Hungary: No Right or Left

O1G

Almost immediately after the Hungarian elections saw the defeat of Viktor Orban and the FIDESZ party and the exuberant victory of the Tisza party led by Peter Magyar, I left Hungary. Got on a plane and flew to Newark. No, not like many of the NER billionaires who were exporting their vintage car collections to Dubai or jetting off to the US for a well deserved weekend with some sympathetic right wing think tanks. No, I simply had to rush off to a family emergency... and wound up staying three weeks. I always miss the good stuff. 

I was here in the late 1980s when the Communist state began to collapse. The 1989 "Rendszerváltás" ("change of systems") was a progression that developed over a period of about two years, dragged out through negotiations and an unfamiliarity with democratic institutions. The end of FIDESZ, on the other hand, all happened in one night. Zap! Pow! Change! Ding dong the Witch is dead! People poured into the streets to celebrate on election night, and once again Hungarians felt bold enough to shout their opinions in public again. After 16 years during which we were told in no uncertain terms that it would be better to keep our mouth shut and "ne politizalj... ('don't talk politics') Hungary was simply euphoric in those first weeks after the collapse of the Orban regime. 

O1G means "Orban Egy Geci" (Orban is a Scumbag)

From my remote media command center in distant New Jersey I could (gleefully) follow the Hungarian news of those first few days... watching Prime Minister Magyar take down a propaganda spouting  TV news presenter with the promise that their job and their "news" program would soon be history. Watching videos of hard core FIDESZ supporters attempting to grasp that they were no longer in positions of control. FIDESZ had actually believed their own propaganda, backed by polls conducted by their own trusted marketing research. One day confidently in power with a firm hand in the corrupt till of state money, and now the tables had turned. It was so abrupt. For an old leftie like me, it was delicious. 

The depth of social change became clear during the opening ceremonies seating new members of the Hungarian Parliament. According to protocol, the Hungarian Anthem was played, and then special guests appeared: the children's tamburica orchestra from the village of Sűkösd where Magyar Peter had visited during one of his epic treks by foot across Hungary. As the children played the Gypsy song considered to be the national Hymn of Hungarian Roma, the far right wing Our Home party (Mi Hazank, the successor party to the fascistic Jobbik party) stood up and walked out of the hall. The response the next day was quick and damning. Magyar Peter labeled them clowns who had no respect for children or the democratic traditions of Parliament, and for days the media was full of comments and stories by Hungarians appalled at the blatant racism. And there was nobody from FIDESZ to laugh it off or make a joke on the TV news about it. Considering the damage done to Hungary's Romani communities during the last twenty years, spearheaded by policies of Jobbik and its successor parties, it was a giant step in the right direction. These days Parliamentary sessions provide a new form of entertainment: FIDESZ throw accusations at Magyar Peter, who, in a in virtuoso lawyerly manner, is very good at snapping right back to them about their individual hypocrisies and ties to grandiose corruption. Its like watching a game of Angry Birds, but with embezzeled state budgets instead of stones.

FIDESZ had polarized the mere identity of being a Hungarian to base it on support of their party. If you weren't with FIDESZ you were not Hungarian, or as Viktor Orban explained last weekend as part of his lame excuse for losing an election by two thirds, you were probably being paid by foreign agents, working for George Soros, getting money from the European Union to slander Hungary, or involved with some kind of subversive liberal NGO. Viktor still doesn't understand how he could have lost. The electoral system had been designed to prevent FIDESZ from losing elections. Orban still sees the world in pastel CPAC colors of right or left. As long as he continues to do so there is no danger of him ever returning to power. Something as simple as "Everybody despised you" was too complex to grasp.

"Orban's popularity worries the left-liberal radicals" FIDESZ media pre-election

Now at night I sleep soundly to the gentle murmurings of FIDESZ politicians weeping in the night. We are not sure what will happen next, but Hungary is now more or less safely in the hands of a government of technocrat administrators chosen for expertise in their fields. The arrogant, overbearing figures that loomed over our lives for the past decade are now reduced to blabbering clowns. It is a bit disorienting, but for the time being, there really is no right or left. Just Hungarians.

The Fall of Orban: The Zebras Did It.

"Deceptive Propoganda!"

It must have been the zebras. Hungarians are a tough lot of people: they can take a lot of punishment. And God knows they get it. There is a saying: "The Hungarian back does not bend. It breaks" The zebras broke it.  Back in 1989 the headlines used to read:  "Hungary leads the way out of Communism" Hungary Kicks the Ball to Freedom"... As an editor at Budapest Week in the 1990s our bread and butter story was about how Hungary had embraced capitalism and was hurtling towards the bounty of an EU future and how everything was coming up roses for all the "entrepreneurs" lining up to buy shiny purple "manager suits" at the "manager shop" at the spanking new shopping mall. Today Hungarians live in the poorest nation in the EU. Hungary is rated as the most corrupt nation in the EU. People in the southern counties take dawn buses to better paying jobs in Romania. They hop across the border to save money shopping for groceries in Austria. But the zebras clinched it. 

I thought the nostalgia train would be the cause, but it was... the zebras. 

Viktor Orbán has been building a Disneyland inspired personal palace west of Budapest in Hatvanpuszta, next to his home village of Felcsút, where he had already built a vanity football stadium in his back yard and a story book nostalgia railroad to bring visitors to it... using EU money, of course. Well, who would want to deny Hungary's number one soccer fan his own adolescent dream football academy and stadium? And the new "agricultural institute" being built in his Dad's name in the next village, Hatvanpuszta... next door to the estate of Orbán's best friend from High School, the village plumber who suddenly became Hungary's wealthiest construction oligarch, Lőrinc Mészáros. Why shouldn't there be a game park with African antelope and ... zebras. Michael Jackson had Bubbles the chimp. Why shouldn't the Orbán family have their own zebras?

Pancho Arena next to the Orbán residence, Felcsút.

Government corruption and ego are dangerous partners. Americans may recognize the symptoms from their own experience with Viktor Orbán's good friend, the Orange Clown Demon of Mar El Lago: grandiose ego projects, giant photographs on Government buildings, name on the currency. In Hungary we have similar tendencies - usually expressed in fantasies of Hapsburg era kitsch - but it finally came down to the zebras. Everybody hated the fucking zebras. Hungary has the highest percentage of dog ownership in Europe: 50% of Magyars own a dog. Dogs eat meat. Meat, in Hungary, is expensive. So you wind up with a lot of unsatisfied, angry dog owners and pooches who debate the drawbacks of a  quasi-vegan diets. And then your Prime Minister goes and gets a herd of zebras for the garden at his new palace in the countryside. I don't know what the feed bill for zebras is. The vet bills must be astonishing, especially when he has to take care of the antelopes as well. This was going one safari animal too far. Or as we say in Hungarian "Tele van a hócipőm!" (My snow shoe is full.)

Name your enemies! Péter Magyar and Zelensky

What came as the biggest surprise to many of us was not that Orbán and FIDESZ had lost the election, but that they actually seemed to believe their own controlled state news broadcasts and polling services.  In the past year, the ruling party Fidesz has maintained the most sophisticated system of media capture and control yet seen within the European Union, They came to believe their own propaganda. I love radio, but for the last decade Hungarian radio has become a parade of misinformation, government spin, and sports. It was as if they were performing a parody of 1960s Hungarian communist radio. Every now and again we would get mail asking us to participate in a new FDIESZ "civilian referendum"... in order to promote opinions like "Should we pay for Zelensky's war?" "Should we allow George Soros to laugh at us?" Your tax forints at work! 

Greedy Ukrainian money- grubber  in the mail again!

When Meta, YouTube and Google banned political ads, FIDESZ organized state funded troll brigades such as the "Digital Warriors" and "Megaphone" to "occupy" the comment sections and spread faked AI images and videos of the opposition. The false flag operations suspected to be linked to the Russian Intelligence service (A bomb found alongside the oil pipeline in Serbia. A proposed assassination attempt against Orban) were all leaked before they were planned to go off: proof that even inside the government security agencies there were people who were not prepared to fix the election with Russian help. The Russians, never ones to learn from their mistakes, had sent in the same teams that had failed to sway previous elections in Moldova and Romania.

Demonstration at Hatvanpuszta

So much has been happening in the last few days that it is hard to organize a single theme to address it. I was already in Hungary in 1989 during the "rendszervaltás" - the "change of systems" from late Kádár era communism to the beginnings of democracy. At that time I was a resident in the Bibó Kollegium on Ménesi ut in Buda, the residential college of the ELTE Law School which birthed FIDESZ as the student government which then  reorganized as a liberal youth oriented political party. The atmosphere in Budapest is not merely similar to the feelings going around back then, but more focused on change. On regaining power in 2010, Orban used his supermajority in parliament to concoct a new constitution and a new national system which we now call "NER" or "National Cooperation System." 

The NER poster required by law to be hung in every public building... kind if like a modern Lenin portrait.

NER is a term rarely used by the government itself anymore, and it has become a term that recognizably describes the mafia-like oligarch system by which Orbán's family, friends and vassals have - in the name of Hungarian patriotism -  divided up the economy and made deals to favor their primacy in Hungarian society. (Perhaps the best explanation of NER I have found is Sandor Esik's piece.), Bloviating fake patriotism became a trademark of FIDESZ, just as it is with MAGA followers of Trump. Orbán's followers refer to themselves as "The National (Nemzeti) side" as if any opposing opinion is an anti-Hungarian attack against the nation itself. Openly criticizing NER by name became a prosecutable offense. NER came to symbolize the deep pocket corruption of FIDESZ, and was its most public expression was observable in the monopoly Orbán had over the press and media. There are independent media outlets in Hungary, but 85% of the country get its information from state-run media and newspapers. 

Surprise! Nobody likes a thief!

Blog readers may have recognized that I rarely if ever brought up the topic of politics in the twenty years that I have been cluttering up this blog. The reason is that like most Hungarians, I feared retaliation if I drew attention from supporters of the Orbán regime. As a former political essayist for magazines and news sites in Budapest, I long ago learned that, yes.... somebody is reading your piece and somebody is keeping a list of names. So today feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm not, however, interested in reviving my former career as a political writer: I'm too old to be astonished by anything anymore. After fifteen years of carefully controlled state news, so much new information has been coming out since Sunday night that it is almost impossible to keep up. But it is exhilarating to watch the youth of Hungary - who have only known Orbán and his NER system for most of their lives - looking to a fresh future. And we have the zebras to thank for that.

Fehérvári Piac, Budapest: The Holy Grail of Market Lunch

Quince Jelly

I used to work writing about Budapest for travel guides. All of them, pretty much - American, British., Swiss, and even Japanese. Magazines, guide books, airline in-flight mags all helped pay the bills. The pay was usually miserable, but it went a long way in the weird east European economies of twenty years ago - not that the situation is less weird now, but there isn't much that you can now label as "cheap." You can eat lunch cheaper in Berlin these days than you can in Budapest. Another drawback of writing travel guides is that you don't get author credit, if you are listed at all, and the books tend to go out of print after two years. Its as if you'd never worked on a published book at all. And then came social media and the magical days of the travel guide book were no more. 

Now tourists are seen wandering the streets with their faces glued downward onto their phones, following GPS maps to those same "best rated" lunch spots that all the other travel influencers have featured in their previous video spots on Tiktok and YouTube. I love how somebody who has just arrived in a new and unfamiliar place, who doesn't know the language or culture, and has never tasted the local food is suddenly the expert to guide you though your first visit. Where to find good Hungarian food? Just ask somebody who got off the train six hours ago. And thus: the tourist lángos, the goulash in a bread bowl, and the ice-cream filled "Transylvanian" funnel cake. 

When I wrote about Budapest I always suggested a trip to one of the city's outer district markets to sample some of "the real Hungary." The Instagram guides will invariably suggest visiting the downtown Vámház Market, where the eateries specialize in serving overpriced tourist food - particularly the lángos sellers who probably bank their daily earnings in Zurich. 

Vámház is a pretty good market for produce and especially for meat - its butchers supply a lot of the downtown restaurant biz and so the quality is high and the prices are low for the retail customer. But if you want to eat... get on a bus or tram and head away from the city center. My suggestions are either take the #7E (express) east into Pest to the end of the line to Bosnyák ter, my old favorite market. Or even closer to downtown, The Fehérvári utcai Piac, located next to the old Skala department store, probably offers the best food court experience in Budapest for traditional heart clogging Hungarian food. Take the M4 Metro or the 4 or 6 tram to Ujbuda Kőzpont and you're there. Enter the nondescript grey building marked Vásárcsarnok". Trundle past the wonderfully affordable vegetable sellers and the home made sausage stands and take the escalator to the third level. You are home, Pilgrim. Home.

First impressions: not a single tourist. At least a dozen different food vendors offering Hungarian cooking and a mere hint of "Other" (Ukrainian pierogi, Chinese steam table, Pizza-oid carbohydrates.) A lot of the tables are taken up by gaggles of retired folks knocking back flasks laughably cheap wine and chowing down on the kind of old time Magyar lunch dishes that seem to have disappeared around the time we stopped calling each other "comrade". 

The prices tend to be about a half of what you would pay in a "nice" restaurant, and you are guaranteed to get more fat, cholesterol, carcinogens and carbs in every bite. I'm sure that any EU inspector would faint at some of the stuff you can find up here. I found it hard to choose: when I see tripe in one pot and pig feet paprikás in the other, I go into panic mode. We went with two of my favorite home style lunch dishes, ones that I dare you to find in any restaurant that features a tablecloth: Rakott Krumpli (baked stacked potatoes) 

Rakott Krumpli is a standard in families where Mom can't really cook. It is like the instant ramen noodles of Magyar cuisine. You slice spuds, chop up some hard boiled eggs and csabái kolbász sausage, which will bleed orange paprika grease as it bakes, empty some sour cream on top of it, and stick it in the oven. Presto! Everybody happy! It sounds like it should be repulsive, but this is Eastern Europe, so somehow the disparate parts come together in a harmonious symphony of Sunday lunch. Sour cream, lard and paprika are the essential Staff of Life staples here. They make anything taste good.

My choice for lunch was káposztás tészta, cabbage noodles. This is a peasant dish that evokes the end of winter, when all other food has run out. It almost screams "Famine ahead! Eat while you can! Famine coming'" It takes hours to slowly sauté and caramelize the cabbage into a soft brown edible stage, oddly sweet and peppery and with a distinctive whiff of cabbage farts. It is one of the dishes I crave but don't have the patience to make at home. It was one of those old farmhouse dinners that disappeared with the rise of the microwave oven. Again - it doesn't sound like it should taste good but somehow it is.

The real reason to go to the market is to bring stuff home with you, which doesn't seem so urgent after you have eaten two or three plates of concentrated carbo-lard energy loaf. But don't miss the strudel seller on the first floor: decide how much you want and then order double that amount to bring home. You will thank me.

There's nothing more I like to do when I first arrive in a new country than drop into a market to see what's on offer: there is a lot more history and tradition to an open market than a Tescos. The Fehérvári market used to be a sprawling open tiered market, rebuilt around twenty years ago to stand the weather in all season. I used to work up the street when Budapest Week had its offices in the old Sopianae Tobacco factory. After work I used to hang out at the snack kiosks in front where the Transylvanian Roma used to hang out while sojourning in Budapest: That is where I learned a lot of Romani language over beer and sausages. You wont find the kiosks out front anymore, but head inside to the third level  and don't worry about reserved seating. There's room for everyone.

The Tourist Lángos

I just bought a subscription to the Hungarian online news magazine 444.hu, which is a first for me because I am a crabby cheap old bastard who rarely subscribes to anything. I read 444.hu every day, in fact, but they gated their feature writing and in-depth articles behind a paywall.  444, however, is one of the last holdouts of progressive journalism left in Orbanistan, where the FIDESZ government has bought up a large percentage of the private media and choked off outlets dedicated to investigative reporting and opposition opinion. With Hungary facing a federal election this coming April, independent news sources are crucial. My daily diet of Hungarian news mainly comes from 444, HVG, Telex, and Magyar Hang, and I usually peek at a few of the pro-government sites as well just to get a look at what they are saying in the right wing fever swamp. It isn't like I need more news. I read a lot in Hungarian, but I have always been hampered by the fact that, having not been educated in Hungarian schools, I don't take much satisfaction in Hungarian literature. (If you want to argue with me, first try translating a bit of Krasznohorkai.) I like the colloquial voice, which is, to say the least, not dominant in Hungarian literature. So a lot of my favorite writers are actually mere essayists and columnists, people who write in the voice of actual people. Especially when they can take my mind off of the news.

Szily Laszlo - one of my favorite Hungarian journalists - just started a new series of food reviews in 444. And so yes, I subscribed! Szily's previous food series was about some of the old  communist restaurants that still hang on in Budapest. The new series is about eating only tourist food in Budapest. Since I live in the Bulinegyed - the seventh district "party zone" - I see these places popping up weekly. Hungary doesn't have a tradition of "street food" but once it became an idée fixe of industrial tourism, "street food" popped up everywhere. If influencers want street food, influencers shall have street food. One of the most common - and from the vendor's standpoint, most profitable - offerings is lángos. Lángos are simple deep-fat fried dough, often made with a bit of mashed potato mixed into the dough. You could fashion a crispy, chewy pillow of hot carbs that would be slathered in salt and  garlic sauce or served sweet with apricot jam. They were sold at stands in open markets, at beaches and from fryer trucks at festivals, When I was a kid visiting Hungary I practically lived on lángos on the beach at Balaton.

Lángos as it should be: garlic and salt, upstairs at Klauzál tér market.

I don't actually eat lángos that much. I'm afraid that when I die and my life passes in front of me I will see visions of a greasy, salty lángos and know that I probably could have stayed on the mortal coil for another few years if I had avoided it altogether. Lángos is the fried pastry of mortality. We are all going to die. And we all have to eat. But nothing ties the two together as well as a lángos.

Lángos were always a simple, trustworthy cure for hunger, but around 1990 things changed. Gradually alternate toppings appeared on lángos: sour cream, grated cheese, ketchup... but the humble dough pie remained a feature of market stalls. Then somebody realized you could take the humble lángos - the most minimal investment in food conceivable - and market it to tourists hungry for a taste of authentic Hungarian food. Heck, you could add topping... like sausages! paprikás stew! caviar! Just watch the profits roll in! Soon the humble market lángos - the joy of destitute students, pensioners, and the homeless - were marketed at restaurant meal prices. You can easily find lángos being sold in the FT 4000-5000 range, the same as an entree in a sit down, downtown restaurant. 

FT 600 for a plain. Klauzál tér. 

Szily's first adventure takes him to the Retro Lángos near the Parliament, where, for a mere FT 3790 ($11.50 USD)  he orders a fusion lángos called "The Peasant" topped with sour cream, cheese, raw red onion, and fried kolbasz. Szily writes What does the Hungarian peasant do? If we can believe the hit product of Retro Lángos, then he gags all day long. No wonder, since there is no peasant who could get air while his entire oral cavity, plus his esophagus, is filled with a rubbery, dense, elastic substance... It wasn't just any cheese, but the cheapest, completely tasteless, usually not even "cheese" anymore, but one of the substitute products sold under the names "pizza topping", "sandwich topping" or similar. I've never eaten grated rubber gaskets or fishing lures made of silicone rubber, because they wouldn't be able to show anything new in comparison

The aforementioned "peasant" lángos (courtesy 444.hu)

Szily's writing alone is worth the price of the subscription, but he is not exaggerating. Very little of the food served to tourists is very good. If you really want a good lángos , go to one of the big vegetable markets outside of the town center. Usually around the back you can find a few kiosks selling roasted meat, sausages, and with luck, decent lángos. I recommend nothing more than garlic water and salt, but the apricot jam is divine as well. Keep it simple.