Viktor Orbán’s Popular Defiance

An outsider in Budapest seeking to understand the Hungarian election of April 3 in the run-up to the vote was likely to find it a bit surreal. One friend and his wife were set to vote for the Two-Tailed Dog Party, which sadly did not in the end manage to elect any MPs; another friend rang up and told me to leave the country at once because Viktor Orbán planned to welcome Vladimir Putin’s army into Hungary and we were all in danger. This person was herself planning to sell her flat and move to Italy. Another acquaintance, apparently in full possession of his marbles, fulminated against Orbán and all his works for half an hour over tea and sütemények. During a pause in the rant I ventured to ask him who he was therefore planning to vote for. “Orbán, of course,” he said, as though the question was dumb. “There is no alternative.”

The Two-Tailed Dog Party was doing for Hungarian politics what Marcel Duchamp’s urinal did for French art. Its program was creative, if…