After much good news for President Putin, thanks to Donald Trump’s blundering intervention in the Middle East, Hungary’s impressive election result on Sunday night has hit the Russian despot with a serious setback. Which American deputy The president’s wrongful intervention in Central Europe last week clearly did nothing to stop.
There has been no greater friend to Russian interests among EU leaders than Viktor Orbán, whose loss leaves his country with new rulers. They will inherit a Hungary still dependent on Russian energy, while its reputation – and Orbán’s – has been tarnished by ties to the Kremlin. In the final days of the election campaign, audio emerged that appeared to show Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, agreeing to hand over sensitive European Union documents to Putin’s government. Likewise, Orbán had openly blocked a vital €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine.
This pull towards Russia appears to have played a key role in the heavy defeat of his government by his former loyalist, Péter Magyar. Like the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan reported from Budapest, “Everyone I spoke to in the crowd said that the relationship between Hungary and Russia was what determined their vote.” In his victory rally, a triumphant Magyar declared that “We want to be a country that is nobody’s vassal”, but instead to be “a European country” again.
And in response, his supporters cheered Let’s go home! – “The Russians go home!” – echoing many other voices celebrating across the capital – and no doubt across Europe. Protesters had even chanted this slogan at Orbán’s own rallies during the campaign. ITVX reported that the phrase “had gained increasing currency amid Orbán’s move towards Moscow”. The words go deep into the modern history of Hungary.
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In 2016, making an oral history series for BBC Radio 4 about the major crises of the Cold War, I had the opportunity to interview a man named Mátyás Sárközi. On October 23, 1956, he was working as a journalist in Budapest when a student demonstration turned into a revolution against the Soviet domination of Hungary, which had been enforced since the end of World War II. At first, students chanted in advance that soldiers of all nations should go home. This was quite daring, but within hours they were singing Let’s go home! The scene recreated by Sárközi 60 years later continues to play in my mind; one of those electric moments radio producers live for.
As Sárközi and other young rebels told me, before the night of the 23rd was over, the hard-line communist regime had rejected the students’ demands for more freedom; workers had joined the uprising, the 30-foot statue of Stalin in Budapest had been cut down, and gun battles with the regime’s security forces had broken out. Amid the fighting outside the town’s radio station, Sárközi saw a student lying dead in the street. Soviet tanks arrived – but eventually withdrew.
For a moment of ecstasy, it looked like they had won. It appeared that reformist communist leader Imre Nagy, who had returned to office and pulled the country out of the Moscow-imposed Warsaw Pact military alliance, would continue, possibly leading a coalition. But then the tanks came back, in overwhelming numbers, and destroyed the capital. Nagy was tricked into hiding and eventually hanged. Like many of his young peers, Sárközi fled across the border to the West and came to Britain, where LSE students volunteered to teach refugees English.
This was not the first time that Russian forces had crushed Hungarian hopes for freedom. On the day the revolution began, students laid a wreath at the foot of a statue commemorating a Polish general who had fought with the Hungarians in their revolution against Habsburg rule in 1848-49 – before reinforcements sent by Czar Nicholas I helped quell the revolt. This too is again on Hungarian minds today. of Times reported István Kapitány, the prospective minister for the economy in the new Magyar government, comparing their victory to the revolutions of 1848 and 1956 alike.
The ghosts of 1956 were laid to rest, if ever, only in 1989, when Hungary launched another revolution against Soviet hegemony. This time, his signature events were not street brawls or the lynching of security police, as in 1956. One was a huge “pan-European picnic” on the border with Austria – where restrictions had been loosened, paving the way for East Germans to tear through the Iron Curtain, bringing the entire rusted structure to the ground. Another was the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy, which brought more than 100,000 Hungarians to Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. The final speaker that day was a young liberal activist who gave an impassioned speech calling for the Soviets to leave Hungary.
He made the name of the young activist and was called Viktor Orbán.
On March 15, 2024, a national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution, Orbán – now prime minister for a long time, but much less liberal – gave a speech on the steps of the National Museum, attacking the EU and calling Magyar’s Tisza party “warmongers”. Magyar fired back, at a rally of his own, asking “Mr. Prime Minister, why don’t you say ‘Russians go home’ anymore?”
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may have been broken in the most brutal way, but it had a major impact on the West, curbing support for the Soviet Union and spurring the creation of the New Left. The Hungarian revolution of 1989 did not go down—Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had made it clear that there would be no more tanks rolling through European roads—and it had a major impact in the East, bringing about the end of the entire Soviet experiment.
Today, Hungarian bravery leads the way again, in the fight against another harsh ideology. As Magyar looks set to unlock that vital EU loan to Ukraine, this new Hungarian revolution will prove its importance soon enough.
But Tisza’s landslide victory in a huge turnout also suggests that Orbán’s strange version of nationalism, which is so eager to bow to a dominant foreign power, is not invincible. So, not for the first time, there may be a lesson in this Hungarian revolution for the rest of us.
(Further reading: Has the Reformation in the United Kingdom revealed human rights?)
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