The dangerous rise of illiberal nationalism in Hungary

The Hindu

23-05-2025

As I walked across the iconic Chain Bridge that joins Buda to Pest, the sharply uniformed Hungarian cops brought me to a halt. The lively district of Pest that hosted the clubs and restaurants of Budapest was closed to pedestrians. It was not a scene I imagined in a western country. But it was a reckoning with the dark authority of a nation with a communist past that could close off roads to the public to secure smooth passage for a political VIP.
That VIP was Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, whose visit to Hungary in April coincided with the central European nation exiting the International Criminal Court (ICC). Following the war in Gaza, Netanyahu was labelled a war criminal by most European countries. In Hungary, however, he was welcomed by his old friend, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who had proudly declared, 'The new state we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.'
Seven bridges across the Danube river connect Buda, the quieter castle district, with Pest, the happening district for shopping, clubbing, and dining. The very next day, I looked from Pest towards Buda to see another bridge blocked by thousands of protesters demonstrating against the banning of Pride March in Hungary.
Restricting queer rights
My friend Jeroen Maassen van den Brink, who lives in Budapest with his husband René, tells me that in Orban's Hungary, homosexuality has become closely associated with paedophilia, following Act LXXIX that went into effect on July 8, 2021. On March 18, 2025, the Hungarian parliament passed a law banning any public demonstration of queer identity, once again aligning it to the government's 'child protection' laws.
The future of liberal sexual policy, as Jeroen sees it, is bleak in Hungary. 'We know that the government policies are less in favour of queer lifestyles and expressions, but we believe that being a part of the European Union will still safeguard our fundamental rights,' he says. 'But we see a lack of support in the form of queer-friendly places, or demonstrations for equal rights that are supported by all. We hear queer Hungarians are moving abroad, leaving behind a more conservative population.'
The last few niches, therefore, become precious — we go to Aurora in the 8th district for beer and unicum (a Hungarian herbal liqueur), and amidst the haze of smoky substance, I sense chilled out vibes that are now hard to find in the famous coffee shops in Budapest. 'With the upcoming 2026 elections, we do not see a change in the political scenery nor a reversal of the anti-LGBTQIA+ laws that have been put in place since 2021,' says Jeroen.
Of language lost
How did a nation that formed a brave and unique national identity shaped by heroic literature and a strikingly revived language become Europe's most frightening instance of illiberal democracy? I remember pausing before the cemetery of the family of Sándor Petőfi, Hungary's national poet, at the Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest earlier this April. Killed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, his body never recovered (the graves hold the rest of his family), Petőfi wrote the famous line: On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls. It became the patriotic war cry of the Magyars, Hungary's dominant ethnic group, against the domination of the Habsburg Empire, up to the crushed revolution of 1848. It was indeed a nationalism shaped by language and literature.
Song, music, language and literature are often the most prized possessions, instruments or weapons for peoples, nations, and communities drained dry by oppressors. The inescapable irony of such maimed nationalisms is that, in their fury to fight their oppressor, they don't notice the oppression that they inflict on people weaker than them. Anyone familiar with the Francophone nationalism in Canada's Quebec that fought the national dominance of the English language, knows the Quebecois rarely talk about the indigenous people wiped out from the history of the province.
Likewise with the Boers of South Africa, the descendants of Dutch settlers. Blinded by the violence of the 20th century Anglo-Boer War in which the English crushed them, the Boers asserted the only thing left to them, their white skin, to initiate apartheid rule so that they could champion an aggressive nationalism that excluded the black, brown, and coloured people of South Africa.
Forgotten legacy of poets and critics
Uniquely positioned in Central Europe, Hungary had pursued a rare heroic path to turn a marginal, peasant vernacular into a language of literary and scientific prestige. An intelligentsia that spoke and wrote in German eventually turned to Hungarian to create poets like Petőfi, the language reformist Ferenc Kazinczy, and the literary critic György Lukács, who wrote scholarly books in German alongside accounts of his vibrant public intellectual life in Hungarian.
It was a nation that had suffered many times over. Dismemberment into scattered parts — some of it in current Romania — was the price it paid for being on the wrong side of World War I. After World War II, 'liberation' by the Russians cast the country from Hitler to Stalin, with thousands killed by Russian tanks in the counter-revolution of 1956.
But, standing among the Communist-marked graves in the Kerepesi cemetery, the trinity of the hammer-sickle-star reminiscent of my own childhood in Communist Bengal, my heart felt wrenched at the current destiny of this traumatic memory. It now drives the aggressive nationalism of Orbán's Fidesz Party that spews venom at its own Roma gypsy population, tramples on the rights of queer people, and welcomes a war criminal in the ICC to a glorious celebration in its capital that blocks the passage of pedestrians on its spacious streets.
The writer is the author of 'The Firebird', 'The Scent of God', and most recently, 'The Remains of the Body'.