Election day is coming for Orbán and Hungary: and this time we dare to dream he may be toppled

In the spring of 2010, I was 20 years old and devastated by Jenny Humphrey being written out of Gossip Girl. But something worried me even more: Orbán’s first big election win that allowed him to change the constitution and rule without the need for allies. Sixteen years later, I still consider both to be fatal mistakes. While Gossip Girl is long gone, Orbán’s regime is still with us: but we finally may have a chance to wave our farewells.

April the 12th: election day. Every Hungarian’s thoughts orbit around this date and, as it approaches, I sense a strange mix of immense hope and looming fear. Elections are always very emotional here. Four, eight and even 12 years ago my friends and I, along with most of Hungary’s youth, got our hopes up only to be slapped in the face by the orange map showing another Orbán win. We cried, we vowed to move abroad – many of us did – and eventually we got back to our lives, writing off the country as hopeless, trying to avoid hope until the final weeks of the next election. 

That all changed two years ago. By early 2024, Orbán’s Hungary had become a wasteland of civil rights abuses and systemic corruption. The country’s healthcare system collapsed under the weight of being grossly underfunded, understaffed and overworked. Wages had not been able to keep up with crazy inflation and through-the-roof rent and property prices. And to sidetrack public attention from these issues, the government started using the LGBTQ+ community as scapegoats – something foreign and deviant that threatened the country. 

It all started with denying trans people the right to ever legally change their names to match their true gender identity in 2020. Then came a propaganda law that made it illegal to even speak about non-heteronormative identities and orientations in schools. Then that got applied to books as well. I wrote an autobiographical novel called Crybaby based on my experiences growing up mixed-race and gay and without a father in this non-diverse country. The book was mostly about the lifelong yearning for a dad and where this void took me in my adult life and romantic relationships. To this day, it cannot be sold in any bookshop that has a church or a school within a 200-metre radius. And even though it got nominated for a Margó prize as best debut novel, the book couldn’t be displayed and sold at the award show as the venue had a school and a church nearby.

All of these laws were aimed to protect young people, the government said – or, as they put it: “stay away from our children”. Except they don’t protect children. In fact, what cracked the regime’s facade was the news in early 2024 that the president had pardoned a former vice-principal who helped cover up a child abuse case at a children’s home. The scandal swept through the country and the president and the minister of justice (both of whom are women) resigned. However, the suspicion was that they might have been following orders – and it soon emerged the pardoned individual was connected to the Orbán family. Then the ex-husband of the departed minister of justice started demanding answers publicly. That man was Péter Magyar, who soon became the first challenger to Orbán who actually has a chance to beat him at an election. Using public outrage and the political elite’s ignorance and disregard of real issues, he has gained a mass following of people who had long lost hope for their country. People like me.

Magyar did in a few months what other opposition leaders couldn’t in more than a decade. He united people across all age groups, backgrounds and ideologies, giving back a sense of national pride that had been previously appropriated and weaponised by Orbán. For almost two years, he’s been constantly on the road, visiting even the most secluded parts of the country, meeting and speaking with local residents, revealing the country’s run-down hospitals and regularly informing his one million followers on social media about the various unlawful attempts the government has made to cover the tracks of their corruption and their ties to Russia. His party, Tisza, bearing the name of one of Hungary’s rivers, won 30% of the vote in the 2024 European parliament election, despite having been relaunched under him only two months earlier. That’s how much people are starved of change. 

Orbán, of course, is doing everything in his power to stop Magyar taking over – and he has plenty of power. The state-funded media networks have been spewing outright government propaganda for years now, and with Magyar’s popularity growing and Tisza rising in the polls, it appears the regime has not been not picky about what it does. The last few weeks seem to have come straight out of a crime series. The former captain of the cybercrime division of the National Bureau of Investigation came forward with allegations that the Hungarian secret service had pressured them to investigate and frame Tisza’s IT specialists. A documentary revealed how the most economically vulnerable people in small villages were exploited into selling their vote or pressured into voting for Orbán’s party by high-ranking local figures such as their mayor, their boss or even their doctor. In cases where these voters still refused, the repercussions were unthinkable: some had their electricity turned off, others no longer received medical prescriptions or referral slips to important examinations, and some had child protective services unlawfully take their children, the documentary said. Foreign secret services warned that Russian agents were coming to Hungary to help Orbán stay in power, and one of the leaks suggested the Russians were proposing to stage a fake assassination attempt against him. An audio clip surfaced in which our minister of foreign affairs, Péter Szijjártó, promised Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, to help remove a Russian oligarch’s family member from the EU sanctions list. Then came news that the son of the former head of the National Bank, who’s been caught up in a £1.5bn corruption scandal, had been shipping all his assets to Dubai…

Many of us joke on Reddit that we’re cancelling our Netflix in light of the current stream of scandals. We’re holding our breath until 12 April, and entire industries are doing the same, with hiring freezes until after the elections. I personally have delayed buying a home because if Orbán is staying, who knows what will be left of the country in a few years – heading out of the EU and into a Putin-like regime. And with the police already closing down nightclubs and raiding celebrities’ homes for criticising the government, we’re almost there. 

Now, with the country at a crossroads between true democracy and a vengeful dictatorship, we will once again tune in, on 12 April, and hope to see the finale we have always deserved.

Krisztián Marton is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter, his book Crybaby won a PEN/Heim prize to translate it into English