Hi, I’m Zsofi — writing to you from Budapest, Hungary.

For 16 years I’ve lived through the slow erosion of democracy under Viktor Orbán’s rule. I write this series to share what I’ve learned - because I believe the Hungarian experience holds real lessons for anyone watching democracy weaken in their own country.

It wasn’t the government that broke me.

The government did everything it could to break me, but it didn’t manage.

It was the comments.

I was there at a protest - it was a regular thing for us. With small children next to me, around my neck - that’s how they spent a good chunk of growing up. There were thousands of us, in the cold, protesting against whatever the current outrageous move was.

The next day I was looking at the news: according to the government side’s reports, only a fraction of the participants had been there, illustrated, naturally, with cleverly taken photos — and in the comments people were laughing. They weren’t arguing, they weren’t making their case, they were just laughing. At us. At the fact that we’d gone there at all. I was scrolling through the comment section and I felt like none of this made any sense. As if there were far more of them. Maybe I’m the one thinking about things the wrong way? Maybe you really don’t need a proper higher education, a good trade is enough? Maybe not that many people are actually living below the poverty line? Maybe I’m just completely stupid doing all this?

That’s when I started going quiet.

It wasn’t a decision, it was more like sliding into silence. Suddenly you stop posting. You stop getting into arguments. You scroll past things that would have made you furious six months earlier, and you just - keep going. You tell yourself you’re being smart, you’re conserving energy, you’re picking your battles.

In reality, you’re just disappearing.

There’s a Hungarian word for this, I don’t know how commonly it’s used in English, but our country’s history is a history of oppression, so it’s a phrase that comes up a lot “belső emigráció” - “inner emigration”. It means you’re still there in body: you pay your taxes, you go to work, you love your children, you live your everyday life as if nothing had happened. But something inside you has already quietly left.

At the time I felt this was a strategic decision I was making in order to preserve my sanity.

Now I can see that this is their goal. Not the protests they break up, not the journalists they harass - the real goal is this: to reach the moment when you decide it’s not worth it. When you do their work for them. And you don’t just go quiet on the things that are good - because constantly fanning the culture war topics drives water to their mill as I wrote about it earlier - but on everything. Simply, if you stop saying anything about anything, they’ve won anyway.

Then in the last moments, during the campaign, something brought me back. Not just me, but a lot of Hungarian people.

This campaign was different from anything I’d seen before, and I’d seen quite a few. The slogan came from one of our poems, written for the 1848 revolution -which every child learns in primary school- and it has become a saying: This is the time, now or never!

On the posters only the now or never appeared like this: now or never!

The message was simple as it is: now!

I spent years making peace with never. Never was manageable. Never meant I didn’t have to hope, because hope that is lost over and over again is the most punishing thing I know.

The crossed-out never emphasized this. Never is over, there is only now. That was the message, with such elemental force that we couldn’t turn our heads away.

People came back. People who years ago had left - not just into inner emigration, but actually abroad. Hungarians flew in from the other end of the world. Some drove for hours and then stood in line for hours at the ballot boxes. Nobody organized this return - it just happened, separately, all at once. The system fell because every single person felt it: now or never!

You know this feeling too. I’m sure of it.

Maybe not from Hungary. But sometime in the last few years there was a comment section, a news cycle, or just a moment, when something was so obviously a lie and so openly celebrated that a part of you gave up. There are too many of them, they don’t back down, they steamroll over us. What’s the point.

This isn’t a character flaw. This is what happens when too much, too heavy is the burden you have to carry.

What I know now, standing on the other side: the silence was not permanent. It just seemed that way from the inside, but when the time came it gave way to action.

You can go under for a while, sometimes you have to. If this is where you are right now, I want to give you strength. You haven’t given up, you’ve just been waiting for the moment when never gets crossed out, when it becomes obvious that this is it, this is the moment.

Just pay close attention, so that when the moment comes, you know: now or never.

If this resonated, subscribe. If it didn’t, subscribe anyway and argue with me in the comments — I find that equally motivating.

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Hi, I’m Zsofi — writing to you from Budapest, Hungary.

For 16 years I’ve lived through the slow erosion of democracy under Viktor Orbán’s rule. I write this series to share what I’ve learned - because I believe the Hungarian experience holds real lessons for anyone watching democracy weaken in their own country.

While I watched the play, I cried.

Not just because my daughter was amazing in it. But because this play -written over a hundred years ago- suddenly felt like a mirror. Like it knew exactly who we are. Like it had always known.

Last weekend I went to a school play: my younger daughter’s class performed The Paul Street Boys by Ferenc Molnár. I’m not sure if you know it. In Hungary it’s huge - everyone reads it in school. I recently found out it’s actually part of the curriculum in Brazil too, which blew my mind. But I’m guessing most of you have never heard of it, so here’s the quick version.

The story follows a group of boys in 1889 Budapest who have this empty lot they love. They call it the “grund”: it’s their place, where they hang out every afternoon after school. Then a rival gang tries to take it from them. A fight breaks out, someone becomes a traitor, someone becomes a hero. In one big final battle they defend their ground, and the hero doesn’t die fighting. During the conflict he gets thrown into cold water more than once, gets sick, and quietly dies at the end of the book. And the next day the others find out it was all for nothing anyway, because the lot is getting built on and they have to leave regardless. So the hero dies, and the cause is lost.

That’s the story.

This is our story.

We don’t have winning stories. Our great historical moments are about defense - if we managed to hold off the Mongols or the Ottomans, we survived. If we didn’t, entire regions got wiped out. We don’t have successful revolutions either - our two most recent ones (1848 and 1956) were both crushed in blood by the Russian army, which showed up to help whoever was oppressing us at the time. Our school ceremonies are always about heroes who died for a cause that was ultimately lost.

You can’t understand Hungary without understanding this. This is a country where the national anthem says “this nation has already paid for its past and its future.” Think about that for a second. Most national anthems are about victory, pride, the future. The Hungarian one says this people has suffered enough, and that the punishment extends to the future too. Kids sing this at school ceremonies. What they learn is: it’s noble to be a hero, but just so you know, it usually doesn’t matter.

So when you look at what happened in Hungary this April -when we finally got rid of Orbán after 16 years- maybe this context helps. This is a nation whose history and culture both teach the same lesson: it doesn’t matter, the hero dies and the cause is lost. For 16 years we watched an illiberal system dismantle rights one community at a time, and we kept asking ourselves who would be next. And through all of that, some people still refused to give up. Even when everything around them -history, culture, the sheer weight of it all- was whispering “just let it go, this is how it ends.”

There were journalists who didn’t give up. Actors, playwrights, activists who didn’t give up either. Not when they were labeled enemies of the nation. Not when they were called vermins to be exterminated. Not when every sign pointed to the same conclusion: this cause is going to lose. Orbán had total power. Unlimited money. Control over every institution.

And still, some people didn’t give up.

I’m writing this because I want to give some strength to those of you who feel like the situation is hopeless. Who feel like the odds are too overwhelming. Who feel like what you’re doing doesn’t matter because you’re too small, too few.

In Hungary there was one person who said: step by step, brick by brick, we’re taking our country back. Then one person stood with him. Then another. Then another. All the way to 3.5 million. And now his approval is even higher: recent polls show around 70% support, something Hungary has never seen before. Step by step. Brick by brick.

So you know, in the end the hero dies. The cause is lost. The lot gets built on.

And yet, a hundred years later, kids are still learning his story. Not because he won. But because he didn’t give up.

That’s what Hungary rediscovered this April. Not that heroes don’t die. Not that causes can’t be lost. But that persistence has a memory. That every single person who doesn’t give up becomes part of something bigger than themselves.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re fighting for - your persistence has a memory too. You don’t have to save the world in a day. You just have to not give up. Just show up. Just do something, even when it feels like it doesn’t matter.

Because maybe it doesn’t matter. Or maybe, a hundred years from now, someone will cry because of you at a school play.

If this letter gave you something -a little hope, a little strength, or just the satisfaction of learning that Hungary exists and has opinions- please like, subscribe, or share. I'm over here writing about Central European history and the souls of small boys on empty lots, and I genuinely need to know someone is reading. Show me you're out there. Or I'll assume it's just me and my wifi router, quietly not giving up together.

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Hi, I’m Zsofi — writing to you from Budapest, Hungary.

For 16 years I’ve lived through the slow erosion of democracy under Viktor Orbán’s rule. I write this series to share what I’ve learned - because I believe the Hungarian experience holds real lessons for anyone watching democracy weaken in their own country.

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This article is inspired by a comment in which the writer described his government as authoritarian - but I raised an eyebrow. From the outside, that country doesn’t seem authoritarian at all. It made me think: am I simply not familiar enough with the situation, or is this a democratic government that feels authoritarian to the opposition for some reason?

I did a bit of research, and found a great litmus test in the book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Their four-point test lets anyone assess whether their government shows authoritarian tendencies. I want to share their framework with you - because it’s both insightful and urgently useful at a time when we all live inside opinion bubbles, and it’s dangerously easy to misread the signs.

So before we go further: what does authoritarian actually mean?

An authoritarian leader is not simply one you disagree with, or one whose policies feel harmful to you. Authoritarianism is a specific pattern of behavior - one that targets the democratic system itself. It's about how power is sought and held, not just what policies are pursued.

Every so often, a politician with authoritarian tendencies rises to prominence by claiming the existing system has been hijacked by the elite - and promises to bury that elite and return power to the people. This becomes dangerous when the traditional gatekeepers, usually political parties, fail to do their job and allow such a figure to reach power.

In Hungary, the problem had this particular shape: When Orbán started his political career, he was a pro-democracy liberal, wildly popular in the years after communism, the promise of something fresh and European. Supporting him back then was a reasonable choice. But over the years he changed completely, and not one of his people ever objected. There was even a saying among his followers to cover his most alarming decisions: Orbán may be wrong now, but he’ll turn out to be right. And so everybody blindly followed him - into one hair-raising decision after another.

But the problem wasn’t just his party. The Hungarian people also believed the lie and followed him. The gatekeepers failed, and the society was fooled. Slowly, quietly, he gathered all meaningful power into his own hands. Those who were in the opposition used to say: whatever didn't interest him enough, he delegated - always to his own people, of course. But whatever truly mattered, he decided alone.

And that is how he pulled off his turn against the existing world order. That is how he became the model for a new illiberal system - admired and imitated far beyond Hungary’s borders. (If you're curious about how he built that system step by step, I wrote about it in detail, you can find it here.)

The checklist: four indicators of authoritarian behavior

Based on Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

Recognizing this pattern is exactly what the following checklist is for. Grab a coffee, think of your government, and go through it honestly.

No single indicator is enough to make a verdict. But if you find yourself checking multiple boxes -especially across several categories- that’s when you need to pay attention.

1. Rejection of — or weak commitment to — democratic rules of the game

☐ Do they reject the Constitution, or express willingness to violate it?

☐ Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such canceling elections, banning organizations, or suspending basic civil rights?

☐ Do they seek to change the government through unconstitutional means - coups, violent insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a takeover?

☐ Do they undermine the legitimacy of elections by refusing to accept credible results?

2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents

☐ Do they describe rivals as subversive, as enemies of the constitutional order?

☐ Do they claim the opposition represents an existential threat to national security or to the prevailing way of life?

☐ Do they baselessly label opponents as criminals - suggesting their supposed lawbreaking disqualifies them from political participation?

☐ Do they imply that rivals are foreign agents, secretly working in the service of an enemy government?

3. Toleration or encouragement of violence

☐ Do they have ties to armed groups, militias, or paramilitary organizations?

☐ Have they or their allies sponsored mob attacks on opponents?

☐ Have they tacitly endorsed violence by simply refusing to condemn it?

☐ Have they praised acts of political violence — either in the past, or elsewhere in the world?

4. Readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media

☐ Have they supported laws that restrict protest, criticism of the government, or civic organizations?

☐ Have they threatened legal or punitive action against critics, rival parties, or journalists?

☐ Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments?

Now that you've seen the list, think it through honestly: how does your government measure up?

Use the word authoritarian when you truly have reason to - because words carry more weight than you might think. The words we have shape the thoughts we think. And the thoughts we think shape the way we see the world. Our worldview can only be as precise as our vocabulary. As a lawyer, I have deep respect for precise terminology - because that’s exactly what terminology is for. To name things accurately. To distinguish between what is serious and what is catastrophic.

When we casually call a conservative politician a Nazi, or label every unpopular government authoritarian, we are spending words we may desperately need later. This is one of the most common mistakes the world is making right now. We oversimplify, and we exaggerate. And in doing so, we exhaust our vocabulary -and our credibility- before the real danger even arrives.

If we cry wolf too often, nobody will listen when the wolf is actually at the door.

Use the test. Use the words carefully. Save them for when they truly count.

If you found this useful, pass it on. If you'd like to support this little project of explaining Central European hard-won lessons to the rest of the world, you can buy me a coffee, or become a paid subscriber. Either way, you're helping me carve out more time for this work. I write every week alongside a full-time job, for an audience I can't see but refuse to stop believing in.
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Look at this screenshot I grabbed from Threads — names removed.

A White House crane, scaffolding, public money. Someone is furious. Someone else is delighted that they’re furious. The content almost doesn’t matter. The reaction is the whole point.

This is not new for me: I watched this playbook run for sixteen years in Hungary, but it took me at least ten to realize.

How the mechanism works

The Orbán system -especially in its later years- was no longer primarily about governing. It was about one thing: making liberals melt down - and through that, controlling the moment. Topics were injected into public discourse not because they mattered to the country, but because they were perfectly calibrated to provoke the other side. Push them through state media, and then watch the intellectuals, the influencers, the journalists, the ordinary people react: sharing it, arguing about it, denouncing it across every platform they could find.

And suddenly, across every media outlet, their topic was the topic. They controlled the moment. That was always the real goal with the whole thing: to controll the moment.

Our outrage was the fuel. Which is why the hardest thing to learn was this:

We must not participate in our own oppression. We must not give them the satisfaction of watching us come apart.

Their outrage machine needed our reaction to run. Our collective meltdown was not a side effect: it was the product. It held their base together as it gave their supporters exactly what they came for.

It took me years to see it

I was a regular outrage-poster. I felt like it mattered, like staying silent would be complicity. Outrage may be biological: our brains are wired for it. It comes so naturally. They know this very well, that’s why they count on it.

Slowly I understood: many of these stories existed for one reason only to make us react. And if we don’t? If nothing picks it up, if it doesn’t stay in the press because we didn’t feed it? It just dies, so they get nothing. The whole operation only works if we play along.

Sixteen years gives you a long time to recognize patterns. I’m repeating this because I want it to land for people who haven’t lived through what we lived through — who are watching this start to unfold around them now, in the US, in Western Europe.

What actually worked

In Hungary’s 2026 election campaign, the then-candidate for prime minister simply didn’t take the bait. When Orbán tried to set the agenda -to drag the opposition onto his terrain- he got no response. The provocations died out quickly, barely echoing. And the press ended up covering what the opposition campaign actually wanted to talk about: that the country wasn’t working, that people weren’t living well, that things had to change.

It sounds almost too simple. It wasn’t the only factor in Orbán’s defeat. But it was a significant one.

If we talk about what actually matters - how do we build a country that works, how do people live well, what does a functioning democracy actually require - then the small provocations lose their oxygen. They can’t dominate a conversation we’re not having with them.

Stay on your own narrative

This is hellishly hard. The hooks are designed to work on human brains. But understanding why they throw them in -that they do it precisely because they want to watch us lose our minds- that changes something.

Not every provocation deserves a response. The skill -the discipline- is knowing which ones to walk past. To hold your own story. To talk about what you actually want the world to look like, consistently, stubbornly, without taking every detour they lay out. Not reacting is sometimes the hardest political act. We need to see it as it is: not passivity, but strategy.

For 16 years I’ve lived through the slow erosion of democracy under Viktor Orbán’s rule. I write this series to share what I’ve learned - because I believe the Hungarian experience holds real lessons for anyone watching democracy weaken in their own country.

Now that you’ve read all this, please like, subscribe, share, or at minimum nod approvingly at your screen. I need to know this is not just me, alone, explaining Central European democratic collapse to my wifi router. Show me you’re out there, or I will continue refreshing my stats at 2am, pretending I am a serious person who does not care about such things, when I am, in fact, absolutely, desperately, embarrassingly not.

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Hi, I’m Zsofi - writing to you from Budapest, Hungary.

For 16 years I’ve lived through the slow erosion of democracy under Viktor Orbán’s rule. I write this series to share what I’ve learned - because I believe the Hungarian experience holds real lessons for anyone watching democracy weaken in their own country.

This is a follow-up to the previous piece, where we looked at the concepts of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, and the specific tactics used to spread them. If you have not read it yet, it is worth starting there, because this one makes more sense with that context. This time I want to write about what those tactics look like from the inside: in one person’s life, felt on the skin of a whole society.

I spent sixteen years in Hungary under the Orban regime, and in that time I learned something you cannot learn from a book: that information warfare is not a distant concept. It creeps into your life, your relationships, your head.

The moment I understood

It was at 2014. After Orban’s second victory, something shifted in how the regime behaved. There had always been reasons for concern, but what followed could no longer be explained away by ordinary political cynicism.

The government went after civil society. Not gently, not gradually: it went for it completely. Police and secret services harassed people who had taken it upon themselves to do the work the state had abandoned: helping children in deep poverty catch up, supporting the homeless, protecting the environment. It went after every civil organisation that received funding from abroad, because it was unacceptable that any source of money should exist outside its control.

That was when I felt it. This is not accidental. This is the new system we will be living in. And of course, none of this had been mentioned during the election campaign.

Until then I thought what I was seeing was politics. From 2014 I knew what I was seeing was the construction of a system.

How a society gets tired

In the people around me you could watch this process clearly. At first many of us went to protests. There was energy, there was anger, there was hope that if enough of us were on the streets, something would change.

But the regime had a hard answer to that: if anyone challenged a measure, push harder. It turned out that opposing something could actually be counterproductive, because they would simply do more of it. People who protested became objects of ridicule: Brussels puppets, anti-national elements. Sooner or later people started thinking: what is the point of going, if this is what happens? And honestly, that logic was difficult to argue with.

Then came the sentences I kept hearing, and still hear today: I agree with you, but I would rather tend my garden. What can you do? There is no point in any of it. And slowly, the crowds at the protests thinned. Friends, family members. Not all of them, but many.

This learned helplessness is not weakness. It is a rational response to a managed system that was designed to produce exactly this result.

It is important to say this clearly, because many people blame themselves for having given up. They did not give up. They learned what the system taught them: that their actions have no effect. That is a different thing.

How to recognise it in yourself

This is the part I think matters most, because these signs are not easy to notice in yourself. They arrive slowly, and by the time you see them they have already been there a while.

You stopped following the news. One day you notice you are no longer reading it. Not because you have no time, but because you somehow cannot face it. This is not fatigue. It is the result of flooding the zone: the system created so much noise that your brain switched off.

You catch yourself saying all politicians are the same. Stop when you hear yourself think this. It is the combined effect of false equivalence and cynicism. Not all politicians are the same, but if you believe they are, you do not need to choose, you do not need to pay attention, you do not need to participate.

You feel that raising principles is moralising. In Hungary I noticed at a certain point that if anyone brought up morality as a relevant consideration, people immediately turned on them: who are you to moralise? That reaction did not appear from nowhere. It was the cynicism weapon doing its work: dismantling every shared foundation of values so there is nothing left to appeal to.

You start to doubt your own perception. This is the hardest to catch. You know you are living worse. You see the public services deteriorating. But part of your environment insists things have never been better, and after a while you wonder: maybe this is just a Budapest bubble? Maybe I am wrong? That is gaslighting. And believe me, because I lived it: you genuinely start to waver.

You stopped demanding anything. Not because the situation became peaceful. Because you got tired. This is the final stop of learned helplessness: it does not turn into opposition, it turns into silence.

If you recognise these signs in yourself, that is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you are waking up.

What you can do: not heroically, just honestly

People often ask what kept me going. The truth is not some extraordinary strength or courage. I simply have a very high sense of social responsibility, and I cannot walk past things.

Maybe my own situation was not so bad. But it hurts me that so many people die from hospital infections that did not need to happen. It hurts me that children are given no chance at a better life just because they were born in the wrong place. I cannot sit comfortably at a feast while others go hungry. That is not a virtue. It is just how I am.

My resistance showed up mostly in volunteer work. I helped organisations that were fighting the system, with money and with time. And I conscientiously funded independent journalism, because that is a non-negotiable if free information matters to you.

Resistance does not necessarily mean going into the street. It also means funding the people who do.

Things anyone can do that actually matter. None of them require a hunger strike.

• Support independent journalism. Do not get your information from social media. Pay for the work of people who write about reality.

• Find an organisation whose work you believe in and help them. With money, with time, with attention.

• Speak up when something is wrong. One of the quietest and most damaging processes I witnessed in Hungary was this: people who disagreed simply sat in silence, nodding along as if they had nothing to say. Even when everyone around me was pushing the propaganda, I always said it out loud: without agreeing with you, I would like to suggest we talk about something else. I never just sat there. That matters more than it seems.

• If you see someone caught in learned helplessness, talk to them. Not to argue, because arguing does not help. Give them understanding, give them attention. Sometimes that is enough for someone to start thinking differently, to shift slightly from where they are stuck.

• If there is a local community event, show up. If someone runs a civil organisation near you, ask how you can help.

• Show up to vote. This sounds obvious but it is not. In Hungary, almost 80 percent of voters turned out, and at least a million people voted who had never voted before, all of them against Orban. That is not a small thing. That is learned helplessness going into reverse.

How it can be reversed

Hungary is now at the centre of the world’s attention, and many people ask: how is this possible? How does a society reverse, after sixteen years, what Orban built?

There is no single answer, but there are patterns worth seeing.

Civil society did not die. It retreated. The people who said they would rather tend their gardens: many of them never actually stopped paying attention. They shifted to smaller, local communities where it was still possible to see the effect of their actions. This matters: resistance does not disappear, it transforms.

Independent journalism survived. With difficulty, with chronic underfunding, but it survived, and that did not happen by itself. Readers, supporters, journalists kept it alive. The information ecosystem did not collapse, it adapted.

The cynicism wore thin. When change became real, many people woke up to the fact that the sentence all politicians are the same had not been true. This does not mean every problem is solved. But it means cynicism can have an expiry date.

The generational shift. The younger generation that grew up under the Orban system relates to it differently from those who lived through the transition into it. They did not internalise the helplessness to the same depth. That is a reason for hope elsewhere too.

After sixteen years

For sixteen years we were the bad example. Hungary was the country people pointed to when they wanted to show how you build an autocracy inside the EU. I watched these people take power, and instead of using a historic opportunity to build something, they built a feudalism where enormous layers of society live in poverty and segregation.

Now I feel hope again. The kind I felt in 2004 when we joined the EU: that maybe there really is a new chance here. That we can build the fourth Hungarian republic, where everyone who has been held down can rise. And where those responsible face what they deserve, like in a fairy tale that actually comes true.

For sixteen years we were the bad example. Now we are the ray of hope.

The extraordinary sense of liberation I feel now, and the pride that comes with it, also means it was worth holding on. Worth not sinking into helplessness. Worth supporting those who fought. Worth paying attention even when it was exhausting.

Learned helplessness is a wound, and Hungary is showing the world right now that wounds do heal.

This is part of an ongoing series on democracy, civic awareness and political self-defence.

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The three core concepts

Misinformation: false information, no intent

Someone shares a health tip they genuinely believe is true. It is not. They were misled, but they pass it on with good intentions. That is misinformation. It spreads through trust: family group chats, well-meaning friends, people who just wanted to help. During COVID, false cures spread from people who sincerely wanted to help. No bad actor required, yet real harm was done.

The danger of misinformation is not malice. It is scale. A billion misdirected good intentions can cause the same damage as one deliberate lie.

Disinformation: deliberate deception

This is far trickier, because here someone knows they are lying and does it anyway. This is never a mistake. It is a weapon. Fabricated documents, deepfake videos, coordinated social media campaigns, fake news sites built to look legitimate. In Hungary, the disinformation around migrants, Soros and the EU was not born from misunderstanding. It was strategically produced, publicly funded and systematically distributed.

Disinformation does not necessarily need you to believe the lie. It just needs you to doubt the truth.

Propaganda: systematic manipulation

Propaganda is not necessarily a lie, but it is always manipulation. It can use true facts, selectively. It only shows what reinforces its own narrative. It is always institutional: it comes from governments, parties, movements. It works through repetition. The Goebbels principle: say it enough times and it starts to feel true.

At a glance

The tactics: how it works in practice

The three concepts are the theory. In practice they operate through specific tactics, and every one of them has a name. Once you know the names, you will see them everywhere.

Gaslighting: leads you to question your own perception of reality. It does not only happen in abusive relationships, it can be deployed against entire societies. The goal is not to make you believe a specific lie. The goal is to make you distrust your own judgement. You might think this could never happen to you — that you would always trust your own eyes over the noise coming at you. But believe me: if you are bombarded long enough with the message that you are wrong, that things are not how you see them, sooner or later you start asking yourself: what if they are right?"

Flooding the zone: Steve Bannon put it plainly: flood the zone with sh*t. So much noise, so many contradictory stories, that eventually you give up. You conclude it is all too complicated, that you cannot possibly understand it, so you might as well let it go. When everything looks like spin, people switch off. And switching off is exactly what the system needs.

Manufactured doubt: invented by the tobacco industry. You do not need to prove cigarettes are safe. You just need to create enough doubt about whether they are dangerous. The same playbook repeats with climate change, vaccines, election results. They do not attack the truth. They attack the certainty of the truth. Doubt is cheaper than evidence. And far more durable.

Whataboutism: A supposedly Soviet invention, perfected in the digital age. When confronted with an uncomfortable truth, do not deny it, deflect it. The government is corrupt? And what about Soros? It looks like an argument, but it is not. Its only purpose is to redirect the conversation until accountability itself starts to feel hypocritical, and people stop demanding it.

False equivalence: two fundamentally different things are presented as equal. A classic example: all politicians are the same. They are not, but the claim flattens the conversation and the possibility of a meaningful debate disappears with it.

Narrative capture: you do not have to believe every individual claim. You just have to accept the worldview behind them. Global shadowy powers. Our nation is under attack. There are traitors among us. Once everything is pushed inside a false narrative, the storytelling is already under control.

Cynicism as a weapon: its goal is not to persuade but to feed hopelessness. Everyone is corrupt. All politicians are the same. In Hungary I noticed that if anyone raised morality as a relevant consideration, people immediately turned on them: who are you to moralise? That reaction did not come from nowhere.

Learned helplessness: this is the final destination, the combined result of all the others. When people stop resisting, not because they do not care, but because they have learned that their actions make no difference. This is the most effective tool of authoritarian control, because it requires no force. People silence themselves: they opt out, stay home, scroll instead of act.

Learned helplessness is not apathy. It is a wound. And like every wound, it can heal.

How they work together

In practice these rarely operate in isolation. They form a complete information laundering pipeline:

• A troll farm produces a false story (disinformation)

• A partisan outlet picks it up and frames it as news (propaganda)

• A well-meaning reader shares it in the family group chat (misinformation)

The grandmother is not guilty. But the damage is done regardless.

The system does not need to deceive everyone. It is enough to confuse enough people, exhaust enough people, or silence enough people.

Five things you can do, starting today

This is not the advice to distrust everything. Someone who believes nothing is paranoid, and someone who believes everything is fool. The goal is to find the balance between the two, and simply stay informed.

• Ask who benefits. With any piece of information that seems designed to provoke, this question has an answer.

• Check the source, not just the content. A true fact can be weaponised when stripped of context.

• Remove the pages and accounts you know are propaganda from your feed - don't try to filter them yourself, just don't let them in.

• Lateral reading: when evaluating a source, do not read deeper into it. Open a new tab and look up what others say about that source. This is what professional fact-checkers do.

• Slow down at strong emotions. If something makes you want to share it immediately because it is outrageous or perfectly confirms what you already think, wait. That urgency is often manufactured.

• Name what you see. If you recognise a tactic, say it out loud: that is whataboutism, that is flooding the zone. Naming it breaks the spell. It moves you from feeling to thinking.

The existence of these tactics does not mean the truth is impossible to find; it means the truth requires effort, and people willing to make that effort. Democratic societies have survived sophisticated propaganda before. What is different today is the speed and the scale. What is the same is the remedy: informed citizens who refuse to stop paying attention.

You do not need to know everything. You just need to know enough to ask the right questions, and to keep asking them.

Share this with someone who needs it. Because an informed person in your life is one fewer person the information machine can use.

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This is part of an ongoing series on democracy, civic awareness and political self-defence.

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Until next time. Keep your eyes open.

I was standing in a square in Budapest on Saturday, surrounded by thousands of people, and I was ugly-crying.

Not because I’m particularly emotional. But because for the first time in years, I felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel: relief.

In the end that’s what living under Orbán felt like: not just oppression – that word is too clean, too dramatic. It felt like a slow-motion gaslighting. You’d watch democratic institutions get hollowed out one by one, you’d see the EU flag quietly removed from parliament in 2014 like someone tidying up a room, you’d feel the ground shift under your feet – and then someone on TV would tell you this was actually freedom. That values-based politics was embarrassing, outdated, the punchline of a joke. That only an idiot cares about principles when there are deals to be made and profits to be had. And they’d laugh at you for it. Openly. Gleefully.

And even if only 2 million people voted for them out of 9.5, they still say in every sentence that Hungarians made their decision, and this is what Hungary wants… This goes on for 16 years, and you start to question yourself: do I still belong to these people? Am I still Hungarian if I don’t agree with them in any field? And the most painful above all: Where do I belong, if I don’t belong here anymore??

The Fear

So when Péter Magyar won the election on April 12th – ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule – I felt euphoric. For about one night.

Then I woke up the next morning and the fear crept in.

Is this real? Will Orbán’s caretaker government find some way to take it back? Is this one of those hidden camera shows where at the end everyone laughs at you for believing it?

Every day between the election and Saturday felt like waiting for a trap to spring. That’s what 16 years does to you – even victory feels like a setup. You’ve been gaslit for so long that you don’t trust your own relief.

So when I was finally standing in that square, I didn’t feel triumphant. Not at first. I felt suspicious and nervous, bracing myself in the crowd for anything. Nothing was decided yet. Or so it felt.

The Square

And then I looked around. Thousands of people, waving Hungarian and EU flags. An older woman weeping next to me. A young man who looked like he’d never been to a political event in his life, staring at the parliament building like he was seeing it for the first time.

That’s when I understood: we all felt the same thing. We had all been holding our breath for years, and none of us had quite admitted it to each other.

The Boiling Water

In the last four years, Orbán’s government stopped pretending. They had come to believe they were untouchable – and they spoke about those who disagreed accordingly. It’s hard to compress into a short post for those who weren’t here to live through it, but here is the arc: first, they said that anyone who didn’t vote for them was not truly part of the nation. Then came “traitor.” Then, at a national holiday in 2025, the language had escalated to something that sounded like vermin to be exterminated.

It happened like the frog in the slowly heating water. If you throw a frog into boiling water, it jumps out. But if you heat the water slowly, it boils before it realizes it’s in danger. We were those frogs. And by 2026, the public discourse had grown so toxic that I could never understand why Orbán-supporting intellectuals didn’t speak up. By then, people had turned so deeply against each other that I heard of more than one case where an Orbánist parent disowned their own child for disagreeing with them.

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And yet. Here we are.

The Exhale

Here is what the world needs to understand about what happened in Hungary: autocracy doesn’t announce itself. It arrives slowly, in the language of protection and tradition and national pride. It makes you doubt your own perception. And when it finally loses – and it can lose, that’s the point, that’s what Saturday proved – it doesn’t feel like victory.

It feels like exhaling.

Inside parliament, the new Speaker’s first act was to order the EU flag returned to the chamber, twelve years after it was removed. It took about five minutes: that’s how long it takes to undo a symbol of democratic backsliding, once you have the votes.

At least 100,000 people were gathered around parliament that day. Not to protest, but to celebrate, many for the first time in their lives. This is what it looks like when ordinary people defeat a machinery of power that spent years presenting itself as unbeatable. As Magyar said in his speech: “Even the most powerful tyranny can be defeated by the most ordinary, simple flesh and blood people, like us.”

The Sign

When I heard those words, I started crying again. But this time I finally understood why. For years, whenever someone asked where I was from, I would say it quietly. Head down. Ashamed. On Saturday I realized, through tears, that we had washed the shame from our people. That we had given ourselves back our dignity. For the first time – maybe for the first time in my life – I am proud to be Hungarian. I see people around the world cheering for us, but I know they don’t really understand what has happened with us, how could they? We had a saying during these 16 years, for when something unbelievably outrageous happened in such an ordinary way that no one seemed to notice: you have to live here to believe it.

And now? Suddenly, like an elephant that sheds its learned helplessness and breaks free from the rope that has held it for years: we are free again. Is this possible? Is it really possible to unlearn helplessness? And if it’s possible, how does it feel? This feeling is impossible to explain. Sixteen years is an infinitely long time when every single day you feel like you are living in an abusive relationship with your own state. You cannot explain this. You just have to live it.

Let me tell you a quick story: I participated in dozens of protests in the last 16 years. I had two kids in the meantime – so sometimes with a kid on my shoulder. There was one guy with a funny sign at every single protest that said: “What the f*ck is going on in this country?” I don’t know who he was. But I noticed the same sign at every protest where I was. This Saturday he was there too, with his sign. My eyes filled with tears the moment I saw it – again – realising I won’t see him again, because this nightmare is over. It’s over. IT’S REALLY OVER!

The Morning After

Democracy can be lost in a way you feel there’s no turning back. And it can be won back, nevertheless.

In a world where democratic backsliding has become the dominant story, Hungary is now a symbol of hope – hope that authoritarian trends can be reversed, that values still matter to people, that ordinary citizens are not just stupid voting machines who only think about their wallets and believe everything their favourite politician tells them.

Let Hungary give you strength, too.

The ending can be different from what everyone expects.

Against all odds.

And no one is pulling back any curtain. Not this time.

(Now we Hungarians need a few more years to heal, that won’t be easy after all these years. Perhaps the amount of crying and laughing I did that Saturday says something about how much these years have worn me down.

But we need to start somewhere.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, my fellow Hungarians, for making this possible.)

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Were you there? Or watching from afar – what did this Saturday mean to you? Leave a comment.

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And the lesson wasn’t what anyone expected. It wasn’t about elections, or constitutions, or courts. It was about something much more fundamental: something that no institution can provide, and no law can mandate.

It was about whether ordinary people decide to finally act like citizens.

The Hungary of the Transition: Like a Child of Divorcing Parents

The 1989 transition was not a social process. We were like a child whose parents discuss their divorce over his head while he is completely elsewhere. He didn’t understand what was happening, didn’t take part in it — it simply happened to him, and he went with the flow. The whole thing was really just an exchange of elites: new actors replaced the old ones, but no real changes took root in the fabric of society. We built the institutions, set up the framework, and thought we were done — and everyone just waited for prosperity to arrive.

What the Cargo Cult Teaches Us

During the Second World War, an American military base was established on a Pacific island. The islanders watched cautiously at first, then began to benefit from it: supplies arrived, goods, things they had never dared dream of before.

When the war ended and the Americans dismantled the base and went home, nobody thought to wonder what would happen to the islanders who now found themselves cut off from the supply chain.

Anthropologists arrived on the island years later to study its inhabitants, and they found something entirely unexpected. The islanders had rebuilt everything from reeds and palm leaves: the buildings, the runway, the towers — everything, exactly as they had seen it during the war. They believed these things had caused the supplies to come. If they rebuilt the form, the content would return. What a sweetly naïve idea, isn’t it?

We did exactly the same thing with our democratic institutions.

We built the parliament, the courts, the constitution, the national bank, the stock exchange, the State Audit Office, the institutions of a free press. And we believed these would do the work for us; that democracy would simply flow beneath us from that point on, and we would be fine regardless. It turned out that wasn’t the case. Institutions ring hollow when there are no citizens to fill them with civic spirit.

Democracy doesn’t begin with institutions. It begins with civic mentality.

What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen?

This is the question we didn’t seek to answer seriously enough for thirty years.

A citizen is a person who is free both materially and in their thinking. This is not an abstract ideal — it means very concrete things in everyday life.

The first and perhaps most important is financial independence. Someone who is entirely at the mercy of their bills, who lives from one month to the next, can be backed into a corner by those in power at any moment. They cannot do things that are uncomfortable in the short term but important in the long run. Save money, resist the pull of constant consumption. Have something you can fall back on, because vulnerability is not only a material condition but a psychological one.

But money alone is not enough. Intellectual independence is also needed. István Bibó said that a democrat is someone who is not afraid — not so afraid of the communists that they run to the fascists, or vice versa. A citizen can afford to be moderate, to doubt, to belong unconditionally to no one. This holds true today: don’t accept anything from either political side without criticism, because if you do, you are no longer an autonomous thinker but a believer. Stay informed, but critically, and deliberately seek out perspectives outside your own bubble.

The third is participation: because it is not enough for a citizen to think, they must also act. They go to vote, sign a petition, show up to a public meeting, speak up when it is needed. They don’t wait for others to sort out what affects everyone. It is also a civic act not to wait and assume someone else will surely call the ambulance, but to dial the number yourself when it is needed. And it means learning to manage your own affairs: not asking for help so that someone can do things for you, but so that they can show you how, and next time you can manage on your own. The decisions of your local council, the school your child attends, the public space you walk through every morning: all of them are your affairs too. Don’t let them be managed over your head.

The rest matters too: a sense of communal responsibility, patience with those who think differently, long-term thinking, self-knowledge. These are all part of civic mentality. But if you can only do one thing today, start with independence — because everything else is built on that.

This Is Where It Really Begins

For most of my life, I felt alone as a citizen in Hungary.

Not dramatically, just quietly. I listened to people around me say that yes, it would be important to protest, but they would rather garden, rather relax, rather wait; or “I know this issue is outrageous, but what can you do?” And I understood them, but something in me always knew it wasn’t right.

Now something has changed: now everyone understands that it is up to us. People are active, engaged, involved. I have never experienced anything like this in my life — and all I can say is that I hope I never forget this feeling.

This will be our society’s great test. Can we sustain this engagement, or will we fall back into a coma the moment the immediate danger passes? I don’t know the answer. But I know I will do everything I can to keep us on the right path.

This is not only a Hungarian lesson.

No democracy is an exception. Every society that takes its institutions for granted eventually learns that the institutional framework rings hollow on its own, and that even the strongest institutions cannot protect themselves from the forces that have staked everything on capturing and corrupting them.

The most important thing you can do for your democracy is to begin living as a genuine citizen, and to fight with genuine civic consciousness for a country where more and more people do the same. This work never ends: not in Budapest, not in Brussels, not in Washington.

Institutions do not protect citizens.

Citizens protect institutions.

And citizens are ultimately what protect the social order that has provided the greatest well-being to the greatest number of people in the history of the world: democracy.

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Not dramatically, but slowly, the way you stop feeling at home somewhere when everything around you becomes unrecognizable. I looked at people voting for the same government, election after election, and I thought: I have nothing in common with these people anymore. I desperately wanted to leave, and not just the country but the identity itself. I would rather become a second-class citizen somewhere else than be treated as vermin to be eliminated in my own country.

And I did encounter this abroad, at conferences, on holidays — in those moments when the question of where you are from comes up, as it always does. I developed a habit of steering conversations away from the answer, of not volunteering it. Why? Because too many times I had watched people’s expressions change when they found out I’m hungarian. A slight shift, something cooling behind the eyes. And the worst part was that I couldn’t be angry at them: in my opinion, they weren’t wrong to have that reaction — and that was what made it so hard to carry.

The thoughts that went through Pál Teleki’s mind -Hungary’s prime minister, who took his own life in 1941- started making a strange kind of sense to me. He called us the worst nation. Grave robbers, siding with whoever promised the most, regardless of what it cost us. And when Russia invaded Ukraine and Hungary sided with the aggressor, Russian propaganda pouring out of every state media channel around the clock, something in me just closed. I felt I had to give up, I couldn’t take it anymore..

I am telling you this because I think many people have been in this exact place. And I think it matters to say it out loud: that despair, that urge to cut yourself off from your own people, did not come from nowhere. It was carefully constructed.

Authoritarian Systems Restructure Who You See As Your Enemy

What these systems do, better than almost anything else, is redirect anger. Not toward the people holding power, but toward the people sitting next to you.

In a functioning political system, the tension is between ideas: You disagree about policy, about priorities, about the direction of the country. You argue, you vote, sometimes you lose. The country moves forward, imperfectly, but together.

In a captured system, the tension is between people. The goal is no longer to win an argument, but to make the other side inhuman: not misguided - dangerous! The guy with the flag in his yard is not your neighbour anymore - but your enemy.

Hungary’s parties understood early on that the most effective way to keep voters is to dig ideological trenches around them and make crossing those trenches feel like betrayal. Orbán mastered this by always occupying the position where the majority already stood, then making it impossible to reach across - because the people on the other side were not just wrong, they were enemies of the nation. First unpatriotic, then dangerous, then something to be cleared out of the way of a “normal Hungary.”

And on the other side, Orban’s voters became rural primitives, too uneducated to reason with, not worth a real conversation because they aren’t capable of understand your ideas.

Both sides accepted a role that was written for them by the same hand.

Hungarian political analyst Zoltán Lakner once put it this way: Obama could walk into a room of twenty skinheads and walk out with their votes – and that is the political talent of persuasiveness. Orbán has a different kind of talent: he can walk into a room of twenty random people and walk out having set them against each other. That is not an accident - it is a method.

The debate stopped being about policy years ago, because on policy, their voter might occasionally find something to agree with on the other side, and that couldn’t be allowed. So instead, the point became dehumanization: make it impossible to see the other side as people you could sit down with.

The liberal camp responded in kind. Those voters out there? Backwards village people, drinking pálinka all day (=alcoholic), not sophisticated enough for real conversation, not European enough to matter.

Both sides played exactly the role they were assigned: one half of Hungary was declared not truly Hungarian, the other half was declared not truly European — as if the two were mutually exclusive. You could be Hungarian or European. Not both.

You Are Not Helping When You Sneer

When you go on social media and express contempt for “those people” (the ones in the villages, the ones who still believe what they’re told) you are not fighting the system. You are feeding it.

Every time someone on the opposition side sneers at a populist’s voter, somewhere in a communications office, someone is very pleased. Because that sneer immediately becomes content for them: it’s a proof that gets shown to exactly the people you just insulted, with the caption: see, they hate you, they always have, they think you’re beneath them.

I wrote in an earlier piece about the strategic value of making your opponents “just screech.” Your rage and your contempt are useful to someone. Just not to you.

We need to realise that a small nation cannot afford to hate itself in two directions simultaneously. But honestly, I think neither can an empire. If a Washington liberal feels closer to a European progressive than to a fellow American, something has already broken. The moment the citizens of a country feel more kinship with like-minded strangers abroad than with their own countrymen at home, the country becomes nothing more than a territory outlined on a map and not a real society anymore.

Hungary has survived things that should have ended it: our history is full of occupation, dismemberment, betrayal. I believe so has every nation that managed to leave a real mark on history. That survival, those genuine historical achievements, always came from the same place: a people who -whatever their differences- could still recognize each other as being on the same side. That capacity to hold together at the critical moments is the actual mechanism of survival.

The Moment Something Shifted

Péter Magyar -who is set to become Hungary’s next prime minister- said something that sounds simple but was not simple at all, not in that climate: there is no world in which three thousand criminals get to decide who is and who isn’t Hungarian.

For two years he held mass demonstrations and political rallies in the streets, and at every single one he said the same thing: take the hand of the person standing next to you, and raise your hands together. Look around. Do you see this? This is a united Hungary. This is us. (After decades of living in that division, of being told that the person next to you was your enemy, there was something about that moment that I still can’t write about without my eyes filling up.)

He said: we are all Hungarian. Ordinary people, most of them decent, most of them wanting the same basic things: safety, dignity, a future for their children. A significant part of them have been deliberately misled, kept in a fog of lies so constant and so thick that finding your way out requires more than most people have the energy for on a Tuesday evening after work.

But they are not the enemy: the machine that built the fog is the enemy.

When he said he wanted to be the prime minister of every Hungarian -not just the ones who voted for him- it wasn’t a slogan. It was the insistence that the real division is not between his voters and Orbán’s voters, but between a small group of people who benefit enormously from keeping everyone else at each other’s throats, and everyone else.

That reframing did something to me that I hadn't expected: it gave me back the feeling of belonging. The feeling that not all is lost. That we are here, many of us, united around the same goal and we have to keep going.

The Critic Belongs Pointed At The Leader

So what do you actually do with all of this?

You hold your line. Not the line of ideology, but the line of your actual argument. What does a functioning country look like? What do you want for the people who live here, all of them, including the ones who don’t agree with you? What are the real answers to the problems that made people vulnerable to populism in the first place: the economic anxiety, the sense of being left behind, the feeling that the modern world has no place for them?

Those are the questions worth answering — and holding yourself to them is what actually helps.

The moment you start fighting on the terrain the populist has chosen, you have already lost: you are playing their game, by their rules, and they are infinitely better at it than you are. They have the infrastructure, the media, the years of practice. What you have is the truth of your own argument — and that is only useful if you stay focused on it.

Keep the criticism pointed at the leadership. Keep it concrete. Keep it about what a better country would actually look like for the people who live in it.

The person across from you who votes differently is not your enemy. They are someone who has been given a different map of reality, by people who benefit from the confusion. Your job is not to defeat them in an argument on a Thursday afternoon on social media.

Don’t let anyone turn your love for your country into hatred for your countrymen.

That is exactly what they are counting on.

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The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, wrote in 2022: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model. Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Australians - everyone can and should learn from it.”

That wasn’t said by accident. The European Council on Foreign Relations published a detailed analysis of how Republican circles studied Orbán’s methods, and how those methods were built into Project 2025. The core idea was the same one Orbán applied in 2010: the institutional checks on power must be dismantled, because they obstruct real governance. What was tested in Hungary was adapted elsewhere.

That is why it’s worth understanding precisely what this system was, because the description may feel familiar in many places.

“We were in government, but we weren’t in power”

That is how Orbán himself referred to his first term, between 1998 and 2002. He experienced it as being shackled by economic and deep-state constraints: the position was his, but real power wasn’t. That experience shaped everything he did after 2010.

During that period, Fidesz ran on the slogan of “civic Hungary.” G. Fodor Gábor -one of the system’s most candid internal analysts- later stated openly that this was nothing more than a political product. Fidesz was never a civic party, never wanted to govern on ideological grounds, and never intended to. It was always about one thing: power. Whether that was packaged as liberal, civic, freedom-fighting, or Christian, but that was marketing, not content.

Péter Techet pointed out in a 2015 article what parallel this mindset carries. When Mussolini was asked about his party’s programme, he said: “to come to power.” When he had come to power and was asked about his government’s programme, he said: “to stay in power.” Mussolini was capable of transforming from socialist to capitalist, from anti-clerical to clerical, within the space of a few months. The point is precisely this eternal change, rotation, emptiness of content. What matters is not what he says. What matters is where he stands. The same thing happened here.

The constitutional coup with using democratic tools

In 2010, Orbán received a two-thirds parliamentary majority, and he didn’t start governing. He started building a system.

According to the analysis of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he concluded that during his first term the weakness of the executive had been the source of the problem: the state had been vulnerable to capture by private interests, and that had to be eliminated. The solution: the systematic replacement of every institutional check with loyalist control.

He changed the composition of the Constitutional Court and clipped its powers so it couldn’t block legislation. He reorganised the ordinary courts, lowered the retirement age of judges, simultaneously sweeping out independent judges and filling the vacancies with his own nominees. The prosecutor’s office, the ombudsman, the state audit office, the electoral commissions, all of it passed into the hands of loyalists.

Total control required nothing more than ensuring that every institution was run by someone whose livelihood depended on the system’s survival. By the time people understood what had happened, it was too late. That was the genius and the cynicism of the method: every single step was perfectly legal.

As a lawyer, this was what hurt me most: they played the letter of the law against its spirit, moving in complete contradiction to everything we understand about democracy, ethos, and the rule of law, but they made it legal through a debased version of the law’s text. They were also careful to apply patterns that existed somewhere else, so each step could be justified: France does this, Germany does that. But it was only in Hungary that it all came together into a single system, aptly named the “Frankenstate,” following the expression of Kim Lane Scheppele.

Rewriting the electoral system: or how 49.6% becomes a two-thirds majority

In his first term, Orbán also redesigned the electoral system. He transformed the previous proportional model so that surplus votes from losing candidates would be redistributed in proportion to individual constituency victories, creating what amounts to a winner’s compensation mechanism. The logic behind it: on his side, there would always be only him, while on the other side, votes would be split among many small parties. That way, he could hold power permanently.

It worked beautifully. In 2018, on one side stood only Fidesz; facing them were six opposition parties with genuine support. Orbán’s team received 49.6% of the vote. All opposition forces combined received 48.52%. A difference of barely one percentage point, yet Fidesz won two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

The average Hungarian doesn’t fully understand how the electoral system works, and most foreign observers don’t bother with it either, everyone just logs the final result. But this is important to understand. Orbán always referred to himself as the choice of two-thirds of Hungarians. That was last true in 2010. After that, he won a two-thirds majority in every election, but there was never a real two-thirds behind him. It was the carefully redesigned electoral system tilting the playing field in his direction.

This is not democracy. This is the scenery of democracy.

The capture of the media, gradually, so no single moment could be identified as the problem

The media wasn’t captured overnight, either. That was the point of the method - as one European Council on Foreign Relations analysis notes: not through commands, but through incentives, gradually, as regulatory discretion, ownership concentration, and political signals aligned with each other.

In practice, it looked like this: independent outlets were first economically strangled, advertising was withdrawn until they collapsed. Then they were bought up by oligarchs who knew exactly what was expected of them. Local newspapers were folded into a single conglomerate and distributed for free, so that the only paper landing in a small-town mailbox each week was effectively a government newsletter. The media regulator suffocated what remained with vague “balance” requirements, while politicians labelled critical journalists foreign agents and traitors. All of this while the public discourse was constantly framing the problem as left-liberal media dominance, meanwhile, billions were spent cultivating and funding right-wing influencers. At one point, these influencers were spending more on Facebook advertising than anyone else in Europe.

The result: media organisations began practising what has been called “anticipatory obedience.” They didn’t adjust because they received orders. They adjusted because the path of least resistance increasingly ran through compliance. In the final years, investigative journalists were being called foreign spies, that was when the situation became truly frightening. Had Orbán won on Sunday, there was a real possibility that some of them would have ended up in prison.

Feudalism: what they call corruption is actually policy

Lánczi András -a former intellectual ally of Orbán- said in an interview: “what people call corruption is, in practice, the core policy of Fidesz.”

I think that is a precise description.

Orbán didn’t allow corruption randomly. He granted state resources as fiefdoms, in exchange for loyalty and unconditional support. From outside, it looks like corruption. From inside, it is a functioning system with its own internal logic. Orbán consistently says in interviews that he tolerates not even the smallest corruption, that he holds everyone accountable who takes a single forint. What actually happened was that those who were loyal received their share of the fief. Those who weren’t were destroyed.

There is a deeper historical context to this. In Hungary, communism made multi-generational wealth accumulation impossible: the confiscations, the nationalisations, the entire system prevented a capitalist class from forming. Orbán filled that vacuum: he created a national capitalist class. What makes it distinctive is that it was built not on competition, but on political loyalty.

It is telling that the country’s richest men became his friend and his son-in-law. His friend had previously worked as a gas fitter. Today he is four times wealthier than the British royal family, and he tends to double his fortune every year.

I believe the Hungarian people will never forgive Orbán for this. Not for just the wealth itself, but for the quality of the people from whom he built this class. There was no competition for positions, all that was needed was loyalty. That is why I call the system feudalism.

The bonsai opposition which he carefully tended, making sure it never grew too large

In 2010, Orbán had a single great promise on the strength of which he received his two-thirds mandate: to hold accountable the previous, catastrophically failed left-liberal government. The former prime minister had admitted in his own words that he had lied -morning, noon and night- had falsified convergence reports, and had misinformed the public about the true state of the budget. When this came to light, he didn’t resign. He served out his term, committing a historic mistake that Hungarian society will never forgive.

Everyone wanted to see him in prison.

But the long-awaited accountability never came, for a reason.

Orbán had realised that this man was more useful to him in opposition than in prison. And so the former prime minister became the figurehead of the opposition, and whoever rallied around him, however capable or clear-headed, was immediately contaminated by association with his past. The opposition could not renew itself, because the political space needed for renewal remained permanently poisoned in the shadow of the former prime minister.

This was the bonsai opposition: something Orbán carefully tended and watered, making sure it never grew too large -while being able to point to it whenever he was accused of autocracy. For the outside world: look, here is our parliament, here is our opposition. For the domestic audience: look at these people, remember what they did. Over time, anyone who might have built a meaningful career -because they were talented and capable- had no real option but to turn to the governing parties, against their own convictions. Orbán always came out the winner in any comparison with the opposition he had cultivated, and I am convinced that if they had stayed, it would have remained that way forever.

Parliament formally functioned, but Fidesz MPs faced salary deductions if they didn’t vote with the party. The other parties were extras in their own role as opposition.

Then, during Covid, they developed a taste for a different kind of governance: a state of emergency was declared, allowing government by decree. At the time, this was justified given the uncertain situation worldwide - but it was never lifted. It was extended, first because of migration, then because of the Russia-Ukraine war. Hungary has been under government by decree for years now, with no pretence of even keeping up appearances.

The ideology without ideology: the culture war and identity politics as tools

The system didn’t believe in anything. This is very important to understand.

They continuously polled public opinion and simply went and stood wherever the majority already was. They proclaimed national, Christian, conservative values -as the PiS did in Poland- but they never said abortion should be made illegal. They knew they didn’t have a majority there. They only entered culture war battles they could win.

The Polish national conservatives fell because they actually believed in something. That danger never threatened here.

But there was an even more cynical layer to it. A phrase emerged in Hungary for this: “it doesn’t matter, as long as the libs are screeching.” Every time they measured where the majority of society stood on a given issue, and the liberal side erupted in loud outrage, that outrage was also booked as a victory. The screeching itself was the goal. There was a group-cohesion value in having the other side furious, flooding social media and the remnants of the opposition press with their rage. This too was important to recognise: that in culture war battles, any liberal response ultimately drove water to their mill.

There was a symbolic moment for this in Hungary. Orbán had a miniature railway built next to his home at a cost of several billion forints, which nobody needed. When the opposition began attacking it, Orbán said: “If they’re attacking the railway, we should extend it to Bicske.” That wasn’t arrogance, it was political strategy. “Whatever we do, as long as they’re screeching - and if they screech, we push the accelerator further. The louder they screech, the harder we laugh.”

This is something everyone in a similar situation should remember. Do not take the bait. Do not engage with provocations that exist only to make the other side screech. What's needed is your own narrative, real answers to the questions that actually affect people's lives, and the discipline to ignore everything that is thrown out there purely to wind up the opposition. It's hard, genuinely hard. But every time you react, you're doing their work for them.

Words turned inside out

They began inverting the meaning of our own words. Their system called itself the System of National Cooperation, but they and their political community were the nation, regularly referring to themselves as “the national side.” The nation meant the cronies, the collaborators, and their voters.

On the 15th of March 2025 -one of our most important national holidays- Orbán didn’t say a single word about the heroes we should be remembering. Instead, he spoke about the fact that there were still opposition members in the country. In his exact words: “After today’s festive gathering comes the Easter spring-cleaning: the bedbugs have overwintered (...) They have survived too much, received money from too many sources, changed their coats too many times.” Remember, that was called the System of National Cooperation.

The system also presented itself as Christian throughout - though it’s worth recalling where it started. In the post-transition parliament, during a Christian Democrat MP’s speech, voices from the Fidesz benches called out: “Priests, on your knees to pray!” The parliamentary record also preserves Orbán Viktor’s addition after an MDF member’s speech: “I hope the Christian Democrats will applaud. In the name of Jesus Christ, I request applause!”

That is where we started.

Then the party adopted the full costume of Christian symbolism. Perhaps nothing reveals its true face more clearly than the case of Iványi Gábor. Iványi is a Methodist pastor who baptised Orbán’s children; they were close allies at the time of the transition at 1990. When Iványi began criticising Orbán’s policies in the name of social justice in the mid-2000s, the 2011 Church Act stripped his community of its ecclesiastical status. Iványi’s people provided shelter to the homeless and education to disadvantaged children: they served the most vulnerable. Several institutions had to close. By the end, Iványi was already facing court proceedings, and had the system survived, prison would almost certainly have followed.

A system that calls itself Christian and persecutes a Methodist pastor who feeds the homeless. The real Christianity that Iványi represented, that was the contemptible weakness they would never stoop to.

Refugees were branded as migrants, with no distinction made between them, so that a mother fleeing war with her half-orphaned children was also labelled an enemy of the state who had to be kept out of the country at all costs.

The European position became the “pro-war” one, and supporting the Russian position was reframed as being “pro-peace.” A ministry was maintained for propaganda, from which lies were pumped into society through every available channel.

This is when the Orwellian worldview became complete here: even our words now meant their opposite.

It is telling that Orbán himself once said: “don’t look at what I say, look at what I do.“ He was quite right, because he said the opposite of everything he did.

This is worth noting, because the essence of the system can be captured in this too.

The enemy image as fuel, and when it runs out

Orbán recognised early that the Hungarian national psyche carries a deep culture of resistance. History had made it so: Hungarians had learned across generations that someone is always trying to take what they have. He didn’t manufacture this but recognised and used it as fuel.

He continuously painted an enemy image onto which this instinct for resistance could be projected. He defined himself as a freedom fighter, the European Union as an entity that wanted to descend upon us, take our prosperity, dissolve our sovereignty, and only he could protect Hungary. In the last two campaigns, he was already threatening with outright war. By the end, the message had been distilled to this: either he stays, or we all die. (Using artificial intelligence, they produced a campaign video showing a small child searching for their father, who is at the front being shot in the head by soldiers in German uniforms. I am not exaggerating - this was an actual campaign advertisement in Hungary in 2026, produced in support of the governing party.)

In 2022, when the war broke out, this worked extraordinarily well.

By 2026, something had changed. I heard the same words from multiple people, verbatim: “We’ve been so frightened for so long that we’ve become exhausted.”

Fear as a political tool is finite. At some point, a person cannot keep being afraid, and when the fear lifts, all that remains is exhaustion.

And rage.

In the end, a system of national cooperation did come together, just not the one Orbán had in mind.

This one was against him.

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Writing this was a labour of love. If it meant something to you, a coffee means something to me:

Buy me a coffee

I’ve been waiting a decade for that phone call.

Orbán governed Hungary for sixteen uninterrupted years. He became a patron saint of the global right: a proof of concept, a template, a man that authoritarian-minded politicians from Warsaw to Washington studied and admired. His system was held up, depending on who you asked, as either a warning or a model. Either way, everyone agreed it was stable. Permanent, even.

It wasn’t.

But before I tell you how it ended, I need to tell you how it began. Because that part matters more than most foreign observers realize - and it contains the first uncomfortable lesson of this story.

How it was built

The government that came before Orbán was a disaster. Years of mismanagement and broken promises had left Hungary heavily indebted, and when the 2008 financial crisis hit, it hit a country already on its knees. By 2010, ordinary Hungarians weren’t just ready for change - they were desperate for it. They gave Orbán a constitutional supermajority, a once-in-a-generation mandate to remake the country. In that context, it didn’t seem extreme. It seemed like exactly what the moment required.

He used that mandate in a way few people anticipated, and by the time they understood what was happening, it was largely done.

He rewrote the electoral law to favor his party. Then he rewrote the constitution. He packed the Constitutional Court, the regular courts, and every significant state institution with loyalists - people who owed their positions entirely to him and knew it. He didn’t need to imprison opponents or send police to break up rallies. He just made sure that every institutional lever was operated by someone whose career depended on his continued power.

Then came the media. Independent outlets were bought up by oligarchs in his orbit or starved of advertising revenue until they collapsed. Local newspapers across the country were folded into a single pro-government conglomerate and distributed for free, so that in hundreds of small towns, the only paper landing in your mailbox each week was effectively a government newsletter. State television became a full-time propaganda operation. The information environment wasn’t just tilted in his favor - it was architecturally redesigned to serve him.

Opposition politicians were subjected to systematic character assassination - every serious one, except the former prime minister who had preceded Orbán. That man’s continued visibility was itself a strategy: Orbán knew that comparison with that particular predecessor was a comparison he would always win. For the rest, he cultivated what you might call a bonsai opposition: small, defanged parties, tended carefully, just alive enough to point at. Abroad, they let Hungary present itself as a functioning democracy with genuine parliamentary debate. At home, they gave Orbán a weekly argument: look at these people, look how incompetent they are, how could anyone trust them to govern? He wasn’t entirely wrong - they were the hollowed-out remnant of a defeated political class, not a real alternative. Real parliamentary votes didn’t happen in any meaningful sense; Fidesz MPs who broke with party discipline faced salary deductions. The performance of democracy continued. The substance had been gutted.

And then there was the money. Orbán’s inner circle accumulated vast fortunes through government contracts, EU funds, and opaque arrangements that enriched loyalists on an extraordinary scale. When your livelihood, your business, your town’s infrastructure all depend on the same man’s goodwill - the question answers itself. Who would risk opposing him? What he constructed was, in everything but name, a feudal system - with himself at the top, and loyalty to him as the currency that determined everything else.

The result: four consecutive elections, four supermajorities, the opposition reduced to a stage prop. A system that looked, from a distance, unbreakable.

That is where this story begins.

The most dangerous idea

His most powerful weapon wasn’t the captured courts, or the controlled media, or even the money - though all of those mattered. His most powerful weapon was the idea he planted in people’s minds: that nothing could change. That the system was too entrenched. That the opposition was too weak and too compromised. That showing up to vote was a performance for people who liked to feel righteous but didn’t actually change anything.

This is the fatalism that authoritarian systems cultivate deliberately. And it works - until it doesn’t.

Seventy-nine percent of eligible voters showed up on Sunday. 5.9 million people. A record in hungarian hystory. The system didn’t fall because it became untenable from within. It fell because enough people decided, one by one, that they were going to show up anyway. Which means the first thing that had to happen was that people had somewhere to turn for information — and someone credible to turn toward.

What had to survive

When Orbán controlled the information environment, he wanted to make his narrative the only available narrative. In small-town Hungary, that came very close to succeeding. But a small cluster of independent outlets -Telex, 444, Atlatszo, a handful of others- kept publishing, operating on reader subscriptions and donations, often under sustained legal harassment. In the final years, investigative journalists were publicly labelled foreign agents and spies by state media. Had Sunday gone the other way, there is a real possibility that some of them would have ended up in prison. They knew this. They kept publishing anyway.

Those outlets didn’t convert hardcore Fidesz voters but that was never the point. What they did was give the persuadable middle somewhere to turn: people who suspected they were being lied to, who needed somewhere to find out that yes, they were. They kept the connective tissue of shared reality intact, barely, until it could matter.

This is why funding independent journalism is not a charitable act. It is infrastructure maintenance - as basic as paying for roads. The operating system of democracy is informed consent, the ability of citizens to make meaningful choices because they have access to something approximating the truth. When that infrastructure collapses, everything else follows. Subscribe. Donate. Share. Do it before the crisis becomes undeniable, because by then it is usually too late.

Why the opposition kept losing - and what broke the pattern

Here is something that doesn’t travel well in foreign coverage of Hungary: the opposition wasn’t just weak. It was systematically pre-destroyed.

Orbán’s machine rarely invented smears from whole cloth - that would have been too easy to dismiss. The most effective authoritarian propaganda is built around a kernel of truth: a real failure, a real scandal, a real human weakness, with an elaborate false structure built on top. The kernel is what makes the lie resilient. When you argue against it, you keep returning to the true part, which is unassailable. Hungary’s previous opposition leaders carried real baggage -failed governments, austerity, broken promises- and the state media replayed it on an infinite loop. By the time any election came, the question wasn’t whether the opposition had good ideas. The question was whether anyone could look at their candidate without a voice in their head saying: yes, but remember what they did. Every familiar face from the democratic camp arrived pre-disqualified.
That is not an accident.
It is a design feature.

Magyar Péter broke this because there was nothing to work with. He was, until early 2024, essentially unknown — a private citizen with no political career, no failed government, no scandal that could be weaponized. When the attacks came, as they did immediately and ferociously, they simply didn’t stick. Not because he was beyond criticism, but because what was said about him was, from the beginning, simply false. Without a kernel of truth at the center, the whole construction kept collapsing. Voters could feel the difference, even when they couldn’t articulate it.

When he first emerged, he drew his support almost entirely from existing opposition voters. That was the first good sign: the bonsai opposition hadn't just weakened - it had rotted from the root. And in its place, finally, something real. A genuine alternative. Outside parliament, of course, but real.

He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works.

The playbook they want you to run

Now we come to the part that matters most for anyone watching from outside - from the United States, from Western Europe, from anywhere facing its own version of this.

Authoritarian systems do not survive only on propaganda and institutional capture. They survive on your participation in your own defeat.

The method is consistent everywhere it has been deployed. Find the genuine fault lines in a society: urban versus rural, educated versus working class, the people who feel left behind versus the people who seem not to notice. Pry those lines open. Make sure every election is a referendum on identity and culture rather than on whether the pension is adequate or the hospital is functional. Keep the two halves of society furious at each other, convinced the other half is the enemy, and make sure your coalition is always the slightly larger half. The culture war is not a byproduct of this politics. It is the mechanism.

But here is what made Orbán’s version of this particularly cynical: the system didn’t actually believe in anything. It ran continuous polling, tracked public opinion with extraordinary precision, and then simply went and stood wherever the majority already was. It defined itself as a national, Christian, conservative movement - but it never moved to ban abortion, because it knew exactly where the numbers on that question fell. It picked the culture war fights it could win and quietly avoided the ones it couldn’t. The ideology was the packaging. The polling data was the product. What looked like conviction was, in almost every case, a calculation about where the majority could reliably be found and held.

This is worth understanding, because it changes what you’re actually fighting. You are not fighting a true believer. You are fighting a machine that is very good at finding the line that divides society just enough - and parking itself on the larger side of it.

The grievances that get exploited are real - that is what makes it work. The sense of being left behind, of being looked down on, of watching your children leave and not come back - that is not manufactured resentment. It is legitimate. The autocrat does not invent it. He finds it, names it, and then aims it in a direction that serves him rather than the people experiencing it. Think of Michael Douglas in Falling Down - a film from 1993 that mapped the interior of a constituency that demagogues would later capture across the Western world. The rage was real. The direction it was aimed was the part that was constructed.

You cannot say that grievance doesn’t exist because it doesn’t affect you. The autocrat has a ready-made answer for it - simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. The alternative is to have a better answer, not to pretend the question isn’t being asked.

This also means resisting something that social media makes very difficult to resist: the performance of contempt. Posting fury at the other side is not resistance. It is not even catharsis. It is the autocrat’s most useful gift - you are doing his work for him, for free, at scale, and it feels righteous while you do it. When you spend your energy in that direction, you become part of the problem rather than the solution. The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won.

Magyar Péter understood this. In his victory speech, he addressed Orbán’s 2.5 million voters directly. I will be your prime minister too. That is not naive political theater. It is the only arithmetic that works.

What it actually takes, and what comes next

Civic life looks nothing like it does in the movies. There is no single moment, no revelation that turns everything.

It is the journalist who keeps publishing after being called a foreign spy, knowing what a renewed mandate might mean for her. It is the reader who pays for the subscription. It is the person who drives to their parents’ village to have an actual conversation with relatives who have only ever heard one side. It is the voter who overcomes the voice that says it won’t matter anyway and shows up. Multiplied by 5.9 million.

The mechanism of democratic recovery is not heroic. It is cumulative. It is boring. It is the daily refusal to surrender to the comfort of despair.

I want to be honest about what comes next, because false optimism is its own kind of trap. Sunday was the end of something - it is not the beginning of paradise. Magyar Péter inherits a looted treasury, a captured judiciary, a civil service packed with loyalists, a propaganda apparatus that will not dismantle itself.

The saving grace is that he won a constitutional supermajority. A simple majority would have left too much of the old system intact - and with it, the very real risk that they come back at the next election and pick up exactly where they left off.

Rebuilding genuine democratic institutions will take years anyway. There will be disappointments. The 2.5 million people who voted for Orbán did not disappear. They are Hungarians. They are not the enemy.

Hungary is a small country. But Orbán was never just a Hungarian politician: he was a demonstration that liberal democracy could be dismantled from the inside, legally, while keeping the outward form of elections intact. Leaders and movements around the world took notes.

Sunday was a different kind of demonstration.

The lesson, though, is not simply that these systems can be beaten. It is about how. You cannot win by playing from their script. The moment you accept their frame - that your society is divided into two enemy camps, one good and one irredeemably wrong - you have lost something you won’t easily recover. The autocrat wins not just when he stays in power, but when he gets you to see your neighbor as your enemy. When the hatred flows horizontally, between citizens, rather than upward, toward the people actually responsible.

The alternative is simpler and harder to hold onto: we belong to each other. We love the same country. We want it to be better. We disagree -sometimes bitterly, sometimes irreconcilably- about how. That disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.

Refuse to play from their playbook. Hold your own narrative. Do the boring, necessary work.

That is what happened here.

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When it comes to self-acceptance, I keep seeing the same two extremes.

One says you should change: more discipline, more persistence, better results.
The other says the opposite: accept yourself, you don’t need to do anything, just enjoy life, carpe diem, YOLO.

The truth, of course, is not black or white here either, I would suggest something closer to radical self-care, and I'll show you why."

The kind of love I feel toward my children wasn’t present in my life before.

Suddenly there was a small human being whose entire life I was responsible for. Every decision had to be in place, because otherwise it’s not me who pays the price for my mistakes, but someone I love the most in the world.

I learned that love cannot be equal to constant pushing, because then the other person feels like we don’t love them as they are, but always want them to be different. But you also can’t just throw the reins away, because then come the uncontrolled screen time, chocolate morning-noon-night, and everything else whose long-term consequences are anything but good.

So a good parent both loves and accepts their child as they are, and at the same time wants to guide them in a direction where they can bring out the best in themselves, where they can use their potential.

This realization led me to ask: why don’t we turn this kind of love toward ourselves?

Why do we keep jumping between two extremes, instead of showing ourselves the same kind of unconditional, caring attention?

This kind of caring love doesn’t always feel good in the moment.

It means loving your future self enough not to leave all your tasks for tomorrow when you could do them today. Loving your future self enough not to make her life harder than it needs to be, not letting the waves crash over her head.

Do something every day for your future self, because that is also you.

What does this look like in everyday life? Here's a completely unglamorous example of what I mean.

For example, not leaving refueling your car until the moment you run out of fuel — because maybe then you’ll be in a hurry, tired, and stressed — but filling up when you happen to pass a gas station and you have the time. So you’re taking care of the person you’ll be when the fuel runs out.

But self-care also means knowing when to say enough.

Forcing acceptance above everything means that anything can be done to you. Just like you wouldn’t allow someone you love to be constantly tired, worn out, and stressed, you shouldn’t allow this for yourself either.

You shouldn’t maintain habits that drain you, or ignore the signals of your body.

I know this from my own experience: there were times I told myself I was ‘accepting my body’ while actually ignoring signals it was sending me. That wasn’t self-love.

It was avoidance dressed up as acceptance.

And once I stopped calling it acceptance, I could finally start actually caring for myself.

Wanting better for yourself is not punishment.
It’s care.

The same way not wanting to keep eating things that make you feel worse, or relying on alcohol or anything else that just numbs things down - that’s not about being strict.

It’s about wanting to feel okay in your own life.

And that changes everything.

Because change can also come from self-hate. In the long run, it may even lead to the same results, and from the outside, no one may notice the difference.

But there is an important difference from your own perspective.

If I push myself because I hate who I am, then that is the energy I bring into every single day. Every day you carry that thought with you -that you’re not good enough, that you need to change- and it shapes your life.

Every single day.

And this might not seem like much, but these days add up and eventually become your life.

It matters what kind of life they form.

There won’t be another life “later.”

This is the one you have now.

And you need to live it in a way that, when you look back, you feel that you wouldn’t do anything differently.

For that, you need to be present in your own life with care. Because if you don’t take care of yourself, who will?

If you’re not sure where to start, try this:

Find a photo of yourself as a child - maybe five or six years old. Put it somewhere you’ll see it every morning.

Look at her.

Look at how innocent, lovable, open, and full of a simple desire to be happy that little person is.

That is you.

She still lives inside you.

Your only task is to take care of her the best way you can.

The same way you would take care of the person you love the most in the world.

Do something for her every day -something small- even when it’s uncomfortable or you don’t feel like it.

Especially then.

Tell me in the comments: what’s one small thing you’ll do for her today?

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In my childhood, I was a specifically quick-tempered, nervous little person. This didn’t even seem like a problem until I suddenly became acquainted with the writings of Stoic authors and Sándor Márai: at that moment it became suddenly clear to me that I consider their calm collectedness an important value, and I regarded the way they could synthesize their knowledge about the world as a high degree of wisdom.

After this, I began to study how they are different from me, and what I could do to get closer to this exemplary type of person.

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This is what I found:

It is not in their personality that those who are calm are different, but they approach things differently.

Instead of reacting immediately, they wait a little, and this one or two moments are suitable for the answer to arrive from somewhere else. In a previous writing of mine, I already quoted Viktor E. Frankl’s book titled “Man’s Search for Meaning,” but I must return to this now as well: He writes about how between the action and the reaction there is a small pause, in which we can decide how we want to react; this is the ultimate freedom of man, which no one can take away from us.

People labeled as calm utilize this well. They decide that they will react calmly and peacefully. If you are capable of waiting a little before you would react immediately, then in that elapsed time, the majority of things lose their urgency, and it turns out that you have the possibility to think through what you want to react.

My other observation is that there is a difference between what happens and the story that we tell ourselves about it. In the rarest cases do we react to what is truly happening – since our brain is designed to simplify, thereby helping our orientation in the complicated world. Earlier, when I was teaching nonviolent communication, I observed how difficultly we can formulate objective observation: how many times one has to take a run at a sentence until it succeeds to be formulated so that there is no simplification, conclusion, or judgment in it. If you become capable of making a difference between the facts and the story, then it becomes more easily visible what is worth dealing with and what is not.

Naturally, these do not help in becoming a new person from one day to the next. But if you start to pay attention, then you will see that something is changing. Less noise, less unnecessary conflict, more calm space. And you can start to lean on this space nice and gradually, and you will be able to bring more and more of it into your life.

It is not your life that becomes simpler or more peaceful, but you become better at handling difficulties. And in this sense, peace is not something that is born with us, but a skill that we can acquire bit by bit. The calm personality is different from the others only in that they are further ahead on this path. But if you do not even set out, then you will never arrive.

Start with this: today, do not react to something immediately.

Wait a little.

See what happens!

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When I was in elementary school, we were behind the Iron Curtain. Schools were very different then from what they are now. I remember how happy I was to finally be able to go to school. And I tried so hard - I wanted to be a good student, overall a good girl. I was smart enough, but unfortunately the art gene skipped me. I wasn’t good at drawing, just like everybody in my family.

It showed quickly: I got the worst grade a kid could get for a watercolor painting back then. I remember the shame I felt, holding the terrible painting in my hand. The paper was slightly wet and wrinkled from the watercolor. I knew I had received the worst grade in the whole class. And I knew the painting was bad - but it still hurt.

Later in school, I became best friends with a girl who went on to become a graphic designer - so you can imagine how it felt for me to sit next to her during art class. She worked magic on paper every time, while I did what I was capable of - mostly childish, clumsy things in comparison. It went on for eight long years. I slowly learned to believe that I was unable to draw. I tried to be good at other things, but I couldn’t move on from this.

This is how we bury things six feet under - anything we decide is “not for us.” And these days, it’s even easier to believe that, when there’s always someone better out there.

Then one day, after university, I signed up for a drawing class for adults. I believed that you have to do things outside your comfort zone in order to grow. So I looked back at my life and realized that I still had unfinished business with drawing - I needed to make it right somehow.

It was a right-brain drawing class, and I was very excited.

Just to make the lesson even sharper, I ended up sitting next to the best drawer in the group.

Suddenly I was back at that school desk again. Same feeling. Same comparison. I kept looking at her drawing, then at mine, then back at hers again, trying to understand what I was doing wrong. She kept saying her drawing wasn’t that good - but to me it looked perfect.

I tried to stay calm.
I could feel the tension building up in my body. My hand got stiff. I couldn’t see properly anymore. Nothing I did felt right.

And at some point, it was just too much.

I put the pencil down and burst into tears. Not quietly. I was sitting there, in a room full of adults, crying like a child, saying out loud that I would never be able to do this.

I wasn’t even sure why I was there at all.

It wasn’t really about that drawing. It was all the years before that moment, coming back at once.

At that point, the teacher reached out to me. She put her hand on my shoulder and said:

If it’s not what you want to see - “perfect” in your own sense - then it simply means it’s not finished yet.

And that sentence made something click in my mind. I realized that I wasn’t done yet -I just needed to focus on my own drawing. I could go back with an eraser and try again: add details, add shadows, or even start over completely. It’s only finished when you say it is. If you’re not content with what you see - change it. Keep going. Do it again. Start over if you need to. You can keep working on it until you can say: this is what I wanted to see.

And I’ve carried this with me ever since.

We try something, and if it doesn’t turn out the way we imagined, we’re quick to think: this is not for me. I’m not good at this. I’ve failed.

But maybe that’s not true.

Maybe you’re just not done yet.

Not done yet.

Whenever I feel that old frustration coming back, I remind myself: I can still change it. I can try again.

It’s only finished when I decide it is.

And if it’s not what I want to see yet – then I’m simply not done.

At the end of that fourth day, I was holding a photorealistic drawing of myself in my hands. Something I would have said was impossible before.

Staying that day strengthened something in me that has stayed ever since.

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At our university, the rule was that in the year of graduation you had to take one big comprehensive exam covering all areas of civil law. This was the infamous civil law final exam: substantive law, procedural law, company law, law of obligations - everything a person learns over several years.

After all the partial exams, you had to give an account of the whole thing in one single big exam.

There were no lawyers in my family. No one tried to scare me with it.
But somehow the idea of a civil-law Armageddon still formed inside me.

I don’t know where it came from.

The strangest part was that it was there from the very beginning - when countless other exams and challenges were still waiting for me long before that one.

Somehow I couldn’t really enjoy the successes along the way. Because the same thought was always in my head:

“okay, but this still isn’t the civil law final exam.”

For five years I felt anxious about it.

Five years.

I’m writing about this because I think it’s a universal experience.

Many people live with some big, frightening thing hovering in their minds at the end of the road. Maybe a new school. Maybe a career change. Maybe starting a business. Maybe just a decision they’ve been postponing for a long time.

Many people stop before they even begin.

They think: what if I can’t make it all the way?
What if it ends in failure?
What if it’s embarrassing?

And slowly the feeling develops that failure would be worse than not even trying.

So they think: I’ll just finish this first, I’ll wait for that, and then I’ll take the step.

If you feel this way, maybe it helps if I tell you how my story ended.

One day the day finally came.

I woke up in the morning.
I put on my formal clothes.
I went to the university.

At one point that morning I was standing in front of the famous door.

And I pressed down the handle.

The handle whose pressing had cast a shadow over my everyday life for five years.

What happened?

Basically nothing. But I learned something important.

I drew a question.
I answered.
And I got a good grade.

The funniest part of it all was that by then I wasn’t even afraid anymore.

There, in that room, something suddenly became clear.

The farther you are from the light, the larger the shadows grow.

And the closer you get to the source of the problem, the more clearly you know what you have to do.

That day I learned that it had been completely unnecessary to worry about it for years.

I learned something very simple: only the next step matters.

A journey of ten thousand miles also begins with a single step.

And on the road it isn’t what will happen at the end that matters.

What matters is what is directly in front of you.

That next step.

I also learned that no matter how terrible something waiting for us at the end of the road may seem, when we finally get there, we will already know what to do.

When you arrive at the dragon’s cave, the sword will already be in your hand.

You must not let anxiety take the joy out of everyday life.

Just one step.

That’s what you have to focus on.

Even the deepest chasm can be crossed step by step.

And you shouldn’t waste years of your life being afraid of something that hasn’t even happened yet.

Take one step today.

Another one tomorrow.

In the rest of your life, today is the youngest you will ever be. Don’t let opportunities pass you by just because anxiety paralyzes you.

Remember:

only the next step matters.

And when you arrive at the dragon’s cave, the sword will already be in your hand.

If there is a “door handle” in your life that you haven’t dared to press down for a long time, maybe today it’s worth taking one small step closer to it.

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I was lucky because I was considered beautiful without making any particular effort. When I was younger, people regularly stopped me on the street to ask whether I would like to try modeling or attend different casting calls. I even went to a few at first, just to quickly realize that this world was not for me at all, and eventually I stopped pursuing it.

Still, these experiences were valuable because I met several makeup artists at a very young age, and had many conversations with them. They sparked my interest in skincare at a time when I otherwise would not have cared about it at all. After all, who thinks about aging when they are radiant and young, and every day already comes with its own problems?

I started collecting habits that, if you adopt them in your twenties, will make it much easier to enjoy looking in the mirror in your forties. Some of those habits are what I have gathered in this article.

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1. Proper skincare is more important than makeup

Makeup can hide small imperfections or highlight the naturally beautiful parts of your face, but it is nowhere near as important as skincare. On neglected skin, makeup will eventually look bad as well.

At the latest in your twenties, you should start getting to know your skin and begin taking proper care of it. By care, I mean giving it what it actually needs - not whatever the current TikTok trend or marketing trick is promoting.

Cleansing: Your face should be cleansed once a day with a facial cleanser as part of your evening routine. In the morning, it is enough to wash your face with lukewarm water. I recommend having a small towel for each day of the week (so seven in total). After drying your face, place the towel in the laundry. Do not rub your face with the towel—this would damage the skin’s protective barrier. Instead, gently pat the water off your skin. Moisturizer should be applied to slightly damp skin anyway.

When choosing a cleanser, consider your skin type (dry skin: cream-based cleansers, oily skin: gel or foam cleansers, sensitive skin: coconut-based cleansers).

2. Proper hydration - inside and out

Learn the difference between dry skin and dehydrated skin. (Spoiler: dry skin is genetic, but dehydration depends on circumstances, and even oily skin can be dehydrated.)

Look for a moisturizer that contains the right balance of humectants, emollients, and occlusives for your skin type.

My suggestion is for oily skin is gel-based or other lightweight creams, and avoid heavy oily textures; dry skin: look for creams containing ceramides, shea butter, and hyaluronic acid; combination skin: glycerin and niacinamide-based formulas; preferably lotion or gel-cream textures; sensitive skin: avoid products with essential oils; choose fragrance-free formulas.

Once you find a cream that works for you, stick with it. Do not constantly switch products just because influencers - who are often paid to promote them- advertise something new.

And of course, hydration is not only about your skin.

It is honestly quite sad how little water many of us drink, even though our bodies need it so much that dehydration can even show up in blood test results. Please try to drink more water. Not sugary soft drinks, not energy drinks, and not fruit juices but water or unsweetened herbal tea. This matters not only for beauty, but for your overall quality of life.

3. Sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen!

It is a myth that time ages our skin.

The sun ages our skin - if we do not protect it.

I was lucky because I was not yet twenty when a makeup artist pointed out that I had rosacea and advised me to start using sunscreen every day. I think I owe it to that advice that I became deeply interested in skincare and began every single day by applying a moisturizer with SPF 50+. Yes - even in winter. And yes - even if I do not plan to leave the house.

Thanks to this habit, my skin is in such condition that on good days I could easily pass for ten years younger than my actual age - if I wanted to.

My favorite story related to this happened when I was already a thirty-something mother of two. During a national election, one of the clerks tried to give me a commemorative medal meant for first-time voters, until the colleague next to her -who was checking my documents- pointed out that my age was not exactly obvious from my face.

So please believe me: there is no such thing as a “healthy tan.”

You must protect your skin from the sun at all costs if you want it to remain beautiful over time.

4. The forgotten areas: hands and neck

Aging first appears on the hands and neck if they are not properly cared for. It is worth buying a separate cream for your neck -I personally like a very rich serum-based cream- because the skin there is extremely thin and quickly shows signs of aging.

For your hands, use SPF cream during sunny days, and something extra nourishing at night. This simple habit helps prevent premature dark spots and sun-induced pigmentation from appearing on the skin of your hands. Your hands are exposed to the world your entire life and can easily reveal your age if they are not properly cared for.

Secret tip: Dior has an apricot nail cream that is truly miraculous. Apply it in the evening, and by the next day your nails look as if you had a professional manicure. One jar lasts practically forever, so it is actually a very good investment.

5. Learn to glow from within: healthy food and quality sleep

I will not overcomplicate this topic, because there are plenty of places where you can read about it.

But remember: you are what you eat. Your body can only build itself from what you give it. If you consume nonsense, the results will eventually show. As a teenager, your body may burn through everything instantly, but bad habits are much harder to break in adulthood.

Eat a varied diet. Lots of vegetables, fewer processed foods. Look for foods that do not arrive in a box or package but can be bought in their natural form.

Quality and sufficient sleep is also more important than you might think.

Do not fall into the trap of saying, “I will sleep four hours today and catch up on the weekend.” You cannot truly recover the damage you cause this way. Occasionally -before an important exam, for example- it is fine. But not constantly. It will disrupt your hormones, and it will show on your face that you are not well rested. I once watched a colleague gradually lose the shape and vitality of her body simply because she had been sleeping far too little for months. Sleep deprivation does not just make you tired, but affects your entire body. Never forget that. And of course, there are periods in life when lack of sleep is simply part of the situation -new parents with small children, for example, know this very well. But do not turn sleep deprivation into a lifestyle during times when it does not have to be. Your body will eventually ask for the rest you denied it.

I could continue this list, but I will stop here—because nobody will read an endlessly long article. The rest will have to wait for another piece.

Until then remember: beauty is not something you keep by accident. It is something you must protect every single day.

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We tend to record the milestones — the discoveries, the breakthroughs, the theories that promise to change the world. But a human life cannot be reduced to its headlines. So much of what truly shapes us lives in the quiet spaces: our thoughts about love and loss, the books that stayed with us, the rituals of ordinary mornings, the small victories no one applauds. These are the stories that rarely make it into print. And it is precisely these quiet, unwritten stories that I am most afraid of losing.

Since both of my daughters will be studying abroad from September, we will see each other far less often. I’m afraid that these are exactly the kinds of things I won’t be able to tell them — mostly because I simply won’t be there beside them when the moment arises.

I would like to gather all the knowledge I have gained about life over the past almost 43 years, so that if they ever need it, they will be able to find it. And I am making it public in case someone else might stumble upon it and find value in what I share — and perhaps enjoy reading the things that have settled within me over the years.

I have traveled a very long road. I was born in a small provincial town in Hungary, behind the Iron Curtain. My parents divorced when I was nine. I was eleven when contact between me, my sibling, and my father was severed — for nineteen years. This is the greatest trauma of my life, and I believe I will never be able to fully process its pain. It feels as if there is a blank spot on the map of my childhood — not because I forgot it, but because it was never drawn. And that is something I must grieve.

The world in which I lived my childhood no longer exists. Today, we can hardly imagine what it was like to attend high school without the internet, to fall in love as a teenager without chat applications, or simply to run a household without a computer.

These memories are still vivid for me. And although I am not uncritically nostalgic — and I certainly would not wish for that world to return — I would like to pass on the values that crystallized in me over time to the generation that follows us.

During my university years, I studied law in the capital at what was considered the best law school in the country. Because of my family trauma, I did everything I could to build solid ground for navigating human relationships: for years, I attended countless communication trainings, studied coaching and mediation, and for a time, I even taught them. If there is something I deeply believe in, it is human relationships. Nurturing them matters more to me than anything.

Today, I no longer teach communication or participate in mediations, but the intention remains in me to help those around me understand one another — to act, in a way, as a “Hungarian-to-Hungarian” interpreter, softening the noise between hearts and translating what lives inside the other person when they hurt. I would like to write about this as well: how to hear the heart instead of the words, even when it is very difficult.

After university, I worked at the prosecutor’s office, but I never truly found my place there. My soul grew tired of the darkness of case files and criminal investigations. I experienced what it is like to stand up from a velvet chair that many around you envy — and walk away simply to breathe again. I still remember beginning my resignation with the words: This is the most difficult moment of my life. And it truly felt that way. I was terrified — was I making the right decision, or the greatest mistake of my life? But that is precisely what is beautiful about life: you must take the risk and not spend your days wondering what might have been.

I have two daughters — one is now seventeen, the other fifteen. I remember what it was like to stay home with them, to feed on demand, to carry them, to parent responsively. The five years following my first daughter’s birth were, I believe, the most difficult period of my life. I was alone in the big city without a family support network. I had given birth young, and my friends were living entirely different lives at that time. I felt completely alone. During sleepless nights, I sometimes felt as though the silent suburban darkness would swallow me whole.

I remember what it was like to believe that I would never again sleep through the night — and that my daughters’ physical and emotional well-being depended entirely on me. In those years, I burned through the deepest reserves of my patience and strength — layers I hadn’t even known existed.

And yet, if I could choose again, I would choose motherhood all over again. These two girls are the most wonderful thing I have ever been part of. Every single day they surprise me in ways that make me even prouder and happier than before. But I also know what I would do differently — and I will write about that, too.

After the years spent at home with the children, I joined the company my husband and I founded together. I obtained a specialization in environmental law, and we built a nationally significant waste management company from nothing — one that now employs more than fifty people. I experienced many different financial realities before our company became successful, and today I can finally say that I live in financial independence and security.

I do not claim to hold the recipe for success. But I do know a great deal about how to build something from nothing — and how to operate it in a way that serves everyone involved. I know that you cannot aim directly for money, because money alone will not carry you. I would like to write about this as well: what I have learned about building something meaningful and successful from scratch.

When I was younger, people often told me I was an “old soul.” Over time, it seems my physical body has caught up with my soul, because I no longer hear that. But I know what they meant. I have always thought differently from most people my age. I do not say this to boast. It is not only because of the countless books I have read, or the many adventures I have experienced, but also because of the traumas I have carried. A soul ages quickly when it carries heavy burdens.

Now that I am over forty, I feel that I understand many things about the world — and I would very much like to protect my children from the mistakes I have made. That is why I began writing. I do not want to teach classes or host webinars. I simply want to tell stories. I have always felt most at home between letters.

I want to tell my story — the things I have learned — so that I may bring order to them for myself, and so that one day my children can read them. Perhaps even at a time when they can no longer ask me questions.

And if along the way I create value for someone else as well, then it will already have been worth it.

If you find this possibility interesting, please subscribe, leave feedback, share it — I am deeply grateful for every connection. Because I believe the tragedy of untold stories does not begin with death — it begins the moment we miss the opportunity to connect.

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For a long time, I deeply believed that all of this largely depended on chance. That there is an invisible force that decides who ends up on which side. This thought quietly but persistently fed my anxiety. Because if everything depends on luck, then there is nothing to hold on to.

That is why I hoped so much that I would belong to the “lucky ones.”

That one day I would be drawn out of that particular hat.

I was twenty years old when I realized that I had been wrong about this all along.

That was when I met my future husband. He was willing to give up his previous life to move to Budapest with me, because my university studies tied me there. A new city, a new beginning, an uncertain economic situation. At that time there was fierce competition for every job. He submitted countless applications. We hoped. We waited. We flinched at every ringing phone. Then the rejections came. One, two, ten, twenty. After a while we reached the point where any job would do. If he could not use his qualifications, that did not matter. We just needed something to hold on to. I always thought, maybe the next one. More applications. More no, no, and no.

At times like this, many people break. They fall into depression. They see their lives as hopeless. And I cannot blame them: these are moments that test a person. It feels as if the world puts you on a scale: it looks at your achievements, at who you are, and delivers its judgment. Good enough – not good enough.

Although I was only an observer from the outside, inside my heart was also tight with fear. How would this story end?

Then the final rejection arrived. From the place where we expected the yes the most. Where we were sure that “this time it will finally work.”

And then something really broke.

But not his self-esteem.

The dynamic changed.

My husband looked at me and said, word for word: “It’s not true that I’m not good for anything. Then I’ll start my own company, and I’ll work there.” At that moment the waiting stopped. There were no more job postings. No more applications. No more “will they call back?”

We had no money. No investors, of course. Instead of large-scale plans, we had common sense and work. As a sole entrepreneur, he started a food waste collection service. We approached restaurants and transported the waste generated there to a biogas plant.

At that time, few people were involved in this field, because environmental awareness was not fashionable and not even a clear goal. Working with waste was considered more shameful than trendy. And yet – or perhaps because of this – the business began to grow.

At first, we hired just one person. I still remember the stress when he called on the phone – did he crash the car? Did something happen? Then we hired another colleague. Then another. If I fast-forward to today: we now employ more than fifty people.

Sometimes we are asked what the secret of success is, what advice we would give to young people. Sometimes I think about what I will tell my grandchildren if they ask one day.

I do not believe there is a universal recipe. But if I had to highlight one thing, it would be this: Do not focus on what happens to you. Do not see yourself as a victim of your circumstances. Work on your responses.

Viktor E. Frankl writes in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that between stimulus and response there is a space. A small pause. And in that space lies a person’s ultimate freedom. The moment when you can decide how you will respond to what has happened to you. No one can take this from you. Not even in the most miserable circumstances.

My husband could have decided to collapse. To believe what the world seemed to say: that he was not good enough. But he could also decide differently. He stood up. He moved forward with his head held high.

It did not depend on the circumstances.

It depended on the response.

This choice – how you respond – is a stronger weapon than we think. Often it is in our pocket, and we do not even know it.

Use it.

You are not a victim of your circumstances.

Decide differently.

Move forward. And when you think you cannot continue – take one more step.

Perhaps this is one key to success. And we all have it in our pockets.