A tremor just ran through the chancelleries of Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, that doughty little Caesar of the Pannonian Basin, has threatened to oust his own handpicked president, Katalin Novák. The Foreign Office, my sources whisper, is in a state of high dudgeon, fretting over fresh instability in the East. But let us not mistake a palace squabble for a revolution. This is not Budapest 1956. This is Budapest 2024, a theatre of the absurd where the script is written by Machiavelli after a long night with P.G. Wodehouse.
Orbán, a man who has so successfully blended authoritarianism with the aesthetics of a provincial estate agent, now finds himself in the delicate position of having to dispose of a figurehead he himself installed. Novák, a former family minister, was meant to be the smiling face of 'illiberal democracy', a woman who could sell the Fidesz project to the West as a quaint, conservative alternative to the decadence of Brussels. But the mask has slipped. A scandal over a presidential pardon granted in a child abuse case has exposed the regime's rank hypocrisy. The outcry has been such that even the stoic Hungarian public, long anaesthetised by nationalist rhetoric and EU funds, has stirred.
Now, Orbán must choose. Keep Novák and endure the moral stench, or cast her aside and risk the wrath of his own base, who may see this as a sign of weakness. The FCO's panic is understandable, but it is also irrelevant. For what can London do? Send a strongly worded letter? Threaten to suspend the next trade delegation? The days when Britain could dictate terms in Central Europe are as dead as the Habsburg Empire.
The real story here is not the fate of one Hungarian president. It is the continued unraveling of the post-1989 settlement. For thirty years, we told ourselves that liberal democracy had triumphed. We built institutions, wrote constitutions, and gave lectures on human rights. But we forgot that democracy requires a demos, a people who believe in the system. In Hungary, the people have been fed a diet of grievance and historical myth for so long that they have lost the taste for freedom.
Orbán is not a monster. He is a symptom. A symptom of a continent that has lost its nerve, that has substituted endless proceduralism for actual governance. The European Union, that grand project of bureaucratic peace, has become an empty cathedral. The bells ring, but no one prays.
So let Orbán sack his president. Let him anoint a new lackey. The farce will continue, and the markets will yawn. But we should pay attention. Because what happens in Budapest does not stay in Budapest. It spreads like a virus to Warsaw, to Rome, to Paris. The autumn of the West is not a season. It is an epoch. And we are living through it.
