THE GREAT HUNGARIAN FEINT: DID ORBAN CON THE EU?

When I filed my previous report on the Hungarian elections – that melancholy dispatch titled “The Fall of Hungary,” in which Viktor Orbán, after sixteen years of stubborn resistance, delivered the political equivalent of a pub darts defeat with the weary dignity of a man who knows the referee has been nobbled – I rather thought the story was over. Hungary had, at last, been brought to heel. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party had swept to a two-thirds majority, the EU’s collective bosom swelled with relief, and the usual suspects in Brussels, Davos, and the more expensive bits of Manhattan could be imagined cracking open the good champagne while murmuring about “European values” and “democratic renewal.” It all had the satisfying finality of a sandcastle succumbing to the tide.

Yet, as is so often the case with these continental dramas, the tide has a way of receding again, revealing not driftwood but the faint outline of a rather more elaborate sandcastle. A theory has been doing the rounds on the wilder fringes of social media – one so deliciously baroque that it demands, if not belief, then at least the sort of respectful attention one gives to a well-crafted conspiracy yarn. The suggestion, in essence, is that Orbán did not lose at all. He merely staged the most elegant handover in modern European politics: a controlled opposition so controlled that the opposition itself barely noticed it was being controlled at all.

The notion originates, as these things often do, from a single tweet that has acquired the quiet authority of a rumour whispered in the right cafés. Its author, observing the post-election landscape with the narrowed eye of a man who has seen too many Hungarian political operas, cannot shake the feeling that Orbán and Magyar have together given the EU – and all those other left-wing, green, woke worthies – the most comprehensive political kicking since the Treaty of Trianon. Orbán, the theory runs, spotted the trap early. The international commentariat had him in their sights; the NGOs were sharpening their spreadsheets; George Soros was, one assumes, already drafting another memo. So what does a wily Magyar do? He sends in his best friend. Péter Magyar, once Orbán’s own man, a former insider with the sort of credentials that make Brussels salivate, was despatched into the electoral lists like a Trojan horse wearing a very convincing centrist smile.

The beauty of the scheme, if scheme it was, lay in the arithmetic. Hungary’s left-wing opposition parties, those plucky little outfits that had spent years positioning themselves as the authentic voice of anti-Orbán resistance, all failed to clear the 5% threshold. Poof – gone. Vanished like so many well-meaning manifestos into the Budapest fog. What remained was a binary choice that was not, on closer inspection, binary at all: Orbán or Magyar. Or, to put it in the slightly more conspiratorial vernacular of the tweet, Orbán or Orbán. The only complication was linguistic. Nobody outside Hungary speaks Hungarian, least of all the people in Strasbourg whose job it is to understand these things. The EU, Soros, Obama, Clinton – they all swallowed the bait whole, convinced they had witnessed the long-overdue liberalisation of a stubborn little Central European redoubt. One can picture Hillary Clinton in some well-appointed drawing room, glass in hand, declaring the dawn of a new era while a Hungarian waiter, polishing the silver, permitted himself the tiniest inward smirk.

It is, of course, the sort of theory that sensible people are supposed to greet with a raised eyebrow and a pinch of salt the size of Lake Balaton. After all, the personal animus between Orbán and Magyar has been well documented: the former ally turned sworn enemy, the allegations of abuse of office, the very public falling-out that would have done credit to a Renaissance court. Hungarian voters, one is reliably informed by those who actually live there, loathe one another with a sincerity that no amount of backstage choreography could fake. And yet… there was Orbán’s concession speech. Not the furious howl of a man robbed of power, nor even the stoic growl of a defeated boxer. Just that quiet, unfussy acknowledgement – the verbal equivalent of shrugging off a coat and hanging it neatly on the hook. No claims of fraud, no midnight rants, no desperate appeals to the constitutional court. Just a man who has lost a game of darts down the pub, as I rather uncharitably put it last week, and is now buying the next round. One begins to wonder. Could it be that the grizzled holdout, who spent sixteen years blocking EU directives with the cheerful obstinacy of a man parking a tractor across a motorway, had calculated that the only way to preserve Hungarian sovereignty was to appear to surrender it? That by installing a successor who looks and sounds sufficiently Brussels-friendly, he could unlock the frozen funds, quiet the NGOs, and still keep the actual reins in reliable hands? It would be the political equivalent of the old Hungarian joke about the man who sells his soul to the devil and then discovers the devil is on his payroll.

The satisfaction one feels at the possibility – and let us be honest, it is only a possibility – is not, I hasten to add, the crude glee of seeing one’s own side win. It is the pleasure of watching the great and the good of the European project being taken for the sort of ride that usually requires a very large expense account and a rented yacht. For years they have lectured Budapest on “values,” on “solidarity,” on the moral imperative of opening borders to whoever happens to be passing with the right paperwork. Now, if the theory holds, they have been handed precisely the government they demanded – only to discover, too late, that it may not be quite the government they thought they were getting. The EU’s heart, as Ursula von der Leyen so memorably declared on election night, beats stronger tonight in Hungary. One wonders whether it is beating with triumph or with the first faint flutter of suspicion. 

Of course, one must take all this with the aforementioned pinch of salt. Hungarian politics has a habit of being more Shakespearean than conspiratorial; the personal hatreds are real, the policy overlaps fewer than the theorists would like. Magyar’s voters speak of hope and change with the same earnestness one once heard in Britain before the Brexit vote, and they will not take kindly to being told they were merely extras in someone else’s long game. Nor should we underestimate the genuine appetite for a fresh face after sixteen years of the same one. Politics, even in its most theatrical moments, is rarely pure puppetry.

And yet the image lingers: two men who once worked in the same political stable, now apparently on opposite sides, exchanging the sort of courteous congratulations that suggest the rivalry was, if not scripted, then at least performed with a certain professional courtesy. Orbán felicitating his successor without the usual grumbling about stolen elections. The left-wing parties conveniently evaporating below the threshold. The EU breathing a sigh of relief that sounds, on second hearing, suspiciously like the exhalation of a man who has just been relieved of his wallet. If it is a con, it is a magnificent one – the sort of slow-burn satire that Thomas Hobbes himself might have appreciated in his prime, watching the Brussels bureaucracy congratulate itself on its own cleverness while the Hungarians, with that quiet Central European cunning, simply changed the labels on the bottles. If it is not… well, then we are back where we started, watching another small nation fold itself neatly into the European consensus, complete with the usual helping of guilt, diversity targets, and the slow erosion of anything that once tasted distinctly of paprika and poetry.

Either way, Hungary remains a splendid spectacle. One only hopes the next act reveals whether the curtain came down on a tragedy or a particularly deadpan comedy. In the meantime, I shall be watching Budapest with the same mixture of affection and scepticism one reserves for an old friend who has just announced he is giving up drinking. It may be genuine. It may be tactical. But one rather suspects the hangover, when it comes, will be felt most acutely in Strasbourg.

MOYA BRENNAN (1952 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Moya Brennan, who has died at 73, was the voice that made Irish traditional music sound like the wind complaining in several languages at once. Born Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin in 1952 in the Donegal Gaeltacht, she emerged from a family so musical that their local pub, Leo’s Tavern, must have felt like a perpetual ceilidh with occasional licensing hours. As the eldest of nine, she helped form Clannad in 1970 with siblings and uncles, a group that took the ancient sorrows of Ireland and polished them until they gleamed just enough for the 1980s charts. 

Their breakthrough came with the theme to Harry’s Game, a brooding, Gaelic lament for the Troubles that somehow reached Top of the Pops—a feat roughly as likely as a Gregorian chant troubling the disco floor. Clannad sold millions, won Grammys and Baftas, and soundtracked everything from Robin of Sherwood to the misty longings of a generation that discovered Celtic mysticism via television. Moya’s harp and crystalline vocals became the signature: ethereal yet sturdy, like Donegal granite wrapped in silk. Her sister Enya later floated away on a cloud of multi-tracked serenity to even greater commercial heights, but Moya remained the anchor, the one who remembered the words in the old tongue. 

Solo work followed—albums under her own name, collaborations with Bono (who called her voice one of the greatest the human ear had experienced, a compliment so lavish it risked causing structural damage to modesty), Mick Jagger, and others. She collected an Emmy, a lifetime achievement award from Michael D Higgins, and the quiet satisfaction of never quite abandoning her roots. Diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2020, she carried on with the stoicism of someone who had spent decades making fog and rain sound romantic. Her final album appeared in 2024; Clannad’s farewell tour had already drawn the curtains in 2023. 

She died peacefully in Donegal, surrounded by family, on 13 April 2026. Tributes spoke of her generosity, her peaceable presence, and how she never forgot where she came from. In an industry fond of overblown mythologies, Moya Brennan was the genuine article: a woman whose voice suggested the Atlantic had learned to sing, albeit with a sardonic undertow. The mists will sound a little thinner now.

IRELAND'S DIESEL DEFIANCE

In the grey, sodden expanse of a Belfast bypass on an April morning that felt less like spring and more like a municipal reprimand from the weather gods, a procession of tractors moved at the pace of a funeral cortege for common sense. Green John Deeres and red Massey Fergusons, some trailing loaders and rollers like medieval siege engines repurposed for the 21st century, crawled along the Sydenham Bypass, bound for the vague direction of George Best Belfast City Airport. Behind them, a snarl of white vans, family hatchbacks and articulated lorries stretched into the misty distance, their drivers no doubt contemplating the existential void between the cost of diesel and the promise of net-zero nirvana. This was not some picturesque rural idyll captured for a tourism board; it was the Irish farmer, in all his diesel-scented glory, declaring that enough was, at long last, enough.

The post that captured it – terse, almost laconic in its understatement – nailed the mood with the precision of a well-aimed silage fork. “What the Irish skinsuit regime doesn’t realise,” it observed, “is that the farmers and hauliers increasingly have nothing left to lose. They’re already drowning under the fuel taxes. As things stand, their businesses are toast anyway, so they may as well protest with everything they’ve got.” One pictures the author typing this with the weary detachment of a man who has seen too many official pronouncements delivered in the tone of a headmaster explaining why the school hamster must be sacrificed for carbon neutrality. The “skinsuit regime” is a phrase of genius, evoking not merely suits but the sort of hollowed-out husks that once contained actual humans before the civil service and Brussels filled them with regulatory ectoplasm. These are the same functionaries who lecture us from heated offices about the virtues of public transport while the rest of us calculate whether the next tankful of fuel will require selling a kidney or simply the family silver.

Let us be clear, in the manner of a man clearing his throat before delivering an uncomfortable truth: the Irish farmer is no revolutionary firebrand with a manifesto and a beret. He is the last honest link in the food chain, the chap who gets up before the rest of us have remembered how to spell “latte,” who coaxes life from soil that has been taxed, subsidised, hectored and hectored again into reluctant obedience. For decades he has been the butt of every urban sophisticate’s joke – the slow-talking rustic whose tractor is worth more than his house and whose politics are presumed to stop at the parish pump. Yet here he is, not storming barricades but simply refusing to vanish quietly into the spreadsheet of some green technocrat’s five-year plan. The fuel taxes have done what centuries of invasion, famine and partition could not: they have pushed him to the point where protest is no longer a choice but a form of economic self-defence. When your margins are thinner than the average politician’s grasp of reality, and every litre of diesel is another brick in the wall between solvency and the food bank, then blocking a bypass becomes less an act of civil disobedience and more a statement of continued existence.

One cannot help but admire the sheer, unadorned pragmatism of it. The hauliers are in the same leaky boat, of course – those unsung heroes who keep the supermarket shelves from resembling the aftermath of a particularly enthusiastic student raid on the off-licence. They too have watched their costs balloon while the rewards shrink, all in the service of an energy policy that reads like it was drafted by someone who has never had to warm a barn in February. The European Union, that grand experiment in bureaucratic overreach, has spent years telling its member states (and the United Kingdom’s slightly embarrassed Northern appendage) that the future is electric, or hydrogen, or perhaps just a collective holding of breath until the wind blows in the right direction. Meanwhile, the farmer stares at the price board and wonders why the same officials who subsidise his neighbour’s solar panels cannot grasp that his tractor does not run on good intentions and a favourable exchange rate.

This is satire, yes, but the sort that writes itself. Imagine the scene in some Brussels conference room: earnest young graduates in ethically sourced knitwear debating “just transition” frameworks while outside, in the real world, a man in wellies is deciding whether to sell the herd or sell the farm. The skinsuit regime – whether in Stormont, Westminster or the European Parliament – specialises in such abstractions. It specialises, too, in failing to notice when the abstractions have begun to bite. The protesters are not asking for the moon; they are asking for the basic arithmetic of survival. Fuel taxes that treat diesel as a luxury good rather than the lifeblood of an island economy are not policy; they are a slow-motion mugging with added virtue-signalling.

And yet, from this muddy, rain-lashed standoff, one begins to sense the faint stirrings of something larger. These tractors are not merely clogging a bypass; they are the opening bars of a tune that has been playing, sotto voce, across these islands for some time. The farmers of Ireland – north and south, for the distinction grows increasingly academic when the price of red diesel is the same on both sides of an invisible line – have become the canary in the coalmine. Or perhaps the tractor in the bypass. Their protest is the visible symptom of a deeper malaise: the realisation that the people who grow the food, drive the lorries and pay the bills have been politely ignored for too long by those who dine out on the proceeds.

Here, then, is the hope – and it is a hope expressed without the usual frothy optimism of the true believer, but with the dry, sardonic satisfaction of a man watching the first crack appear in a particularly pompous dam. This Belfast convoy, modest as it appears, is the prelude to something grander: the forthcoming “Unite The Kingdom” rally, that gathering of the disaffected, the over-taxed and the thoroughly fed-up, which promises to do what polite petitions and focus groups have signally failed to achieve. One can already picture the scene: banners fluttering like laundry on a bad drying day, speakers who actually know the price of a pint and a packet of fags, and a crowd that includes not just farmers but teachers, nurses, small-business owners and the occasional retired colonel who has finally had enough of being told his generation ruined everything.

Should that rally deliver on its quiet promise – should it force the resignation of Keir Starmer and the entire Labour government, that curious coalition of metropolitan manners and provincial mismanagement – then the dominoes may at last begin to topple. Starmer’s administration, with its curious blend of fiscal incontinence and green zealotry, has managed the rare feat of alienating both the countryside and the corner shop. Its departure would not be mourned in the shires, nor, one suspects, in many a Belfast housing estate. From there, the contagion of common sense could spread, as it so often does when people remember that sovereignty is not an abstract noun but the right to decide whether your tractor can afford to leave the yard. And if the spirit takes hold across the continent – if the French gilets jaunes find common cause with the Dutch nitrogen farmers, if the Poles and the Hungarians decide that Brussels edicts taste better when served with a side of self-respect – then the European Union itself may finally achieve the dignified dissolution it has so long avoided. Not with fireworks or fanfare, but with the quiet, inexorable logic of a system that has forgotten its own founding principle: that people, not paperwork, are supposed to be in charge. 

The skinsuit regime would, of course, protest that this is all terribly regressive, terribly populist, terribly un-European. One can only reply, in the driest possible tone, that when the alternative is watching the continent’s breadbasket turn into a subsidized car park for wind turbines, a little populism may be the only sane response. The tractors will eventually move on. The bypass will clear. But the memory of that slow, deliberate crawl through the rain will linger – a reminder that when ordinary men and women conclude they have nothing left to lose, they tend to find a great deal to gain. The Irish farmer, bless his stubborn heart, has always known this. The rest of us are only now catching up.