Hungary

[rainbow]

Anybody been there?

Do they have food?
If so, what is good?

[laklak]

If you're hungary enough anything will do.

[Tero]

My son went there, on way to Austria. He survived the one day with junk food from the railway station.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Anybody been there?

Do they have food?
If so, what is good?

They eat a lot of goulash. A stew with an über-nommy paprika sauce.

Apart from that, I think they have potatoes and maybe some kind of vegetables?

[PsychoSerenity]

One of my housemates is from Hungary. She's by far the best at cooking out of all the housemates I've ever had. Although that isn't actually saying much. And I wouldn't judge an entire country on the basis of one individual.

[laklak]

They eat a lot of cabbage. Whole country smells of cabbage farts.

[JimC]

Pigs. Many, many pigs...

[Svartalf]

Pigs. Many, many pigs...

why are yu speaking of their politicians?

[rainbow]

They eat a lot of cabbage. Whole country smells of cabbage farts.

I'm sold on it already.


Looking forward to some McPaprikash.

[pErvinalia]

Anybody been there?

Do they have food?
If so, what is good?

Been there. Awesome place. Goulash is their national dish. They also drink a very rich and dark red wine.

[Svartalf]

AND they produce Tokay, the best sweet wine in the world

[rainbow]

Good. I shall try the wine.

Thanks.

[Tero]

One obvious lesson of Peter Magyar’s success lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network. “They had 2,000 Tisza islands with between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers,” Balint Magyar told me, in evident awe. “Just in their call centers, they had 3,000 to 4,000 people in the last week of the campaign.” We talked two days before the swearing-in ceremony, at his office in the spectacular but largely empty building of Central European University. In 2018, Orban’s government forced most of the university’s operations into exile amid an antisemitic scare campaign focused on the Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros, the C.E.U.’s founder and principal funder. Some of Orban’s many other scare campaigns targeted migrants, “the Brussels elites” and L.G.B.T.Q. people. During the latest election campaign, billboards and A.I.-generated social media posts warned Hungarians they were in danger of being overtaken by Ukraine and only Orban could protect them. It should have seemed absurd — it was absurd — but outlandish xenophobic and antisemitic propaganda had served Orban well for years. It didn’t work against Peter Magyar — probably because so many Hungarians got to see him in person, many of them repeatedly.

This is another lesson of his success: Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.

Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty, inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear. Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over the last decade and a half.

Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.

Instead of shrinking away from direct confrontation, he fortified himself against it. By getting elected to the European Parliament, in 2024, he secured immunity from prosecution in Hungary. When rumors circulated of an intimate video that would be used to blackmail him, he went on the offensive, accusing Orban of using “Russian-style kompromat” (no video was released). Knowing that he would probably be blocked from registering a new political party, he took over one that had become dormant. Even more important, instead of trying to build coalitions among other parties, he focused on conscripting as many actual people as possible, from across the political spectrum, ultimately building a giant organization capable of taking down Orban’s political monopoly.

For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers. An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel, smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral victory.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/opin ... orban.html