Good morning. It’s April 14th, 2026, Tuesday, and I’ve been thinking about reflecting on this change in the moment here in Budapest. My phone has been lighting up with texts and emails from people I know back in the States and other parts of Europe — readers, close friends, family — and all of them are like, wow, he’s actually gone.
They actually got rid of him. And yeah, it’s been an incredible moment. Going back to when I moved back to Hungary in November of 2023, the Viktor Orbán cloud has definitely been hanging over the experience, hanging over the city, and hanging over the community.
There’s just a collective exhale happening right now. It’s going to take a while for things to set in, for things to settle. And that whole settling process is going to be very pleasant. The community here will settle into something more pleasant than life under Viktor Orbán.
And it was — life in Budapest was good. It’s a good city. It’s a beautiful city. It’s a city with a vibrant community, a very diverse, internationally diverse community. Culturally, the way it sits in a buffer region between Western Europe and the East brings interesting cultural elements with regard to music and the arts. I meet as many interesting people, artists from countries east of here — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan — as I do people from France and Italy. Maybe more.
So there’s so much to love about this city. I could get into that, and maybe I will drop into moments of that. My novel is certainly a love letter to the city, rooted in when I fell in love with it back in 2002 and 2003, my first experience living in Budapest.
But when I got back, that was the main difference between the Budapest of 2023 and the Budapest I left 20 years earlier. People always say, isn’t it “Budapesht”? Yes, when you’re speaking Hungarian — we pronounce the S as “sh.” But in English, you don’t, so it’s Budapest. Frankly, when you’re speaking like a normal human, you could say it either way, and depending on who’s listening, they’ll hear it either way. That’s just a side note.
The main difference — well, there were two things. The city had a lot more polish as a tourist destination. It had matured. Especially in the inner districts, there was a little bit more glitz and glam. The restaurant scene blew up in the intervening years while I was gone, so the culinary scene here is really great now. Lots of other things. But what was challenging was living under the Orbán regime, where, under Fidesz, civil liberties and public tolerances started moving in the other direction — away from progress, it would seem.
So you had that. Great city, “but.” I love living here, “but.” It was always that. And the other thing — when I got back and really started talking to people about the political situation, there was a sense that it was going to be a very long time before another party could properly challenge Fidesz and challenge Viktor Orbán, because his party was so deeply in control. They held the two-thirds majority in Parliament, which meant they could make constitutional amendments as they wished, and they did so in a way to entrench their power and ensure the longevity of their rule.
About a year after I got here — not even, it was in the summer of 2024 — you first started hearing about Péter Magyar. It was exciting that there was a challenger, an opposition party making waves. But people believed it was going to be one of those things where he would carve out a place in Parliament, carve out a place in the government, build influence, and then maybe in 2030 have a shot at unseating Fidesz.
And there were the EU parliamentary elections, where every country votes on the delegation they send to the European Parliament. That was the first real test to see how Tisza — Péter Magyar’s party — was doing. And he performed well. The tides of change have been growing since then.
But nobody — it’s been 16 years. Imagine that. 16 years of a party that has not been inclined toward economic growth, personal growth for individuals, for the arts, for anything but people living within the circle of cronyism. People have become fabulously rich. It really is similar to Putin’s oligarch model, where all of his political friends and personal friends have done tremendously well under his rule. But everything else — all of the other prosperity — it’s propaganda.
And if you looked at all of the Fidesz messaging going into this election, it was all propaganda. There was absolutely nothing of substance. It was: Hungary is going to get drawn into the war with Ukraine if you don’t vote Fidesz. You’ve got to protect this country. And it’s all bullshit. It was all bullshit, and people read through it.
But even going into the last week before the election, nobody knew what the actual numbers were going to be. Even though Tisza was polling ahead, people have been here before so many times with hope. And it’s so painful — it’s so painful to think of a new day dawning, and then only to wake up with that new day being put off for at least another four years, maybe eight.
I think about people going to the parole board who are almost ready. They want to get their date to freedom, and they hit a snag in their parole hearing and get a five-year denial. I know that doesn’t mean a lot to most people — most people are probably like, good, let them stay in prison. But it’s not like that. There’s nuance there. You kick the can down the road so many years that it’s like, I can’t maintain hope for that long. So I’m just going to get back to my daily life and hope that things don’t get too miserable.
And even a week or two before the election, that was the feeling. And that’s all part of what just completely got blown out on Sunday. It’s remarkable. It was remarkable yesterday waking up and realizing that the “but” is gone. Budapest — great city to live in, no more “but.” I just can’t wait to see, as people start to really feel it, that there’s an element of depression — this entrenched pessimism, this lack of hope — that will start to lift.
A lack of hope that you can live the life you want to live, grow as a creative, grow as a business person, that there’s going to be opportunity. Nobody is so Pollyanna that they think, wow, now we’re living in the golden age instantly. No one really knows how the new party will rule. There are lots of reasons to be hopeful, but we don’t know.
But everyone who lived here did know what life under Fidesz was like for a lot of people. And so there are two layers to the elation that followed the election. One is just the surface — just the joy of hearing that announcement, the celebrations in the street, the oh my God, Orbán’s gone. But then there’s the second layer of 16 years of rule by an authoritarian leader who was so drunk on his own power, or drunk on the inability for anyone to challenge his power, that he could say and do anything without a whole lot of consequence. Sounds familiar for a lot of people living in the States. But imagine 16 years of it.
The cool thing is going to be watching and feeling the change, especially going into the summertime. Springtime in Budapest is a beautiful time. It is anywhere when you’re shifting from winter to spring, but here — it’s a flower kind of city, I’ll just say that. It’s a time when your mood goes up two or three notches anyway. But now it’s going to go up a couple notches more. I’m really curious to see what the atmosphere is like here moving into late spring and summer.
And that’s the deeper layer. There’s the part of it where it’s going to be just as extraordinary waking up on July 17th, or August 3rd, and realizing, gosh, this time last year we were living in Orbán’s Hungary. And it’s not going to be that anymore. It really is a mood thing. It’s a personal disposition thing, and it will be impossible four months down the road to look back a year and not appreciate how today — September 4th — is better than September 4th, 2025, for no other reason than we’re not living under Orbán’s rule, that Hungary isn’t carrying the stain of being the thorn in the side of the EU. To be the one country that stands in the way of collective action by the EU in any one area is just ugh.
There’ll probably still be some of that, just because you can’t flip the switch immediately. But it’s a great, great time to be in Hungary, to be in Budapest, to see systemic change, to see social change happening right in front of our faces and to be experiencing it.
When I was here in 2002 and 2003, one of the great things about it was just the feeling in the air — the atmosphere of the place. Politics was in the background to a large degree. I mean, it was obviously there, it’s never not there. But living in the city wasn’t about living in a certain political climate. It was about living in a diverse, international, vibrant, artful community. And there was this sense of creative liberty. It was like there was a joy about the place. Sure, there is the central European, Eastern European vibe — the somber, contemplative. That’s always there. But life in the city felt a little different. And that’s what I feel like we’re getting back to.
So yeah, come for a visit. And if you’ve been within the last few years, come back, because you’ll get a taste of the new Budapest. We’ll see how long it lasts, but it’s going to last a while. I have a feeling. I don’t want to over-promise — I’ll just say there’s a new age dawning. We’ll see how long it lasts, but it’s good. It’s beautiful.
And so it’s timely that I’m launching Budapest Unscripted — this journal and diary log of my first couple of years here, what it’s like to be an expat, what it’s like to change your life, make adjustments to your professional life. For me, that was keeping my novel and the endeavor of finishing and publishing it front and center. The novel is set in Budapest in 2003, and so I wanted to finish it here. Long story — that will be revealed over the course of this publication.
I planned an introduction and a launch for later this month, but I’m ready to do it now. What better fanfare to do it under than the dawn of a new Budapest. The next entry is my proper introduction.
As we go, I will be posting one audio entry per week, and alongside that will be a treatment of the transcript to make it more readable. I explained all of that in the next episode. It’s going to be audio, text, images, some sample chapters from the novel — all kinds of good stuff. And it’s all deeply rooted in the Budapest experience. It was a lovely experience even in the Orbán years — in some ways challenging, in others not — and now we will also traverse into the post-Orbán years. I’ll be posting, maybe out of order, little dispatches about observations and the way that life feels a little bit different.
So yeah, check it out.
