IT’S FEBRUARY IN Budapest and the lingering winter grey is cut through by the lurid hyperreality of AI-generated political posters. Striking a clear note of desperation as Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party trail in the polls, the posters promote a nationwide petition opposing further funding of the Ukraine war. I pass one depicting a smiling Zelenskyy flanked by two German senior European Union (EU) politicians, Ursula von der Leyen and Manfred Weber. Both look stern while pointing to the Ukrainian president’s outstretched palm. ‘We Pay’, it says, backed by a stop sign graphic.

These posters were, at the time, the latest incarnation of Hungary as Western Europe’s victim. Under Orbán, it became the continent’s illiberal exemplar, explicitly endorsed by both Putin and Trump. It was a stunning transformation for what was considered at communism’s collapse in 1989 to be the Eastern Bloc’s most promising democratic prospect. Orbán and his Fidesz party achieved a sixteen-year run not just by warping the electoral system but also by ingeniously mining traumatic memory for political capital. His template took Western democratic ideals and turned them on themselves, even re-exporting them to the West to populists like US President Donald Trump. Liberal commentators remain hopeful that the newly elected President Péter Magyar might restore Hungary’s cratered reputation. This should be tempered by two facts: first, that Magyar only resigned from Fidesz in 2024; and second, that during his campaign he remained strangely silent on the powerful memory apparatus that helped legitimise his former party for twenty-two years.