The news arrives with the predictable sanctimony of a BBC documentary: Budapest’s president, a loyalist of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal project, is teetering on the brink of removal. And who should ride to the rescue of Hungarian democracy? None other than His Majesty’s Government, which has graciously announced a ‘democratic transition fund’ to lubricate the gears of change. One must admire the sheer chutzpah: Britain, a nation that has spent the last decade convulsing through its own constitutional crises, Brexit chaos, and a revolving door of prime ministers, now appoints itself the tutor of political virtue in Central Europe. It is rather like watching a drunk lecture a teetotaller on sobriety.
Let us consider the substance beneath the rhetoric. Hungary’s president, Katalin Novák, is indeed a creature of Orbán’s Fidesz machine. Her impending ouster, triggered by a scandal over a presidential pardon granted to a child abuser’s accomplice, is a sordid affair. But the response from London tells us more about the intellectual decadence of our own elites than about Hungary’s political trajectory. The ‘transition fund’ is a pittance, a symbolic gesture designed to reassure the liberal conscience that something is being done. Yet it reveals a deeper pathology: the assumption that democracy is a commodity to be exported, like Marmite or the English Premier League.
One is reminded of the Victorian era, when Britain fancied itself the beacon of civilisation, spreading parliamentary governance and cricket to the benighted corners of the globe. The results were mixed at best. Today, the same impulse manifests as a neurotic obsession with ‘democratic backsliding’ in Hungary and Poland, while our own institutions atrophy. The House of Lords remains unelected. The electoral system is a gerrymandered relic. And the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was chosen by a few dozen MPs, not the electorate. Yet we lecture Budapest on democratic standards?
The historical parallel that haunts me is not the Fall of Rome, but the late Habsburg Empire. In its dying decades, Vienna grew obsessed with protocol and prestige, issuing decrees about the proper way to conduct a ball while the nationalities within its borders festered. Britain today is the Habsburgs of the 21st century: a once-great power, diminished and insecure, compensating through moral crusades abroad. The Hungarian affair is a distraction from our own decay. While we fund NGOs in Budapest, our own civic trust dissolves. While we tut-tut at Orbán’s media laws, our own press groans under the weight of billionaire ownership and state capture.
Do not misunderstand me. Orbán’s regime is no model. His attacks on the judiciary, the press, and civil society are deplorable. But the response from the West is a performative ritual, not a serious engagement. The ‘transition fund’ will likely end up in the pockets of consultants and activists who already believe the same things as their British benefactors. It will change nothing. What would change matters is a honest reckoning with the fact that liberal democracy has lost its allure. It is seen as a system that delivers endless war, economic stagnation, and cultural deracination. Hungary’s turn to illiberalism is a symptom, not a cause.
Hungary’s president will probably fall. A new figurehead will emerge, perhaps more palatable to Brussels. But the structures of power that Orbán built will endure. The British fund will be a footnote in a history that is not about democracy, but about the decline of a once-vibrant idea. We are living in a interregnum, where the old certainties have crumbled and the new ones have not yet taken shape. And rather than admit our own confusion, we pretend that a cheque book can restore the faith of a sceptical continent.
In the end, the Budapest drama is a mirror. We look into it and see our own anxieties: the fear that the era of liberal ascendancy is ending, that the magic is gone. The ouster of a Hungarian president will not restore it. Neither will a fund. Only a honest confrontation with our own intellectual decadence might begin that work. But that, alas, is not a headline. It is a slow, painful process that requires more than a press release.
