On Andrássy Avenue, the most elegant shopping strip in central Budapest, there is one four-story building that is not quite like the others. It is called the House of Terror, and you can tell, because its metallic awnings have the word terror stamped into them. Behind an art installation made of chains and a piece of the Berlin Wall, the building’s facade is decorated with pictures of victims of the Communist regime that once controlled Hungary. Inside, if you make it to the basement, you will find a monument to torture and atrocity featuring solitary confinement cells, a wet cell, and a series of gallows. A tap seems to be dripping in the background. The only way down to the basement is through a darkened elevator that moves oh so slowly as a video plays of a janitor recounting, in painstaking detail, the procedure for state executions. If you haven’t taken an audio guide, no information is provided to contextualize this exhibit beyond a piece of paper that describes what secret police officers would do to innocent citizens, right here in this very building. From each of the gallows, a ghostly track plays, finally giving voice to one of the unjustly damned.
It makes for a brutal, unflinching encounter with historical truth—or half-truth. For one thing, executions never took place at 60 Andrássy Avenue. The building was taken over by the secret police in the mid-1950s and served an array of other purposes until the early 2000s, when ideologues from Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party turned it into something approximating Disneyland for fans of the bombastically hawkish Sovietologist Anne Applebaum. Some of the site’s history is indeed shocking, as are the actual atrocities committed by Communists on Hungarian soil between 1949 and 1989, from the brutality of postwar purges and forced collectivization to the furious persecution of rebels associated with a failed anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. But in its current guise, the House of Terror’s basement—like its other three floors—is about as real and sensitive as the countless escape rooms that dot this heavily touristed Central European city. Unlike an escape room, however, you don’t need to use your brain to make it out of the House of Terror. You just have to follow the predetermined path, which leads out through the torture chamber, past videos of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán giving a speech and Soviet troops leaving Hungary, and up into the lobby, where a massive Soviet tank stands guard over the gift shop.
A high-tech museum of fascism and communism located in a building used by the Nazis’ Arrow Cross puppet regime before the Communist takeover, the House of Terror is the cornerstone in Fidesz’s attempts to remake Hungarian identity along nationalist, conservative, irredentist, and above all, anti-left-wing lines. Once a liberal centrist party, Fidesz has shifted rightward since the 1990s under Orbán’s leadership. After ruling in a conservative coalition from 1998 to 2002, Fidesz lost the ensuing elections to the Socialist party and began establishing itself as the country’s primary right-wing opposition force. Upon returning to power in 2010, Orbán set to work ensuring that Fidesz would continue to dominate national politics for decades to come. His administration has massively increased party influence over the courts, media, and NGOs while introducing self-serving reforms to the electoral system and offering citizenship to (generally pro-Fidesz) ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries. He also changed Hungary’s constitution to reflect the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. During the 2015 influx of migrants to Europe, Orbán adopted a position of extreme hostility to the European Union’s migrant quotas, engaging in highly xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric while building an infamous barbed-wire fence along Hungary’s southern border to keep asylum seekers out. He said the EU should pay for it.
Fidesz’s economic policies have combined bursts of neoliberal privatization and austerity with strategic big government spending, particularly in the form of offering tax breaks for young families, pushing utilities prices down, and bolstering (some) pensions. Orbán has described his system as a Christian “illiberal democracy”; internationally, critics have described it as “managed democracy,” or occasionally “soft fascism,” in which there is the appearance—but not the reality—of independent media, free elections, and open competition between political parties. (According to one estimate, by 2017, around 90 percent of the Hungarian media landscape was controlled by either Fidesz or party-loyal oligarchs.)
Orbán’s administration has weathered accusations of cronyism and corruption, as well as concerns about the rule of law and Fidesz’s hostility to the rights of queer people and asylum seekers. Yet external pressure has come late. It wasn’t until 2021 that Fidesz was pressured out of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which included Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and fellow member and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. The EU only began temporarily withholding funds from Hungary in late 2022, finally fining the country €200 million for flouting asylum laws last year. Hungary’s democratic status has now been formally called into question: one European Parliament report described it as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”—that is, not quite a totalitarian dictatorship but not quite a functioning democracy either.
From the beginning, Fidesz has been clear that its aims went beyond success in electoral politics. The party wanted to genuinely transform Hungarian culture, to “embed the political system in a cultural era,” as Orbán put it in a 2018 speech. One major element in this campaign has involved historical mythmaking, with Orbán and his allies—most visibly the House of Terror’s director Mária Schmidt, a professor and media mogul whom Fidesz appointed as historian-in-chief—marshaling public and private resources to monopolize national conversations about history and memory. A belligerent right-wing nation requires a belligerent right-wing national story. To this end, Fidesz has sidelined professional historians and museum workers while pouring resources into new research institutes and building programs run by political appointees happy to commit to Orbán’s agenda, even when the results are historically misleading and symbolically heavy-handed. Statues have been replaced; Budapest city squares have been refashioned; historians have lost their jobs; and new unscholarly museums have been established, all designed to deliver a version of Hungarian identity based in victimhood, a sense of lost glory, and a militant, anti-left nationalism. The Fidesz-aligned politician Sándor Lezsák once explained it like this: “We must reconquer the past.”
Some efforts to meddle in history, such as plans to erect a statue of the antisemitic politician Bálint Hóman in 2015, have provoked criticism from Western commentators. Yet the broader sweep of Fidesz’s historical project—a project explicitly and dramatically unveiled as long ago as 2002 at the House of Terror—has largely flown under the radar. Hungarian power brokers may be gifted at speaking from both sides of their mouths, but there’s another reason their mythology has avoided any real censure. The Fidesz history campaign’s nationalist conservatism and anti-left triumphalism are not all that different from what the West itself wanted to see in end-of-history Central Europe.
This Was Their Socialism
The House of Terror is nominally dedicated to two twentieth-century dictatorships, but as soon as you enter, it becomes clear that the place is far more interested in the Communist one. Standing in the entryway are a big five-pointed star and an Arrow Cross, the eponymous emblem of Hungary’s Nazi-installed fascist government. Just past them in the lobby, however, a corny socialist-realist artwork hangs over the ticketing desk while a video shows a man in a hard hat weeping: “Sixteen, eighteen-year-old kids whose thinking was different, and they sent for the hangman, the executioner,” he says. “This was their socialism.” It seems the museum only includes fascism to recruit the Holocaust’s moral status into an anticommunist memory project. A glance at the House of Terror’s map shows that there are three rooms dedicated to fascism and perhaps two dozen to communism.
It seems the museum only includes fascism to recruit the Holocaust’s moral status into an anticommunist memory project.
After a handful of rushed Arrow Cross installations, you find yourself in a vividly immersive room dedicated to the postwar Soviet occupation, and especially the gulags. On one wall is a quote from Stalin: “Hungary must be punished as an example to others.” Museum text describes how the occupying Soviets, “like the Nazis” before them, came with prepared lists of enemies earmarked for “deportation” on eastbound “cattle wagons.” A few rooms later, you learn what the museum really means by terror when an info sheet describes the Communist takeover thusly: “The era of fear and terror began.” (I was personally surprised to hear there had been no fear or terror in the years when Hungary was ruled by fascists.)
Equivocations of fascism and communism abound throughout the rest of the space. One installation is set up like a locker room. Two mannequins spin around in the center, one dressed in the Arrow Cross uniform while the other wears Communist garb. A screen plays a video of people changing outfits, while the audio guide explains: “Exhibits in this room signify the continuity of the dictatorial regimes, indicating that the dictatorship only changed its color and uniform.” When I asked Gábor Egry, the director-general of Budapest’s independent Institute of Political History about this installation, he said, “It’s a really neat and obvious repeating of this idea of totalitarian—not just affinity—but actually overlap between extreme right and extreme left. . . . The most important point there is that both get placed outside of the authentic Hungarian history, that somehow these are not stemming from Hungarian identity but are imported to Hungary.” The message here, as elsewhere, is clear: Hungary’s twentieth century is a tale of the brutality it endured at the hands of foreign totalitarian powers. When resistance is mentioned in the museum, it is framed as a “freedom fight” for national sovereignty; even the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, which was in fact led by reform leftists, is cast in national-populist terms.
It is a convenient message for a nation that was allied with the Germans well before the Nazis invaded in March 1944—and that provided collaborators and leaders to both the fascist and Communist regimes. And it is a message that Fidesz has looked to inscribe, not just on Hungary’s streetscapes and museum rooms, but into national law as well. Not long after returning to power in 2010, Fidesz added a new preamble to the nation’s constitution, which includes these lines:
We date the restoration of our country’s self-determination, lost on the nineteenth day of March 1944, from the second day of May 1990, when the first freely elected body of popular representation was formed. We shall consider this date to be the beginning of our country’s new democracy and constitutional order.
According to the historian Ferenc Laczó, whom I spoke to over the phone, this seemingly minor point is heavily loaded. Disavowing sovereignty at the date of Germany’s occupation whitewashes the pre-occupation regime and portrays Hungary not as a nation that both suffered and perpetrated twentieth-century crimes, but as a powerless victim of imported ideologies. “It allows people to say that all the bad stuff came from Berlin, for the far right, and all the Communists came from Moscow,” Laczó says. “It basically enables the story to be told without any attention to the Hungarian state’s very problematic role.” Serious academic historians largely refute the equivalence of fascism with communism, in the Hungarian case as elsewhere; they also tend to draw lines of continuity between the Holocaust and the regime of Miklós Horthy, a self-declared lifelong antisemite who served as Hungary’s head of state from 1920 to 1944. Horthy’s government freely allied itself with the Axis powers, passed stringent laws restricting Jewish participation in public life, and only backed away from its alliance with Germany, triggering the occupation, when it became clear the Allies would win the war. “This is a manipulation of history,” Laczó says of Fidesz’s memory politics, exemplified by the House of Terror, “a state-directed attempt to indoctrinate people in a certain way. It is an anti-liberal and radical-nationalistic project.”
A Revolution of Imitation
When the House of Terror opened in 2002, it infuriated many prominent Hungarian academics—I spoke with one, the liberal Krysztián Ungváry, who called it an “absolute scandal”—as well as progressive activists and culture-makers of many stripes. But mainstream Western politicians and journalists offered minimal critique. The New York Times published two articles about the museum’s highly disputed opening, both of which gave the final word to supporters and, in one case, to museum director Mária Schmidt. She told the paper, “Finally we can say this out loud: The Communist regime was inhuman. Finally we can teach children the truth.” In 2008, the New York Times travel section called the House of Terror “wonderful,” “not to be missed,” and, somehow, “understated.” More recently, it was lauded in the paper’s 2019 roundup of exhibitions marking the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Prospect magazine praised the museum’s lack of “macabre kitsch.” The Times of London promoted the House once in 2014 (“a sombre reminder of Budapest’s troubled past”) and twice in 2024 (“sucker-punching”; “The basement, where dissidents were tortured and executed, will freeze your blood”), and also called, in 2018, for a similar museum in the UK to “remind us of communism’s evils.” Mainstream European politicians have regularly attended events and given speeches there over the years. It is listed on all kinds of tourism websites.
The West’s eager embrace of anticommunism has been empowering belligerent, conservative nationalism in Europe for some time.
“The interesting part of the story is how incredibly well received this museum is at first,” Laczó told me, noting that its success also had to do with genuine local demand for a reckoning with Communist history. “Many people don’t like to go back there now,” he continued. “But if you look at the early years, this is a museum that’s widely seen in the West as, ‘Finally, an Eastern European country confronts its totalitarian past. Finally, there’s some attempt to show the crimes of communism.’” Fidesz, ever pragmatic in its messaging to both domestic voters and international observers, has long understood militant anticommunism as a way to secure Western buy-in for ultimately illiberal projects. “Anticommunism is acceptable internationally, in Europe, in the West,” Laczó continued. “It’s kind of a consensual ideal.”
Indeed, since 1989, a certain strain of anticommunist history—one that goes above and beyond coming to terms with real twentieth-century atrocities—has proven influential among Western liberals, conservatives, and the far right alike. As the Cold War came to an end, the United States, the UK, and Western Europe set out to bring the ascendant liberal global order to the traumatized lands of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. The operative question was: How should these countries look now?
Political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have described the 1989 regime changes as a revolution of “imitation,” noting that “political elites in the region were almost universally enthusiastic about the imitation of West European and American ‘normality.’” At the time, “normality” meant Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Reaganism’s influence in the region was extended by anglophone intellectuals like Anne Applebaum—who came to prominence as an Eastern Europe watcher for The Economist and the Independent—and by think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where Applebaum’s husband, the conservative Polish politician Radosław Sikorski, worked during the early 2000s. At AEI, Sikorski led the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI), whose official patrons included Thatcher and Henry Kissinger. NAI organized international conferences like “Ronald Reagan: Legacy for Europe,” which celebrated the role Reagan allegedly played in “victory over the Evil Empire and the Autumn of the Peoples in 1989,” and asked explicitly: “Can his methods be applied in Central Europe?” Speakers included Newt Gingrich, the columnist John Fund, and Lech Kaczyński, one of the two brothers who used to lead Poland’s populist right-wing Law and Justice Party.
The West’s eager embrace of anticommunism has been empowering belligerent, conservative nationalism in Europe for some time. Since the Soviets had been anti-nationalists, the logic goes, European nationalism must not be so bad. In a 1995 anthology based on a series of seminars held by the Council on Foreign Relations, Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe, the political scientist George Schöpflin—then a professor in University College London’s Slavonic and Eastern European Studies department—noted the reemergence of nationalism with approval: “Its Marxist and liberal opponents have written it off countless times, yet it lives on, despite having been dismissed as ‘irrational,’” he wrote. Schöpflin would eventually give up his plum academic post to represent the Orbán government in the European Parliament.
Another regular reference point for right-wing populists on the continent is The Black Book of Communism, a work of dubious historical accuracy published in English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999. It was written by the French scholar Stéphane Courtois in association with a handful of other authors from France and Central Europe, two of whom have disavowed the book on account of Courtois’s faulty scholarship, specifically his insistence on morally equating communism with fascism by attributing to the former a dubious but widely cited death toll of one hundred million. Today, HUP still sells the tome on its website, featuring positive blurbs from the Wall Street Journal (“a masterful work”), the Washington Post (“part of a welcome change in the moral-philosophical landscape in Paris, and one hopes elsewhere”), The New Republic (“the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators”), and the New York Times, in which Tony Judt wrote that “no one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew.” In 2000, a Hungarian version was launched in Budapest by none other than Schmidt, who acknowledged both Courtois and Applebaum in her remarks.
As Laure Neumayer, Valentin Behr, and other scholars have written, a broad church could be united behind such publications: “Though the Black Book inevitably contributed to the rise of a national-conservative anti-communism, it also provided a legitimate common ground for a reluctant cooperation between two types of anti-communists: national-conservative revisionists and pro-European liberals.” These intertwined transatlantic movements have successfully lobbied governments in the United States and Europe to introduce initiatives aimed at prosecuting former communists and commemorating “Victims of Communism” writ large—often with the aim of appropriating the moral weight of Holocaust memory for their anti-left cause. There are now emotive memorial-museums dedicated to those abstracted victims in locations ranging from Romania to Lithuania to Washington, D.C.
Certain members of the unwieldy coalition behind these campaigns may now regret their credulousness. In her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum laments that “Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law.” Nevertheless, under the cover of anticommunism, right-wing politics and romantic nationalism have become newly respectable, as has Holocaust revisionism.
“We see sites like that a lot in the post-communist sphere,” says Ljiljana Radonić, a political scientist from the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, about the House of Terror. “What starts off as an equalization [between fascism and communism] actually ends by saying the communist crimes are worse, and then this is where the whole energy and emotion of critically confronting the past goes.” If the legacy of fascism is a negative icon of our times, then Fidesz wants to replace this negative icon with anticommunism, to substitute gulag for Auschwitz, to make ideas like redistribution and internationalism just as politically taboo as antisemitism and eugenics. It is a project, in other words, that hopes to totally reshape society.
Not Just Anything Goes
The handful of rooms dedicated to fascism in the House of Terror present a narrative that Jewish Hungarians lived in relative safety up until the arrival of the Germans, who installed an antisemitic puppet government. The museum also tells visitors about what was done to “our Jewish fellow citizens” from the spring of 1944, with no mention of how, by then, the Horthy regime had already barred Jewish citizens from marrying gentiles and working in the civil service and deported tens of thousands of them to Nazi-occupied Ukraine, mostly to their deaths.
This posture is symptomatic: Fidesz has encountered a fatal contradiction in its attempts to bring Jewish history in line with its nationalist narrative. The party does not want to be seen as antisemitic, at least not internationally, but the denial of Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust has been apparent in their historical vision from the beginning. It is a circle that they have, to date, struggled to square.
The party does not want to be seen as antisemitic, at least not internationally, but the denial of Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust has been apparent in their historical vision from the beginning.
In 2013, Orbán’s government proudly announced its plans for a new museum dedicated to Hungary’s Holocaust experience. The site had been acquired: a former railway station in southeastern Budapest where deportations occurred in 1944. It would be called the House of Fates, to correspond with the House of Terror, and was conceived of by Schmidt, who boasted that the new museum would tell a “story of love between Hungarian Jews and non-Jews.” Construction was completed in 2015, with the old railway station buildings supplemented by an eye-catching monument: a massive silver Star of David that shoots out from between two stacks of piled-up cattle wagons.
Radonić explained to me that Budapest already had a viable museum on the topic: the Holocaust Memorial Center, which was established in 2004 under a progressive government and neglected (though not altered) under Fidesz. Yet the party wanted to represent this history in terms of their own political narratives. “It was clear from the start that they wanted a different Holocaust museum, in order to tell a different story,” Radonić said. That story would be far less critical than the one that the Holocaust Memorial Center told. “In Hungary, there is this strong trend of telling stories that do not exclude the Holocaust, but that de-Holocaust-icize the Holocaust—talk about it, but talk about the Hungarian rescuers and not about the Jews who were rescued.”
The country’s largest Jewish organization, Mazsihisz, ended up boycotting the House of Fates project; so did Yad Vashem, whose director of libraries protested in a statement that “visitors to the House of Fates are to be shown and taught that, except for a tiny, criminal and fanatic minority, the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” The Jewish-Hungarian author György Konrád refused to participate in an advisory session, telling Schmidt via the press that he could not shake the feeling that this exhibition was not about murdered Jewish children but instead about Fidesz.
Although Fidesz has nominally relieved Schmidt of leadership, passing responsibility for the museum to Orthodox community leader (and Orbán ally), Slomó Köves, the House of Fates still has not opened. Sources tell me the project has been decisively canned. The opening had been planned for 2019, then 2024. Mazsihisz and Yad Vashem remain unconvinced; so do historians, several of who were approached but refused to join a project they felt would be undermined by party politics. “We know that in Hungary,” Radonić said, “no curator would have the full power to freely decide. I spoke to people who have been offered this position, and they have said, well, I’m not naive.”
Last December, I visited the House of Fates site, which loomed large in wintry dusk light. The gates to the property were closed with chains. Its massive silver star reflected the lights of passing cars. Across the street was a neon pink sign hawking Gyros and a shop front for Lottózó, the nationally owned gambling service—a more successful house of fates, perhaps. The whole scene was bleak, a forlorn emblem of just how wastefully Fidesz has been vandalizing the cultural and historical landscape of Budapest. But when I asked Radonić, she saw the museum’s failure to launch as a cause for cautious optimism: “In a way, this is a good sign as well, because it shows the limits of historical revisionism,” she said. “We are in a globally intertwined world, where not just anything goes when it comes to the Holocaust.”
It is true that not just anything goes, and the Fidesz government has faced severe criticism both at home and abroad for its attack ads against the Jewish-Hungarian Soros family, its attempts to rehabilitate antisemites from Hungary’s past like Hóman and Horthy, and narratives of national victimhood with respect to the Holocaust. In recent years, however, Orbán has settled on a new strategy for refuting accusations of antisemitism: unconditional support for Israel and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite their presumed differences, including over the extent of Hungary’s Holocaust guilt, the two strongmen have made numerous public declarations of mutual support.
Their alliance is uncanny, perhaps, but appears to be working out for them both. Netanyahu has an ally in Europe prepared to welcome him in open defiance of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for conducting war crimes in Gaza, while Orbán gains diplomatic cover for the antisemitic and revisionist flourishes that accompany his radical anti-left cultural policy. When Fidesz won the 2018 election, after a campaign that heavily featured attacks on Soros, an Orbán spokesman claimed that the attacks “could not possibly be anti-Semitic, since they were echoed by Netanyahu.” It’s from the by-now familiar playbook of the global right: Netanyahu also came to the defense of “great friend of Israel” Elon Musk after his Sieg heil-esque salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration—the very same week that Musk told attendees at a German far-right rally they should “move beyond” their “guilt” and ensure that “multiculturalism” does not dilute their national pride.
Café Society
Fidesz’s history campaigns are not only about disavowing national guilt but also vilifying their present-day enemies. In 2022, when Schmidt was being interviewed by the Hungarian magazine Képmás—an initiative of the Foundation for a Civic Hungary, the Fidesz think tank—she took its director of publishing on a tour of the House of Terror. At one point, between posing for photos at her favorite exhibits, she reflected on the fall of Communism thirty years on: “There was one question that has always concerned me and my American friends, for example, Norman Podhoretz, who spoke about it here in Budapest at our conference, and that is why Western societies did not celebrate the fact that they had defeated communism. We now understand why: because they’ve never defeated it,” she said. “We need to be aware of what we are up against. For a long time, we thought that the West was opposing communism—people have not realized yet that they are the heirs.”
Scruton Café bills itself as more than just a coffee shop—it is also a community designed to promote conservative values, one clearly trying to bolster Fidesz’s popularity among the nation’s youth.
Into this moral void steps Hungary. Fidesz politicians and their allies often invoke Hungary’s long experience of foreign domination at the hands of the Habsburgs, the Nazis, the Communists, and the Soros-following liberal mob as evidence of the durability of their nationalist concept. What results is a vision of national identity that rallies past pains to the cause of ongoing national belligerence, regardless of who the target might be. Orbán has compared the EU’s threat of funding cuts to the 1956 Soviet invasion: “We were here when the first conquering empire attacked us, and we’ll be here when the last one collapses.” While at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, he brought this historical parallelism to bear on a rather more abstract kind of invading force: “The woke movement and gender ideology,” Orbán boomed, “are exactly what communism and Marxism used to be.” Posturing as Europe’s last true defenders, Orbán and his allies cite their national experience to expand their influence abroad. Might Fidesz’s historical takeover offer a model—a blueprint—for right-wing culture warriors worldwide?
For many years now, ultra-conservative figures like Tucker Carlson have been drawn to Hungary, describing it as a land of anti-woke milk and Christian nationalist honey. Agitators across the right-wing spectrum have praised the Orbán model. The former Australian prime minister-turned-UK governmental adviser Tony Abbott—a regular visitor to Hungary and one-time attendee of the Demographic Summit in Budapest, which gathers right-wing thinkers to powwow about boosting the birth rates and “traditional family values”—applauded Orbán’s nativist policies in The Spectator in 2019, and in May 2024 claimed that Hungary under Fidesz had become a “point of light to Conservatives around the world.” Abbott has played down claims that Orbán is some kind of dictator. “Hungary has a vigorous free press,” he said to the Hungarian Conservative magazine, which happens to be funded by the pro-Fidesz Batthyány Lajos Foundation. “It has a robustly independent judiciary, and it has free and fair democratic elections.”
English-language magazines like Hungarian Conservative and the European Conservative, both of which you can purchase in the House of Terror’s gift shop, are further evidence of Fidesz’s hunger for global influence. It seems likely this pivot to print was masterminded in part by John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher who—after spells at the head of the National Review and Radio Free Europe—has settled into a plum position as president of the Danube Institute think tank.
Today, however, the most visible British conservative in Budapest is a dead one: Sir Roger Scruton, an English philosopher who became an influential right-wing editor and columnist. In 2020, thanks to public funds dispersed via friendly foundations, Budapest acquired a Scruton-themed coffee shop chain, replete with trendy lower-case signage (“scruton”), latte drink options, and regular Friday Night Vibes concerts. Scruton, who was a supporter of Central European dissidents, gentleman farmer, fox hunting enthusiast, Brexit advocate, and cult hero among a certain post-Thatcherite conservative London set, would surely be pleased to hear that the yuppie cafés named in his honor represent “Coffee and Conservatism Undiluted,” as O’Sullivan claimed in an article marking the café’s initial opening.
Scruton Café bills itself as more than just a coffee shop—it is also a community designed to promote conservative values, one clearly trying to bolster Fidesz’s popularity among the nation’s youth. It advertises networking nights and live music in addition to conservative political events. One such event caught my eye during a recent trip to Budapest because it featured a familiar face from the American magazine scene: Rod Dreher, the Socrates of Substack and former columnist for The American Conservative, who was due to discuss “The West’s Crisis of Faith” alongside a Danish journalist with ties to the Fidesz-aligned Mathias Corvinus Collegium university. I attempted to attend this conversation but mistakenly went to a Scruton Café rather than the Scruton Salon. Arriving at the correct location too late to gain entrance, I was only able to lean against the door and hear isolated snippets of Dreherian wisdom, including what sounded like a story about meeting a nice Slovenian man whose daughter got confused by American gender activists online and started smoking weed.
The next day, I stopped by the Scruton Café’s downtown flagship branch. I took in eight plaster busts of Sir Roger, a collection of books in Hungarian with rainbow flags and dangerous-looking fonts on the cover, various photos of Scruton’s farm, men and women’s bathrooms labeled with aggressively gendered Greek statues, and a rather odd assembly of Scruton’s personal items—his riding crop and saddle, leather-bound books, a bust of Schiller, vinyl records—donated to the café by Scruton’s widow. On each table was an explanatory pamphlet with a quote by the philosopher: “Conservatism is more an instinct than an idea.”
Not wanting to out myself as an agent operating on behalf of the subversive foreign Baffler Foundation, I pulled out my tattered copy of Middlemarch—a reasonable compromise, surely—and ordered the Strong Scruton Tea house blend plus the apple-shaped patisserie named Scruton Alma, or Scruton Apple, presumably a source of forbidden Tory knowledge. The only other person seated near me was a businessman looking at an iPad and clutching the right-wing newspaper Mandiner. In time, I got bored. Nobody seemed to be coming in or out: all quiet on the Western civ front. If Fidesz is to succeed in passing their conservative nationalist freedom-fighting worldview onto Hungary’s youth—who, according to opinion polls, remain majorly unconvinced—I suspect it will not be in spaces like these.
A Nation That Suffers
The party has been far more successful in rebuilding downtown Budapest. On a blustering winter evening, I made my way onto Kossuth tér, the bleak monumental square that sits in front of the neo-Gothic National Parliament building. Clusters of tourists moseyed about, peering at their phones and taking absent-minded photos in front of various traditional-looking statues. Two flags were flying: one the red-white-green of Hungary, the other blue and yellow—not for the EU, but for the Hungarian ethnic minority living in Romania. On the edge of the square, where a statue of the beloved Communist reformer and martyr of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising Imre Nagy once stood, there is a newly installed neoclassical monument. This “Monument of National Martyrs,” I discovered on the government’s website, depicts “a female figure symbolizing Hungary” on one side and “a male figure defeating a monster—symbolizing Communism” on the other.
From time to time, bottom-up conversations about the nation’s past have made their presence felt on Budapest’s streets.
As it turns out, the monument is a reconstruction of one built by Horthy’s interwar regime. In place of a real person who died resisting the worst of Soviet rule, that corner is now home to a belligerent abstraction, one borrowed from far-right nationalists of the past. While the statues that have gone up around Kossuth tér—mostly dedicated to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalist heroes—look back to an older Hungarian past, the act of rebuilding them is also an implicit defense of Horthy’s Hungary.
To visitors like me, however, the ideology is not particularly easy to decode. One funereal statue commemorates the failed national revolution of 1848; another celebrates an anti-Habsburg independence fighter. Two teenagers were taking a peace-sign selfie in front of the latter, a triumphant horseback figure who did look very cool lit from below, alas, the Parliament looming in the background. When I met with the Hungarian art historian and Fidesz critic József Mélyi some days later, he explained the various symbols to me in painstaking detail. “On the one side, victimhood; on the other side, resurrection,” he said in summary. “It’s a theological project, ultimately, a Christian story about Hungary as a nation that suffers but rises up again.”
The adjacent square, Szabadság tér, has gone from being an Austro-Hungarian agora—“the most beautiful square in Budapest,” in Mélyi’s wistful phrasing—to a cluttered mess. There is a vast tomb-like Soviet war memorial, which is stalked by slightly larger-than-life-sized statues of Reagan and George H.W. Bush. (I made sure to get two selfies.) And then there is the controversial Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation, which depicts the archangel Gabriel (i.e., Hungary) being aggressed by an eagle (Nazi Germany) that has the year 1944 on its ankle. “It’s symmetrical, and it was planned that way,” Mélyi explained, his expression ironic, sighing over jazz music in a cluttered café. “Hungary as victim country—you see this everywhere.”
From time to time, however, bottom-up conversations about the nation’s past have made their presence felt on Budapest’s streets. Across from the monument to the German Occupation, the decade-old Living Memorial has brought together an array of artifacts and documents to protest Fidesz’s “falsification of history.” A local art historian, András Rényi, now seventy-one years old, is part of the group of artists and activists who have maintained it since 2014. When I met with Rényi, he explained that when plans for the Occupation monument became known, he and his colleagues decided it needed a response. They invited the public to bring personal objects to the site: candles, photographs, newspaper clippings, and memorial stones, all aimed at commemorating victims of fascism and challenging the myth of Hungarian innocence. At one point, the organizers took two white chairs and set them up face to face, inviting both protesters and passersby to talk beside the government’s construction site. Within a few months, there were groups of thirty to forty people meeting every evening.
“The main idea was just to speak, to start talking about the past—to tell personal histories and family histories,” Rényi explained. They also organized for special guests to come, mostly Holocaust survivors and their descendants, although, Rényi added, “it also belongs to our philosophy that it’s not only about the Holocaust.” Conversations also covered Hungarians’ experiences when Soviet troops arrived in the mid-1940s, for example, or when the hard-line regime made reprisals after 1956. The group behind the Living Memorial even traveled to the town of Székesfehérvár, where the Bálint Hóman statue was planned, to hold an open discussion with the monument’s backers as well as its critics.
The installation on Szabadság tér has become a permanent fixture, now maintained by a small group of volunteers. When I visited, it was surrounded by tourists, all reading bits of laminated paper or looking at objects—a portrait of a relative, a busted old suitcase, a newspaper. One little photograph, hung from barbed wire, showed a girl in a tutu accompanied by one line of text: “Orsi wanted to be a ballerina.” But despite its persistence, the Living Memorial’s objection to the falsification of history does not seem to have become a political mass movement. Rényi, when I met him in late 2023, had little hope for Hungary’s future. What can you do, he asked, when Fidesz keeps winning elections? “To be very frank, if I were ten or fifteen years younger, and if I didn’t have small children here, I would leave,” he told me, looking off toward the darkened street outside. “Unfortunately, I’m a little too late to be an emigrant.”
The Orbán government is poised to continue its takeover of Budapest’s museums, architecture, and higher education system, most recently announcing a new forced conglomeration of forty-two museum institutions under Fidesz leadership. It is hard to imagine a meaningful change in cultural policies so long as Fidesz continues to win parliamentary supermajorities—and even if it doesn’t, since the party’s main opposition figure, Péter Magyar, is an ex-Fidesz man who has thus far espoused little interest in history. When I asked Mélyi whether there was any hope for change resulting from EU or U.S. pressure, he replied that by now it was all too late. The EU might have acted earlier, he said, but Angela Merkel had been more concerned with securing the German automotive industry’s supply chain in low-cost Hungary than resisting Fidesz’s ideology. As for the United States, with Orbán ally Trump back in the White House, the possibility of meaningful criticism—let alone effective sanctions—seems more remote than ever.
Leaving the House of Terror this past December for what I hoped was the final time, I peeked in the guestbook. “A wonderful experience,” wrote a couple from Cyprus, “although very sad what the country’s been through into gaining freedom.” A Spaniard noted that the museum was very impressionant and that the jail cells were cold. And a Brit had written, in huge, proud, confident lettering: Beware the Far Right and Far Left. Out on the street, an American was loudly exclaiming about “all the people the Soviets killed.”