Can Hungarians recover from Orbán's 16 year reign?

"It still has to sink in that I lived half of my life under this man's regime, and now it's gone. Is it gone? Is he gone?" Evelin Szigeti's tone of voice is shy, but composed. Lëtzebuerger Journal meets her a week after former Fidesz member Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won a two-thirds supermajority in Hungary's April 12 parliamentary election. She's still in disbelief, describing a lingering sense of confusion. "I don't know. So I cried. I cried because I cannot believe that this is really happening."

Six years ago, the now 30-year-old Hungarian moved to Luxembourg with her husband. They both grew up in Gyula, a small, quiet town on the border with Romania. Today, Evelin is enrolled in the Master in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts at the University of Luxembourg. She simultaneously works on Dr Catherine Tebaldi's research project DiGiTRAD, where she researches the communication strategies of far-right parties and anti-woke, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-migration movements.

Evelin's interest in these topics is little surprising. For 16 years, she witnessed her home country – that remains close to her heart – progressively deteriorate and grow divided under Viktor Orbán's notoriously populist and corruption-riddled Fidesz-KDNP government. In recent months, she has been keeping a gratitude diary for her grandmother – "she was just so stressed about all of this, and her blood pressure was sky-high" – and mentions that her mother had for months been suffering from stress-induced headaches. She elaborates that the Hungarian healthcare system, too, had become so bad that people would die of infections in hospitals due to a lack of clean and proper equipment. "People [in Hungary] are mentally and physically in a really bad shape. I don't like to throw the word 'trauma' around lightly, but I definitely think Orbán was traumatic for the whole country."

Life under Orbán

Evelin liked growing up in Hungary, at least for the most part. "It had its advantages and disadvantages as any place would." She details being the daughter to small businesspeople, coming from a middle-class background, and having enjoyed private tutoring as well as good education. She recalls her parents being disappointed when Orbán was re-elected in 2010. "Things would become more difficult for them, because their business was small." (see info box)