Something remarkable happened yesterday in Budapest. This.
This is Pride Day in Budapest. A protest that was officially banned by Orban’s government. This was the result: up to 200,000 people participating. That is an insane number in a country of less than 10 million. Budapest has not seen a mass protest like this in many decades.
I am as straight, as “cis”, as “hetero” as they come. Yet I was beaming with joy, seeing these images of Budapest’s Elizabeth Bridge. There is hope yet for my Hungarian friends, I thought. That despite all the anti-EU, anti-Western propaganda that Orban uses to legitimize his illiberal soft authoritarianism, despite the real or imagined historical wrongs that lend themselves as useful propaganda for Orban’s grievance politics, there are this many Hungarians who said, enough already.
Come to think of it, if I still lived in Budapest, chances are I’d have been out there on the bridge myself. And I am definitely not the kind who likes crowds or protests.
Sometimes you must.
Of course Orban blamed the EU. Outside agitators. I can almost hear echoes from the old days, when Kadar’s regime blamed American imperialists for any discontent. I can almost see an alternate history in which Kadar’s regime never collapsed: Orban would happily serve as a member of the Politburo, or more likely, as the Party’s First Secretary, the country’s de facto dictator.