt reservations about Peter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, uncertain that he has what it takes to go up against the powerful Fidesz political machine and its oligarch backers.

A man in his 40’s told me that Orbán is “nothing but a Putin puppet” who will “always do Russia’s bidding.” He, too, had reservations about Magyar and other opposition leaders. While insisting that “we must fight hard,” he feared for the future. “We on the democracy side really f—-ed up. We should’ve taken strong action much earlier. It may be too late.”

As one approaches Hungary’s capital, to this seasoned traveler’s eyes, the exurbs and beyond appear rather drab and scruffy, with buildings in need of fresh paint and public grounds unkempt. The city center, on the other hand, is a bustling, sleekly modern place with all of the upscale European big brand stores, glittering high rise hotels and a rich variety of cool restaurants and cozy cafés. But as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum points out,

Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Oddly enough, however, Hungary appears to reflect what the future may look like for the United States and other countries. Russia, Belarus, Turkey, India, Venezuela and likely Argentina are already there. Important members of the E.U. also risk tumbling into a populist-driven neo-fascist/oligarchic future.

To Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán is a model leader, one he continually praises as “a great man, a great leader in Europe.” In the year leading up to the November election, Trump cited Orbán’s name 109 times publicly, far surpassing mentions of other European leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky. And it appears the Hungarian strongman has served as something of a mentor to his U.S. counterpart, having held multiple meetings with Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign and since the election. Orbán furthermore has close interactions with hard right U.S. entities such as CPAC and the Heritage Foundation. Study what Orbán has pulled off in degrading Hungarian democracy since he assumed office in 2010 and compare it with what Trump and his team of nihilists are doing now “moving fast and breaking things,” and you can discern a template for the incremental imposition of autocracy. What the anti-Orbán Hungarian man I cited told me about democracy’s defenders having messed up and not acted forcefully sooner may very well apply to America. Neutered Mueller investigation. Failed impeachments. Merrick Garland and his Justice Department. Prosecutions derailed. Pliant Republicans. Partisan Supreme Court.

It indeed may be too late.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.