As I walked throughout the long-lasting Chain Bridge that joins Buda to Pest, the sharply uniformed Hungarian cops introduced me to a halt. The energetic district of Pest that hosted the golf equipment and eating places of Budapest was closed to pedestrians. It was not a scene I imagined in a western nation. But it was a reckoning with the darkish authority of a nation with a communist previous that would shut off roads to the general public to safe easy passage for a political VIP.
That VIP was Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, whose go to to Hungary in April coincided with the central European nation exiting the International Criminal Court (ICC). Following the battle in Gaza, Netanyahu was labelled a battle prison by most European nations. In Hungary, nonetheless, he was welcomed by his previous pal, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who had proudly declared, “The new state we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Seven bridges throughout the Danube river join Buda, the quieter fort district, with Pest, the occurring district for buying, clubbing, and eating. The very subsequent day, I appeared from Pest in direction of Buda to see one other bridge blocked by hundreds of protesters demonstrating in opposition to the banning of Pride March in Hungary.
People collect on Elisabeth Bridge in Budapest to protest the Hungarian authorities’s curbs on queer rights and freedom, on April 8, 2025.
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Restricting queer rights
My pal Jeroen Maassen van den Brink, who lives in Budapest together with his husband René, tells me that in Orban’s Hungary, homosexuality has develop into carefully related to paedophilia, following Act LXXIX that went into impact on July 8, 2021. On March 18, 2025, the Hungarian parliament handed a regulation banning any public demonstration of queer id, as soon as once more aligning it to the federal government’s “child protection” legal guidelines.
The future of liberal sexual coverage, as Jeroen sees it, is bleak in Hungary. “We know that the government policies are less in favour of queer lifestyles and expressions, but we believe that being a part of the European Union will still safeguard our fundamental rights,” he says. “But we see a lack of support in the form of queer-friendly places, or demonstrations for equal rights that are supported by all. We hear queer Hungarians are moving abroad, leaving behind a more conservative population.”
The previous few niches, subsequently, develop into valuable — we go to Aurora in the eighth district for beer and unicum (a Hungarian natural liqueur), and amidst the haze of smoky substance, I sense chilled out vibes that are actually arduous to search out in the well-known espresso outlets in Budapest. “With the upcoming 2026 elections, we do not see a change in the political scenery nor a reversal of the anti-LGBTQIA+ laws that have been put in place since 2021,” says Jeroen.
Jeroen Maassen van den Brink on the Budapest Pride March.
Of language misplaced
How did a nation that shaped a courageous and distinctive nationwide id formed by heroic literature and a strikingly revived language develop into Europe’s most scary occasion of illiberal democracy? I keep in mind pausing earlier than the cemetery of the household of Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s nationwide poet, on the Kerepesi cemetery in Budapest earlier this April. Killed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, his physique by no means recovered (the graves maintain the remaining of his household), Petőfi wrote the well-known line: On your toes, Magyar, the homeland calls. It turned the patriotic battle cry of the Magyars, Hungary’s dominant ethnic group, in opposition to the domination of the Habsburg Empire, as much as the crushed revolution of 1848. It was certainly a nationalism formed by language and literature.
Song, music, language and literature are sometimes essentially the most prized possessions, devices or weapons for peoples, nations, and communities drained dry by oppressors. The inescapable irony of such maimed nationalisms is that, in their fury to battle their oppressor, they don’t discover the oppression that they inflict on folks weaker than them. Anyone acquainted with the Francophone nationalism in Canada’s Quebec that fought the nationwide dominance of the English language, is aware of the Quebecois not often discuss concerning the indigenous folks worn out from the historical past of the province.
Likewise with the Boers of South Africa, the descendants of Dutch settlers. Blinded by the violence of the twentieth century Anglo-Boer War in which the English crushed them, the Boers asserted the one factor left to them, their white pores and skin, to provoke apartheid rule in order that they may champion an aggressive nationalism that excluded the black, brown, and colored folks of South Africa.
Demonstrators collect in entrance of the Hungarian Parliament to protest the ‘Transparency Bill’ on May 18, 2025, in Budapest.
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Forgotten legacy of poets and critics
Uniquely positioned in Central Europe, Hungary had pursued a uncommon heroic path to show a marginal, peasant vernacular right into a language of literary and scientific status. An intelligentsia that spoke and wrote in German ultimately turned to Hungarian to create poets like Petőfi, the language reformist Ferenc Kazinczy, and the literary critic György Lukács, who wrote scholarly books in German alongside accounts of his vibrant public mental life in Hungarian.
It was a nation that had suffered many instances over. Dismemberment into scattered components — some of it in present Romania — was the value it paid for being on the fallacious aspect of World War I. After World War II, “liberation” by the Russians forged the nation from Hitler to Stalin, with hundreds killed by Russian tanks in the counter-revolution of 1956.
But, standing among the many Communist-marked graves in the Kerepesi cemetery, the trinity of the hammer-sickle-star reminiscent of my very own childhood in Communist Bengal, my coronary heart felt wrenched on the present future of this traumatic reminiscence. It now drives the aggressive nationalism of Orbán’s Fidesz Party that spews venom at its personal Roma gypsy inhabitants, tramples on the rights of queer folks, and welcomes a battle prison in the ICC to a wonderful celebration in its capital that blocks the passage of pedestrians on its spacious streets.
The author is the writer of ‘The Firebird’, ‘The Scent of God’, and most lately, ‘The Remains of the Body’.
Published – May 23, 2025 10:30 am IST
