Hungary in 2026 is what most developed countries were probably on their way to becoming in the 1980s and early nineties, had mass migration not intervened: a sleazy gerontocracy with occasional bouts of moral-majority politics andethnic nationalism. With socialism dead, the opposition is made up of liberal parties led by equally sleazy Tony Blair-style modernisers. Crime has ceased to be an issue, partly because the population is ageing. The people, like pandas, do not breed. There is boredom and ennui. There is nothing analogous to, say, the Manchester Arena bombing.

Hungary has had a dreadful century and is now a tired sort of place

Hungary has had a dreadful century and is now a tired sort of place

Such has been the work of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, who is to face the voters again on 12 April. Elected on a platform of fiscal retrenchment, Orban’s Fidesz party would go on to debut many of the phrases and methods of right-wing populism. ‘We were Trumpists before Trump,’ as Orban often says. The Orbanists have always had a keen sense of a ‘Blob’ or ‘deep state’ lying in wait, ready to confound their efforts. In 1990 the Soviet garrison went home and Hungary held free elections, but almost no one employed by the old regime lost their jobs. Zsolt Nemeth, the walrus-moustachioed co-founder of Fidesz and Orban’s old Oxford chum, who I meet on a press trip in Budapest last month, calls these people the ‘postcommunists’ who still held all the key posts.

The ‘postcommunists’ would soon make their presence felt. During a mass strike by taxi drivers later that year – an event apparently so important in the national memory that a feature film was made about it in 2022 – the state broadcaster blocked the prime........

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