In the grand theatre of European decline, where the scenery is forever being repainted in the confirmative beige of Brussels bureaucracy and the audience has long since nodded off into a complacent stupor, one small but stubborn spotlight has finally flickered out. Viktor Orbán, that grizzled Hungarian holdout who for sixteen years played the role of the last man in the EU parliament with his arms folded and his veto finger twitching, has conceded defeat. “I have lost the election,” he announced, with the air of a man who has just lost a game of darts down the pub. It is the sort of moment that calls not for tears, exactly—tears are for optimists—but for the drier, more sardonic mourning that Christopher Hitchens once reserved for the collapse of empires and the rise of television game shows. Hungary, it seems, has voted for progress. Which is to say, it has voted for the usual.
One pictures the scene in Budapest: the cafés still serving goulash with a side of defiant nationalism, the Parliament building glowing under floodlights like a wedding cake that has survived one too many ideological anniversaries. And then the concession speech, delivered with the weary dignity of a boxer who knows the referee has been paid off. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party—centre-right in the same way that a mildly reformed pickpocket is centre-honest—have secured their projected two-thirds majority. The man who once positioned himself as Orbán’s successor in all but name has instead inherited the keys to the kingdom and promptly handed them over to the very forces his predecessor spent a decade and a half fending off. It is the political equivalent of locking the fox in the henhouse and then congratulating the fox on its democratic mandate. The globalists, those tireless architects of a borderless utopia where every culture is equally welcome and therefore equally diluted, must be popping the champagne corks in their sleek offices overlooking the Place Luxembourg. Ursula von der Leyen, never one to miss a photo opportunity in the ruins, has already declared that “Europe’s heart beats stronger tonight in Hungary.” One wonders if she means the heart that pumps blood, or the one that merely circulates directives from Strasbourg.
For Hungary itself, the transformation will be swift and, one suspects, advertised as “enrichment.” Those migrant projects that Orbán kept locked in the bottom drawer since 2015—gathering dust alongside the EU’s more imaginative fantasies of compulsory relocation quotas—are now, presumably, being dusted off with the enthusiasm of a maiden aunt rediscovering her old recipe for cultural suicide pound cake. Population exchange, they used to call it in the more candid briefings; today it arrives gift-wrapped as “solidarity” and “diversity targets.” Budapest, that pearl of the Danube with its Habsburg grandeur and its stubborn refusal to become another Malmö, may soon find itself hosting the same vibrant street scenes that have made Paris and Berlin such delightful case studies in social cohesion. One can already imagine the tourists of 2035: arriving to photograph the Chain Bridge, only to discover that the folk costumes in the souvenir shops have been quietly replaced by a more inclusive range of keffiyehs and knock-off designer hijabs. Hungarian culture, that peculiar brew of paprika, poetry, and a healthy suspicion of outsiders, will not vanish overnight. It will simply be outvoted, out-bred, and out-manoeuvred until it becomes the charming relic that polite Europeans mention in the same nostalgic tone they once reserved for the dodo.
And what of the Hungarians themselves? The ordinary citizens who, until yesterday, could walk their streets without the nagging sense that their grandchildren might speak a different language at home. They have chosen the path of Western normalisation, which is to say they have chosen to become like everyone else: prosperous, guilt-ridden, and demographically doomed. The essayists of the future—those few who still bother with such quaint pursuits—will no doubt describe it as a triumph of the ballot box. In reality, it feels more like the quiet capitulation of a people who have grown tired of swimming against the current and have decided, with a shrug, to let the river carry them wherever it pleases. The river, of course, leads straight to the open borders and the demographic arithmetic that has already turned much of Western Europe into a polite experiment in reverse colonisation. One almost admires the efficiency: sixteen years of resistance undone in a single election cycle. It is the political version of building a magnificent sandcastle and then inviting the tide in for tea.
Nor is the damage confined to the cultural sphere. There is the small matter of the economy, that unglamorous but essential engine which once allowed Central Europe a sliver of independence. Under Orbán, Hungary had the temerity to block the more deranged EU sanctions packages and to treat the Ukrainian adventure with something approaching scepticism rather than the mandatory flag-waving hysteria. Now the brakes are off. The war machine in Kyiv—eternally hungry, eternally noble in the eyes of its Western patrons—will find the Hungarian treasury a newly compliant donor. Funds that might have repaired roads, schools, or pensions will instead be siphoned northward to prop up a conflict that shows every sign of becoming Europe’s forever war. Central European citizens, those sturdy burghers of the old Hapsburg and Ottoman fringes, will discover what their Western counterparts have known for years: that the price of being “good Europeans” is measured not only in cultural erosion but in the slow, grinding transfer of their wages into the bottomless pit of someone else’s battlefield. It is a form of economic vassalage dressed up as solidarity, and the humour in it is of the blackest sort—the sort that makes one laugh lest one weep.
This, then, is the victory for the forces of evil, if one may be permitted so unfashionable a phrase. Globalism has never announced itself with horns and pitchforks; it arrives instead with spreadsheets, NGOs, and the gentle insistence that resistance is both futile and rather gauche. It is the ideology that smiles while it erases you, that speaks of “human rights” while it engineers the replacement of one people with another, that lectures on democracy while it ensures that the only permissible outcome is convergence toward the same bland, borderless monoculture. Orbán’s outreach to Trump and Netanyahu—those desperate handshakes with the strongmen of the moment—proved, in the end, to be no shield. Selfies with the powerful, it turns out, do not immunise you against the electorate’s deeper appetites for illusion. The transatlanticists and the Israel enthusiasts among the European right have received their little shock; one hopes they enjoy it. It is the kind of irony Hitchens would have savoured: the right, forever convinced that a well-timed alliance with the powerful would save them, discovering too late that the powerful have their own calendars.
And so Hungary joins the club. Visit Budapest while it still retains its flavour, the advice runs—like a travelogue for a city on the brink of aesthetic euthanasia. In a few short years it may resemble Vienna or Berlin: polished, diverse, and spiritually vacant. It is, as the original post so aptly noted, both sad and a wake-up call. Though one fears the alarm has already been snoozed into irrelevance. The people, as ever, sleepwalk toward the precipice with the contented smile of those who have been told the drop is only a gentle slope. If there is any consolation in this downbeat tableau, it is that even in the midst of civilizational surrender, one may still observe the absurdity with a raised eyebrow and a dry martini. The forces of evil have won another round. They always do. The question is not whether the rest of us will wake up, but whether there will be anything left worth waking up to when we finally do.