With the ejection of Trumpian hero Viktor Orb\u00e1n, Hungarians demanded a restored democracy. Now, Europe must support them <\/p>\n
To be in Budapest last Sunday evening was to see history again being made on the Danube. As rapturous crowds gathered<\/a> on the riverbank opposite the brightly illuminated parliament building, chanting \u201cRia-ria Hungaria!\u201d and \u201cHungary-Europe!\u201d, we all knew that the implications of the dramatic election victory for the Tisza party of P\u00e9ter Magyar go far beyond this one central European country. The result is very good news for Ukraine and the European Union. It\u2019s correspondingly bad news for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the US president, Donald Trump, those twin backers of Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s regime. The critical question now is whether Hungary can be the first country in the world to emerge from such a far-reaching populist erosion of democracy \u2013 the \u201cOrb\u00e1nisation\u201d Trump is trying to emulate in the US \u2013 and whether Europe has the political will and imagination to enable it to succeed.<\/p>\n Already on Friday evening, standing amid a huge crowd of young people at a \u201csystem-changer\u201d concert on Heroes\u2019 Square, I felt the energy for change. In the very square where, back in 1989, I watched a fiery young student leader named Viktor Orb\u00e1n call for the end of the weary old communist regime and for the Russians to go home, I now saw a new generation of Hungarians calling for the end of a weary old regime led by this same Orb\u00e1n and his Fidesz party. \u201cFilthy Fidesz!\u201d they cried and, yes, \u201cRussians go home!\u201d For everyone knows that today\u2019s Orb\u00e1n is Putin\u2019s man in Brussels.<\/p>\n Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His book The Magic Lantern<\/a> contains an eyewitness account of the young Orb\u00e1n\u2019s 1989 appearance in Heroes\u2019 Square<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the ejection of Trumpian hero Viktor Orb\u00e1n, Hungarians demanded a restored democracy. Now, Europe must support them To be in Budapest last Sunday evening was to see history again being made on the Danube. As rapturous crowds gathered on the riverbank opposite the brightly illuminated parliament building, chanting \u201cRia-ria Hungaria!\u201d and \u201cHungary-Europe!\u201d, we all … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}