Panel discussion
After Orbán: Hungary, Europe, and the question of democracy
- Date
- Wednesday 27 May 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Spui Campus
Spui 5
2511 BL The Hague - Room
- SPUI 2B.56
About the event
On 12 April 2026, Hungary held the most consequential parliamentary election since 1990. The opposition Tisza Party, led by former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, won 141 of 199 seats on 53.6% of the vote — a two-thirds supermajority, the threshold required to amend the Fundamental Law. Turnout reached 79.6%, the highest in the post-1989 period. Viktor Orbán conceded on election night, ending sixteen years of Fidesz government. Across Brussels, Washington, and much of the Western European press, the reflex framing has been familiar: Hungary returns to Europe.
This panel takes that framing as its starting problem, not its premise. For more than a decade, European conversations about Hungary have followed a recognisable script: Hungary is a deviation, the EU is the benchmark, rule-of-law conditionality is the corrective, and "return to liberal democracy" is the telos. Within that script, Hungarian, Roma, women's, queer, and labour voices have most often appeared as evidence of Orbán's misrule rather than as authors of their own analyses. After April 2026, the script risks hardening into a victory narrative — the EU's patient pressure worked, the prodigal returns — and closing the conversation precisely when it should be opening.
Two commitments organise the discussion. First, we centre voices from within the region: Hungarian and Central/East European scholars not as area-studies witnesses to a Western-defined problem, but as analysts whose categories and questions structure the conversation. Second, we treat "Western liberal democracy" as an object of inquiry rather than a measuring stick — taking seriously the argument that the EU's technocratic-legalistic conception of democracy is itself part of what enabled Fidesz, that conditionality has been more punitive than transformative, and that the figure of a normative European centre judging an eastern periphery has a long and uncomfortable genealogy.