As he made me coffee in his kitchen on the train to Budapest, the chatty chef said something surprising: “there is a fashion now to hate the president”. Orbán would, he guessed, lose the next election.
On my previous trip to Hungary, just 15 months ago, progressives were glum. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was running ever further to the right. And it wasn’t just leading in the polls, it was lapping the fractured and infiltrated opposition.
On the back of an anti-Semitic re-election campaign that spring, Fidesz had secured 2/3 of the seats in Hungary’s gold-plated parliament building, giving it the right to change the country’s constitution at will – a power they’ve not been slow to use. None of the various progressive parties had managed to even reach second place: they’d also been beaten by another far right party, Jobbik.
