The 16-year Orbán era is officially over. And I mean – OVER. As the reality starts to sink in, Hungarians are facing something rare: an opportunity, and a responsibility, to close a chapter with dignity and begin healing.
In this 4-part series, I’m reflecting on how I saw what just happened. I’m looking at it as a marketer and communications professional, and as a linguist, trying to decode what enabled Orbán to stay in power for so long. In the final post (this one), I’ll turn to the question of restitution. That’s a difficult conversation, and one that inevitably brings up uncomfortable historical parallels.
What just happened in Hungary
Two realities: Political marketing in parallel worlds
When language becomes a weapon
On April 12th, 2026, Hungary didn’t just change governments.
It ended something.
Sixteen years of a system that shaped not only politics, but everyday life. How people spoke. What they believed. What they dared to say, and what they didn’t dare to say out loud.
A lot of people suffered under this system. Some spoke up. And they paid for it: They lost their jobs. Their platforms. Their credibility was attacked, their names dragged through the mud. Speaking out came at a cost, and everyone knew it.
Others chose a different path: Silence. Apathy. Resignation.
Some served the system openly, in the front line, in politics, in media, in positions of influence. Others were further removed. Small roles. Administrative tasks. Following instructions. Doing their job.
A system like this doesn’t run on a few visible actors. It runs on thousands of invisible ones.
The Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés (pronounce: “Dyoo-lah Ee-lyesh”, with a soft “dy” sound at the start, like ‘duke’) captures this beautifully in his poem One sentence on tyranny, excellently recited in English by the young Andoni Zorbas here:
Where there’s tyranny, everyone is a link in the chain.
Gyula Illyés
And with Orbán’s fall, there seems to be a huge appetite to track down the links in the chain.
The media machine
To understand this, you have to understand how the Orbán system built its media environment.
Over the years, a large part of the Hungarian media landscape was consolidated under government-aligned ownership. Public media, which in principle should serve the public, became something else entirely: A centralised communication system. News that wasn’t quite news. Opinions packaged as facts. Narratives repeated until they became familiar, and familiarity slowly turned into belief.
Opposition voices were not debated. They were marginalised. Ridiculed. Or ignored altogether.
Péter Magyar is a good example. For a long time, he was effectively invisible in this ecosystem. No airtime. No platform. No space to speak.
When he did appear, it was framed negatively. Zero effort for balanced broadcasting.
There have been multiple analyses attempting to quantify this imbalance, comparing screen time, tone of coverage, frequency of mentions across different channels. While the exact figures vary depending on methodology, the pattern is consistent:
One side dominates visibility.
The other is kept at the margins.
And over time, that shapes perception.
Not because people are forced to believe something, but because they are repeatedly shown only one version of reality.
No wonder one of the first things the incoming prime minister mentioned in his first press conference was the immediate reform of the media law, and to dissolve what he called ‘a factory of lies’:
When support became a risk
In 2025, Viktor Orbán hinted at introducing a media law that would scrutinise foreign funding and potentially shut down independent outlets. Living in London, with a Hungarian and British passport, I suddenly found myself wondering whether I would be seen as a “foreign” supporter. Instead of transferring money to Partizán, one of my favourite independent news outlets on YouTube, we withdrew cash and took it to their office in Budapest, placing it in a donation box – just to be safe. The law never happened, but the thought process alone says a lot about how volatile things felt at the time.
Partizán is an independent Hungarian media platform run by Márton Gulyás, producing long-form interviews, documentaries, and in-depth political discussions outside the government-controlled media landscape.
After the silence
And then, almost overnight, something shifted.
After the election, voices from within the government-controlled media system started to emerge. Journalists. Editors. People working in public media, speaking up.
Expressing discomfort. Regret. Frustration with how news had been produced. How stories had been framed.
It is an important moment. But it is also an uncomfortable one. Because the public reaction has been … mixed.
Many are asking:
Why now?
Where were these voices before?
Where were they when colleagues were dismissed?
When narratives were shaped?
When propaganda was produced, day after day?
Why speak only now, when it is safe to do so?
‘I just followed orders’
What is happening now reminds me strongly of Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil, an idea that emerged from observing the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials.
Arendt argued that oppressive systems are not primarily sustained by monstrous individuals, but by ordinary people. People who do not see themselves as decision-makers. Only as small parts of a much larger machine.
And perhaps that is the most unsettling part. Because a system like this does not require one single, defining decision. It requires many small ones.
Moments of silence.
Moments of adaptation.
Moments of self-justification.
Over time, these accumulate, and they become the system.
The difficult questions
What we are seeing now, with people speaking up, is important. Necessary, even. But the real question I believe is not ‘why now’? Instead, it should be:
What allowed this silence to persist for sixteen years?
What made it sustainable?
What made it normal?
Getting to the bottom of these questions will, in my opinion, help us find the real perpetrators.
Restitution, not just reflection
There is now a growing demand in Hungary for accountability, consequences, and restitution.
“Bilincs, bilincs, rács, rács” — handcuffs, handcuffs, bars, bars — keep appearing in comment sections, as words or emojis. In Magyar’s rallies, these words were repeatedly chanted by crowds.
It’s not just anger. It’s a demand for justice. And I do understand it.
At the same time, I also believe that this moment needs to be handled with care. Because this is not just about giving space to those who are now speaking up. It is also about giving space to those who lost jobs. Voices. Opportunities. The victims.
Those who spoke, when it was not safe to do so and paid for it.
What Hungary is going through right now feels like a kind of collective release. Cathartic. Unsettling. Overwhelming. But also necessary. Because without it, nothing really changes and history will keep repeating itself.
Gabriella Ferenczi 
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