Hungary votes out its proto-Trump

Viktor Orbán’s victory speech after the 2022 election stressed peace and security, as the banner says. Image by Elekes Andor — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.

Go to this link for a quick read

The Big Story:

A political earthquake in Hungary sweeps away the long-time leader once described as “Trump before Trump”. But Hungary is more than Viktor Orbán, who spectacularly lost the April 12 election after 16 years of turning his country into a trailblazer for “illiberal democracy”.

• Hungary has two Nobel literature laureates, Imre Kertész and László Krasznahorkai. Both won in the past 25 years.
• It had the first globe-trotting superstar football coach, long before Pep Guardiola, in Holocaust survivor Béla Guttmann.
• It was conquered by five empires and lost every war it fought, but the Magyar tribes still occupy the same territory they claimed in the ninth century.
• And it has risen to the heights of NATO and European Union membership.

This Week’s Books:

• A right-wing British view of Hungary’s history.
• And an extraordinary meditation on the human propensity to war.

Click to read on about the books and the back story

Originally published on Medium