There are no more events for the foreseeable future. As summer wraps its claws around the Europoor mind, the schedule is as blank as a waiter’s stare at the New York Café. All over, the city is hot and bothered and elsewhere. This is as it should be.

With the summer lull, the Danube Institute has taken the opportunity to do some welcome spring-cleaning. Removing its library of books, getting rid of unnecessary desks, stationery, computers and recording equipment, and of course the many Fellows who were cluttering up the place.

To mark this reconciliation of the ledger, next week we will run an exciting Countdown List Special to cap off the half-year, after which we will report from the annual Tusványos Festival in Transylvania, where may be found many a Lion In Winter.

Then, Based In Budapest will join the parasol hordes on holiday in August, before making a spirited return in September — potentially as spirited as that of Our Lord And Saviour from the cave.

We have one more Secret Project X lined up for the autumn — a big one — but more on that in time. For now, please enjoy your last dose of Business As Usual.

Around Town: Secret Society Special

To Italy, for secret society duties. Every year, an annual gathering of the shadowy conservative elite takes place in a different location, organised by a self-selecting band of academics and thinkers, who want to talk about The Future of Conservatism. It’s the closest Europe gets to an Owl Ceremony. Originally held in a castle from whence it takes its name; this year, held in Brescia, at a vast villa that spoke of the rusted grandeur such a cabal demands. The room service was OK too.

Its attendance list is a closely guarded secret, and we are sworn to omertà on what happened to the owl, but BiB can at least reveal certain elements in a wicked whispers style.

Which rising star of the British right confessed that there had been ‘about 15 Zoom calls in one day’ to work out Rupert Lowe’s position on the Clacton by-election?

Who was the twinkly-eyed boat-stopping Anglo who kept a baby with him at all times? This sinister mastermind later revealed to BiB that: ‘Having a baby gives you an excuse to duck out of all kinds of boring talks’.

Which fast-talking ex-Downing Street advisor scandalised some of the Catholic contingent with his sincere belief that ‘teenage pregnancy is good actually’?

Which frighteningly young Trump-aligned think tanker confirmed that DC is pretty pissed off with the Hungarians right now?

Which self-assured Austrian politician told BiB that our attempt to explain the Ukraine War from a Realist perspective was “a very poor answer”?

Which monastic former Foreign Legion operative was baffled by being introduced to the concept of Mr Beast and needed multiple explanations?

Which vaguely piratical research director found himself ballroom dancing with another bloke, as the event’s sex ratios hit the buffers?

Which Thatcher-loving law-giver blamed a bad back for skipping the dance tent?

Which member of a prominent Austro-Hungarian monarchy admitted that he scheduled regular evening time with his family to talk about the history of their ancestors?

Which Carlyle-loving Californian software developer nearly made us miss our flight back when his anecdote overran by 25 minutes?

Which door-hating Bitcoin billionaire spent much of his evening chatting to an uncancellable waspish homosexual history don with a passion for the Tudors?

Great, it was.

Enoch Powell is constantly having his ‘legacy reassessed’, because the British media is far too squeamish to just come out and say ‘he was right on immigration’. No one ever tries to ‘reassess’ Powell’s commitment to Ulster Unionism, do they?

Well, thanks to a recent DI event, the legacy has now been firmly assessed, and hopefully that will be the end of that.

The jury in this trial was all-star: Simon Heffer (his biographer and friend), John O’Sullivan, Tim Montgomerie, the laughing lord Maurice Glasman, David Oldroyd Bolt and Richard Vinen, a professor at King’s College London.

At the time, our former fellow Alexander Pelling-Bruce, who organised the event, recorded it on his phone.

One thing has since lead to another: we have been gifted that recording, and decided to put it out as a podcast.

Unfortunately, as a phone recording, the audio quality was not great. We’ve used all the studio trickery in our arsenal; the reconstruction was intensive: a bit like putting Cheddar Man back together. Apologies for any artefacts that still linger.

Elvis-adjacent DI fellow Sean Nottoli is off to Taiwan for the summer — he’s going to be looking at their military installations, with permission of course. Before he left, Sean was interviewed by the Korea Times about military procurement. It seems the Koreans have just lost a big manufacturing contract for Canadian defence on the grounds of inter-operability issues. He advised them to just bite the bullet, so to speak, and line up with NATO standards:

"If Seoul wants to become a major supplier within NATO, it should continue investing in joint production, licensed manufacturing, technology sharing and industrial partnerships with its North American and European allies, rather than viewing exports as one-time transactions.”

Crusade-positivist Raymond Ibrahim is eagerly awaited back in Budapest, having spent the month taking care of business in California (“I really needed to clean my swimming pool”).

But while he checks on his dog, workaholic Ray has kept YouTube fed and watered with regular videos. Last week, he made something of a splash by translating the Egyptian football team’s pre-match locker room prayer — and, as YouTube would have it, “You Won’t BELIEVE What They Said!”. 200 000 views and counting.

Paper Of The Week

Conservatism in The Anglosphere: A Tour d’Horizon

David Oldroyd Bolt & Daniel Hannan

David Oldroyd Bolt plus Daniel Hannan is a dream team you could put straight on stage in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

But rather than punch out Pirates of Penzance, these two models of the modern major-general have collaborated on a new paper: a tour d’horizon of Anglosphere conservatism.

Synthesising recent developments in Conservative thought from New Zealand to Canada, they build to a mixed picture — the brio and hazards of populism, and the sense of MAGA as both stabiliser and deadweight on the wider Anglo tribe.

By the end, the horizon has been so comprehensively toured you’d think they were Japanese pensioners.

***

The current Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, a former Air New Zealand chief executive who had been in politics for barely three years, led the National Party to victory in October 2023, forming a coalition with both the libertarian ACT party and the populist New Zealand First under Winston Peters. Like Nigel Farage, a veteran populist politician, Peters is one of those political figures who thrives despite commentators avowing repeatedly that he is finished. He is sometimes compared to Trump, but this misses the essential point: Peters is a coalition pragmatist of the first order, a man who has served in government with both National and Labour and who understands how to acquire influence without assuming sole responsibility for what influence produces.

***

The result was striking precisely because the [Canadian] Conservatives performed so well and still lost. Despite gaining 41.3 per cent of the popular vote, they failed to secure a majority of seats. Poilievre lost his own Ottawa seat that he had held for twenty years. The strategy of absorbed insurgency had left the party populist enough to repel moderate voters during a crisis that demanded reassurance, but insufficiently populist to construct the durable coalition of the discontented that Trump assembled in the United States. It had, in effect, produced the worst of both worlds.

***

Although the MAGA example has been genuinely influential across the Anglosphere, its influence has been mediated by local conditions in ways that produce importantly different outcomes. In Canada, the MAGA aesthetic worked domestically until Trump himself rendered it a liability. In Australia, it has operated less through institutional channels than through the normalization of a style of politics that has benefited One Nation far more than the Liberal Party.

In New Zealand, the influence is visible in Peters’ pandemic-adjacent rhetoric and ACT’s ideological radicalism, disciplined by coalition institutions that impose obligations. It is perhaps in Britain, with Reform UK, that we see the most direct beneficiary of the Trump model. Nigel Farage understood, before almost anyone else in the United Kingdom, that the appetite for disruption on the right was real, large and very largely unserved by the Conservative Party.

Read more.

Coming

“Az erősebb kutya baszik.”

The stronger dog gets to mate.

(Might makes right)

Can it be 500 years since Mohacs already?

Feels like only yesterday Hungary’s teenage King Louis II drowned in a stream trying to scarper from the Ottomans, whose cavalry had battered his army in two hours of ferocious battle, thereby leaving the Holy Crown vacant.

Could it be just half-a-millennium since the Kingdom of Hungary was splintered into three parts — controlled equally by Hapsburgs, Ottomans and the semi-autonomous Transylvanians?

Yes. Yes it is. And now, as the 500th anniversary rolls round, it’s time to talk about Mohacs. Because, y’know, Hungarians seldom dwell on past military defeats.

Hearteningly, MCC has decided to team up with the Ottomans on this one.

That’s: Mohacs 500 — Wednesday 9AM - 1PM, Tas Vezér utca — in which four Hungarian–Turkish research teams will present the results of their joint work.

Register here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-07-30-mohacs-500-dialogue-conference-and-book-launch-1

Around Town: Heat Wave Special

The city will hit 40 degrees today. Hot, even for a hot place.

Internally, emergency measures are being debated. The PM has decreed that no restaurant ‘no matter how fancy’, should refuse homeless people permission to bathe on its premises. Callous cynics are now camping outside Onyx, eager to see how that pans out.

As the PM understands, in this time of strife, it is necessary to stay wet. Here is your official BiB guide to summer water and where to find it.

Lukacs Thermal Baths

Lukacs is attached to an actual sanatorium hospital, so you will often see people there who are recovering from their knee op, or trying to get a grip on their gout, hobbling about on the kind of wooden crutches last seen in the era of Tiny Tim.

For the uninitiated: in Hungary, people actually believe that the only thing that stands between the sick and the healed is that the sick haven’t yet found the right kind of water to treat their condition.

At that, Lukacs is number one: all Budapest’s baths are somewhat sulphurous, but the water at Lukacs can be like sitting in a soup of boiled matches.

Definitely the nagymama’s favourite. Cut price pensioner days occasionally lend the place the air of a nudist care home.

Top hack: the rooftop lounger area upstairs of the outdoor pools. The sort of place you can while away a whole day with a good book and a tub of Factor 50.

Affordably priced — and half-price if you turn up after 5pm. Unfortunately everyone knows this, so you should never ever visit after 5pm.

Veli Bej Baths

Another hack for Lukacs is to avoid it entirely, and step twenty paces on, to this privately run bathhouse, with its own Turkic dome, maintained by an order of monks. No proper cold plunge, but feels grand and cared for — and also surprisingly cheap.

Szechenyi Baths

Szechenyi is the Wal Mart of water. You like 25 degrees? 5 degrees? 40 degrees and bubbly? They’ve got it, across some 40 pools. But as with any hypermarket, the paradox of choice can become exhausting.

Somewhere in the eaves, they have a sauna that would probably be called The Cobra if this were a theme park — not for the faint hearted; and they should take your picture at the end.

Palatinus Thermal and Open-Air Baths

Seldom mentioned in the tourist bumpf is this open-air pool complex on Margaret Island. Communistic workers’ paradise vibes. Family-friendly, civilised, with super-tube water slides for the tweens. A fantastic place when the weather’s right.

Rudas Spa

Instagram brats monopolise Rudas’ rooftop pool — and they are right to: it’s spectacular.

Depending on the day, the ancient Turkish dome is sex-segregated for either men or women. On these days, instead of bathing trunks, clients are required to hobble about in ‘aprons’ that leave the buttocks swinging free. No one knows why this is good, but everyone is too afraid to ask.

Legend has it that the dome is also a morning meeting place for local mafiosi, as the acoustics make it impossible to bug. The truth of this is unclear, but certainly it would be a great place to see mafiosi buttocks.

Around London Town: ARC Special

ARC was three days of fun in the sun. If you didn’t get a quip about how hot it was into your speech, who even were you?

Top trolling by the Sky News Australia anchor Peta Credlin, who decided to tell the audience that it wasn’t particularly hot — just an average Wednesday in Sydney. Brits hate it when you tell them their weather trauma isn’t real.

Eric Weinstein ripped through the Thursday mid-afternoon graveyard shift with a projectile of a speech, complete with a Unabomber powerpoint of spidery black fonts on a white background, strung with lo-res snapshots: taking in string theory, Epsteinism, and epistemology itself.

The previous day, Michael Gove and Sebastian Gorka conducted a face-off on the subject of multipolarity that had something of the high school debate team to it — hinging on semantic definitions and soft-soaping of the crowd: Gove winking to the demos and disingenuously praising his opponents; Gorka hamming up his levels of offended-ness. “Michael, how could you say something like that — about MY BOSS, President Trump!” Maybe Gove was thinking of a different President Trump?

All the important press were there. Pimlico Journal, J’Accuse. Even The Spectator and UnHerd made it past security. Freddie Gray confessed he’d heard of Based In Budapest, but not yet read it. Paul Morland said he’d read it but never heard of it, while his Canon Club Podcast co-star Ed West strode around in crumpled ivory linen, like the man in the Tangiers bar due to be found impaled on his hotel room door hours after delivering the microfiche.

Meanwhile, the DI’s American import, Sean Nottoli, was celebrating his first visit to Britain, a culture clash of note. Sean met a man he later told us was ‘a cartoonist from the Telegraph’ — a fellow called ‘Tim Stanley’. After some confusion, it transpired Stanley must have referred to himself as a ‘sketch writer’ — apparently not a term that makes it across the Atlantic.

A few oppo journalists skulked in the hallways too, looking for a nice tart piece of reportage to file — BiB spotted Simon Childs from hard-left Novara Media (Simon is a dear old friend fromVICE days). We immediately texted security to have his pass rescinded.

Back at the main stage, Freddie Sayers interviewed the proposed new boss of The Telegraph — Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of German media company Axel Springer. Springer are explicit in their charter that they are rightists: they believe in freedom of speech, in markets, and not being anti-Semitic. They write this on their website, and make a point of not hiring people who don’t hold to these values.

“And do you ever have to fire people on that account?” Freddie probed.

“Well, we hope they realise that their talents could better be served elsewhere…”

At Wednesday’s Danube Institute Garrick Club breakfast, Lord Hannan quoted Javier Milei in the original Spanish: “Everyone loves prostitution when it is not your arse.” Milei seemed to be the lynchpin around which much of the discussion revolved. Strange, for an event on Anglosphere conservatism.

But really, the days were nothing compared to the evenings. Tuesday night it was the Pepperbird with hip young gunslinger Emma Trimble, who confessed to not really getting music. By 9PM, most went off to watch that dire England game with Winston Marshall and his always entertaining fiancé Melissa Chen — who’d dolled herself up in an England top-and-skirt combo that Calum Nicholson christened ‘sports-business-casual’.

Wednesday, it was to the Beef Steak Club, for the ‘arts night’, where Pierre who does that right wing art gallery gave us both barrels of his Warholian wit. Inevitably, Gove showed up. At ARC, you were never more than two meters from Michael Gove. Nina Power was in there somewhere too. As was cancelled dancer Rosie Kay (a top laugh), Toby Young, That Niall Gooch From Twitter, John Gillam from the excellent Thinking Class Podcast, the also excellent song maker Ladybyrd, and the Blitz Kids-era bloke who’s started a right wing club night. We also met three young tankie ‘anti-woke leftists’, who all agreed that their favourite Prime Minister of the modern era was Theresa May. Strange things are mutating out there in the ‘heterodox ideas’ space. Maybe it was a bad idea?

On Thursday, only the true glitterati were invited to Ben Delo’s big final night party at the National Gallery; thence an even more elect subset then boarded a couple of old double-decker London buses on to Ben’s office — where he made an unusual entrance, the exact nature of which is protected by omertà - let just say that conservatism 2.0 is about opening doors.

“Több is veszett Mohácsnál"

“More was lost at [the battle of] Mohacs”

(It’s not such a big deal.)

Are you going to ARC bro? You gonna be at ARC yeh? You ARC’ing it up?

This Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the massive spectre of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship will be hovering over London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre like a boat 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high.

ARC has become must-do stuff for anyone Conservative, Con-Curious, or just Con-Questioning. It’s the see-and-be-seen Ascot Ladies Day to the Con calendar, somewhere between a high school social and a trade show for Edmund Burke salesmen.

Set up by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Dark Money Kingpin Sir Paul Marshall, ARC extends itself from the proposition that we can’t ask what is to be done until we’ve honed in on the deep diagnosis of what went wrong.

Accordingly, Day 1 is themed around The Pathway to Deconstruction, Day Two is Mindset Shift, and Day Three is The Age of Reconstruction

The Danube Institute is hosting a breakfast panel on Wednesday morning, at the Garrick Club, on ‘The State of Conservatism in the Anglosphere’.

It features:

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (now executive director of the IEA)

Prof Steve Davies (IEA)

Dominic Armstrong (IEA)

Tony Abbott (wombat anthropologist)

Michael Stutchbury (Centre for Independent Studies, Australia)

John O’Sullivan (law giver)

Unfortunately it’s already sold out. But the DI team are around all week, somewhere between the buffet tables and the bogs. If you see us, do hit us up.

Hungary Helps and the future of aid for mid-ranking powers: after Daniel Farkas’ paper comes Daniel Farkas’ talk, this Wednesday, from 5:30PM at the Villa.

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/central-european-development-aid-in-the-age-of-resource-scarcity-challenges-and-opportunities

In 2012, when BiB first went to Tirana, Albania, they were still whipping the donkey carts round Skanderbeg Square, the big central roundabout that defines the city. The Internet seemed to be powered by rotating hamsters, and they had an entirely fake Marks & Spencer store in one of the few central malls.

When we returned in 2021, the roundabout was pedestrianised, foregrounded by a giant LED screen broadcasting a Vodafone billboard, beneath which sat a Scandi-minimalist coffee shop. The donkeys had been sent to the sandwich-makers, and the streets were instead full of mid-priced European saloon cars.

Life comes at you pretty fast when you’re an EU-peripheral state specialising in sending remittances back from the West.

So can the unthinkable now be thought? Is a one time sump for Europe’s crime gangs ready to become a model citizen in an expanded EU?

And what about Montenegro? In some ways already a model candidate — but can Serbia’s coastal access become folded into the European Union, given that country’s Russian alliances?

Up at the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs, they’re not afraid to take on the big topics. And they’re also pretty OK with taking on the smaller ones, like this.

Join them, Wednesday, 24 June, 4PM, for HIIA: EU Enlargement on the Horizon? Montenegro and Albania on the Road to the EU.

https://hiia.hu/en/esemeny/eu-enlargement-on-the-horizon-montenegro-and-albania-on-the-road-to-the-eu/

Around Town

La Grande Belleza is one of only two films of true artistic significance released in the 2010s — the other being Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. La Grande Belleza (‘The Great Beauty’) is by far the more uplifting of the two.

It is the tale of a few months in the life of an Italian roué as he tries to keep his mojo together. It is also the greatest ad Campari never shot, a camera devoured by Rome in all its libertine eternity. Imagine the Clockwork Orange eye-scraping scene, but for beauty. By the end, they had to peel us off the seats.

Gorge on it at the Bem Mozi, tonight, 6:15PM till 8:40PM.

The only World Cup game worth watching this week is Scotland vs Brazil. Midnight, Wednesday.

Actually, Norway vs France should be a laugh.

9PM Friday.

If you want to be surrounded by boozed-up strangers throwing their pints in the air when a Haaland projectile breaks a million French hearts, a great place for that is Szabadság tér, near Parliament, where they host the ‘Belvárosi Foci Mozi’. It’s yer standard ‘hip European capital public LED screen’ do. Free, of course.

Say what you like about the Soviet Union, but they did pass the ball when they could have kicked it.

The first Hungarian in space was in 1980 - Berlatan Farkas — and he was already the 6th Warsaw Pact person to be given the opportunity (the first non-Russian was a Czechoslovak).

Yet despite being part of the American empire for 45 years, the first Brit in space came in 1991 — and she only did it via the Mir space station route.

Hungarians have a special affinity for space, boosted by the exploits of compatriot Tibor Kapu on the Axiom mission just last year.

And what with SpaceX making space cool again, this is a good time to check out Destination: Galaxy, an exhibition examining our sci-fi dreams and the reality we forged from them.

It’s up at the BTM Castle Museum, in the Castle District, Szent György tér 2, till the end of July.

John O’Sullivan has had enough.

Insofar as John O’Sullivan can have had enough, of course, being always dapper, urbane and thoughtful. Still, righteous anger has to come in some form, and in John’s case it has come in the form of an urbane and thoughtful open letter, published this week on the DI’s website, and on its X account.

John is absolutely hopping (in a reasonable, polite and very lettered way) because the DI’s critics have been out in force since the change of government; many of them quite sloppy with the actualité.

After eight weeks of maintaining a dignified silence, a decision was taken to correct the record.

To nutshell it: various leftist journalist have claimed that there is no evidence of people doing things at the DI - that the Institute itself is a mysterious white obelisk on a hill (yet simultaneously is also a brutally efficient outrider for Fidesz).

We have certain issues with this characterisation. Certainly, as can be evinced from their recent attempts to backwards-induct the Institute’s internal payments system by guess-matching various Freedom of Information requests, these are not what you would call investigative journalists. As also evinced by their failure to just check out our website.

In the letter, John very patiently (but surely inwardly boiling over? - Ed.) lists how the DI works, what it does, what it has done:

• 404 public events, conferences, lectures, and panel discussions, most of which are available to review on Youtube.

• Produced approximately 198 podcast episodes featuring leading scholars, journalists, policymakers, and public intellectuals.

• Published 243 research papers at an average rate of roughly one per week in recent years.

• Welcomed 86 Resident and Non-Resident Visiting Fellows from Europe, North America, Australia, Asia, and beyond, from anything from a few weeks to several years.

• Produced two documentary films, on migration, and on Hungarian culture and identity.

• Maintained a vibrant internship programme, bringing in up to 30 young people a year to serve in and support our research, comms, events, and operations departments.

• We also informally publish a popular Substack, Based in Budapest, tracking the life of Budapest as s a centre of conservative life and culture. [HEY THAT’S US!]

He goes on to tackle the political independence question.

In reality, our fellows and contributors have expressed a variety of perspectives on that conflict, as they have on many other subjects. For evidence, look no further than the film, Erase The Nation, made with Institute funding by our Visiting Fellow Tomasz Grzywaczewski, a Polish war journalist. His piece is sharply critical of Russia in almost every dimension. Or go back to the video of our 2014 conference on Ukraine, held jointly with the Hudson Institute in Washington, which critically examined the first stages of Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Or consider the several major speeches by former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, who as a fellow was consistently hostile towards Putin’s war.

Much else is covered. The letter clocks in around 1700 words, and yet never outstays its welcome. It already has 70 000 views on X: definitely worth reading in full. Link below.

PAPER OF THE WEEK

A Study in Strategic Empathy: A Critical Exploration of Mainland Chinese Legitimisations for a Taiwan Scenario

Eric Hendriks

Empathy is hard. Nicholas Elpley’s excellent short book, ‘Mindwise’, about the phenomenon of empathy, concludes that empathy is not really inbuilt, and it actually conveys no particular level of predictive power. I might sense that I ‘empathise’ with you, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to say anything useful about your next moves. Even highly romantically-involved couples with long marriages offer little better than a coin-flip chance of being right when posed predictive questions about their other-half.

In short, he says, if you want to know about the internal states of others, you should simply ask them.

So it is with dapper don Eric Hendriks’ new paper, on China’s case for taking Taiwan. While Western geopolitics guys draw baroque squiggle maps of what China would do in Case 1(a) Part (c), Hendriks is more interested in simply interrogating the CCP’s own literature. What do the Chinese say they want, and what does that infer for the rest of us?

The result is less another materiel abacus lesson, more a journey into Chinese theory-of-mind. We might not like what we find. But we are foolhardy to ignore it.

“Yet, despite this darker history, the dualistic pan-Asian conception has returned with force in contemporary mainland China, albeit under new names and in subtly modified forms. In various iterations, it plays a prominent role in CPC doctrine, education, and academic political philosophy.

The application of the Pan-Asian duality to Taiwan is readily apparent, even if Chinese thinkers are typically too discreet to spell it out: China must liberate Taiwan in the name of global harmony, freeing it from the grip of Western hegemony – a hegemony that, by separating Taiwan from China, seeks to obstruct the emergence of a world of harmonious coexistence.

In Jiang Shigong’s application, “The Taiwan question is a contest between two civilizational forces in Asia whose outcome will influence the future of human civilisation.” For Jiang, China carries a harmonious socialist culture into the world, while the resistance comes from the United States, the “new Roman Empire”, with its imperialist spirit of domination.

Thus, according to Jiang, the PRC must incorporate Taiwan into its sphere of governance and culture for the sake of humanity as a whole.

This style of East-West thinking about Taiwan is highly polemical and readily lends itself to use as a resource of legitimation in the event of a concrete, perhaps even coercive incorporation of Taiwan by the mainland, which is probably precisely its intended function.”

Read more.

"Bagoly mondja verébnek, hogy nagyfejű."

The owl tells the sparrow that it has a big head.

(The pot calling the kettle black)

As we all know, Climate Change was invented in 1990 to terrify tweens. It failed in that regard, yet here we are: voluntarily clanging our way back to the Fred Flintstone Age, while China burns to victory on the coal of a thousand suns.

Climate Change is wedged so deep into our world view it may be politically irreversible — whatever the true impact of a 1.5C rise in temperatures by 2100.

But in truth we shouldn’t be thinking about Climate Change at all, says Calum Nicholson. Rather, we should be thinking about human adaptability to environmental change — how can we work round it, socially, agriculturally, economically?

Dr Nicholson, a local anthropologist, used to work on these matters at Cambridge, then at MCC. He is now presenting a live version of his paper: How To Think About Climate Change Beyond The Culture Wars — with no safety net.

Come to the Villa on Tuesday for a juicy evening of what our haters would no doubt call Climate Denialism — we like to call it Climate Positivism.

5:30PM

Register here:

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/how-to-think-about-climate-change

Trump did the easy bit first: smashing USAID to smithereens.

Now comes the hard bit: building a system of relations with Africa that can compete with the Chinese Belt & Road initiative.

But so far, Trump Part II’s chief contribution to the upside seems to have been to let off a few rockets in Nigeria.

Perhaps Tibor Nagy can explain? Despite his name, Nagy is an American — the Former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. He’ll be talking to Viktor Marsai, from the Migration Research Institute, 5PM, Tuesday, MCC.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-16-from-the-m23-to-the-usaid-cut-the-us-africa-policy-in-a-transactional-world

Have you heard of AI? It’s like computers, only more so, but they also need a lot of water for some reason.

Anyway, everybody’s talking about it. And you can too — at the MCC Scruton on Friday, where the MKI-MCC Center For Geopolitics team are joined by two figures who really do know what they’re on about.

Mehran Gul — author of The New Geography of Innovation.

And Arvind Gupta — head of Digital India.

That’s: Competitiveness in AI and Digitalisation.

5PM. Tas Vezér utca.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-19-competitiveness-in-digitalization-and-ai

Around Town

Attila the Hun gets a lot of bad press these days. Apparently he had ‘hordes’ and they ‘rampaged’, and none of that is appropriate behaviour for a grown man.

The Hungarians see him rather differently — clue’s in the name. Now, a major new exhibition at the National Museum promises to fill in the gap between Attila the rampaging warrior, and Attila the rampaging warrior but that’s good actually. It contains over 400 artefacts from the Hun era, prospected from the world’s top museums — the Louvre, the British Museum. In addition to recreated yurts, the show includes long-skulls — the Hun were head-shapers, they practiced ‘ritual cranial deformation’.

Runs till 23 July. Sign up here:

https://jegy.mnm.hu/programok/reszlet/attila-_1768552366

The Beatles are widely known for their classic hits including Last Train To Clarksville, Daydream Believer and (Hey Hey!) We’re The Beatles.

Celebrate them, with a short festival at Kobuci Kert, Fő tér: Sunday, 4PM till late.

Byrne baby Byrne: the Talking Heads autist is back in town after a 17 year absence.

Thursday, Papp László Budapest Sportaréna.

Not to be confused with The Seventh Seal, The Fifth Seal is a classic Hungarian war movie, set in Budapest in the time of the Arrow Cross.

It’s not only one of the masterpieces of Hungarian cinema — but also one of the best movies of 1976, maybe of the ‘70s, possibly even the entire 20th century.

Whereas the sealed scroll that Bergman’s Seventh Seal is named after is the one whose opening is said to herald ‘the seven angelic trumpeters’, the fifth seal is the one whose opening reveals ‘the martyrs’ prayers, beseeching God’s vengeance’. Yup, it’s a Hungarian film.

Thursday, it’s playing at Bem Mozi, 6:30PM

By now we all know the Art of the Deal method — Trump comes in hard, rolls you with a fantasy number, twists your expectations, then meets you at his new ‘halfway’, singing your praises. But have the Chinese read this important work — the Western equivalent of Sun Tzu?

That’s the question the DI’s Sean Nottoli is pondering in a new blog on the LSE’s China Dialogues sub-site.

Raymond Ibrahim is in DC this month. He spoke at a Coptic convention (Ray is a Copt himself). And he appeared on a podcast with his old mentor, Victor Davis Hanson — in which he shouted out his work with the Danube Institute. Not a lot of people know that Ray was once VDH’s pupil, and Vic was his thesis advisor.

Here’s the proof: the pair of them chilling at a barbecue on VDH’s almond farm — 1998 or ‘99.

Simon Cottee continues his extensive PR tour around his blockbuster paper on Jihadis and what they get up to: he’s been hacking through the junkets like Sydney Sweeney. Not content with a drop-in appearance at the seminar discussing his paper, he has also done an hour on Danube Politics, telling the show that ‘your average Jihadi now is something of a loser…’, and reflecting on the ideological capture of his home discipline, criminology: “Very few criminologists are interested in doing qualitative analysis on the roots of radicalisation… they just don’t want to touch it.” Tune in to hear about the Fourth Wave of Jihad.

France is the enemy of the family: so says Pierre Hugues-Barré.

Calum Nicholson, a local anthropologist, has spent many an hour amusing BiB with his shrewd insights about Hungary. Calum is a setlist kind of guy. He alights on an idea, then works and reworks his material endlessly in casual conversation, hardening the original hazy notion into a series of diamond-hard bits, as a comedian might. In Brussels last month, at the Liszt Institute, he used the Exciting Time of Change as the excuse to let rip a dozen or more of his all-time best insights into How Hungarians Work. This is the biggest greatest hits set of the think tank year. It’s Queen at Wembley, folks. Enjoy.

Paper of The Week

Calum Nicholson, memoirist and vaguely piratical anthropologist, went to Iraq to conduct fieldwork on the plight of Christians in the region. What he came back with was something more nuanced than a simple tale of persecution.

His latest paper, a compendium of top-and-tailed field notes, has the air of Graham Greene, or Shooting An Elephant. A tale told through multiple cultural lenses, with much gamesmanship on both sides, that serves to reveal some central truths about human nature.

The edges of Iraq are peopled by several non-Muslim or dissident-Muslim sects. From Catholics to Yezidis. The Yezidis are best known for what ISIS did to them. Less known is that they are not heretical Muslims, nor Christians: they worship a ‘peacock angel’.

In this strange hinterland of faith, the peacock angel devotees shared the road with devout Sunnis, Shias, and the more Westernised followers of Rome, and we witness an encounter not just between multiple faiths — but between ancient tribalism and modern individualism.

After ten days of meetings that often felt more like political audiences than they did sociological interviews—a feeling not helped by the constant presence of our “translator” and guide, a former Kurdish soldier with a furtive manner and a free associative approach to translation, and who seemed tasked more with watching than assisting us—I felt we had exhausted the genre. The meetings had taken on a pattern, and it was clear that there was little real insight to be gained from talking with this class of interviewees, them being polished politicians to a man, their quick eyes a counterpoint to the stiffness of their cassocks and the steepled stillness of their hands. There was also an additional problem, an unintended consequence of having a schedule of interviews planned long in advance.

One day, for instance, we drove out to the relatively remote Nahla valley, an ancient Christian community to the north of Duhok. On arrival at the local church, we quickly realised we would not be able to conduct many interviews, as we were received not as powerless researchers, but as foreign dignitaries. The community’s leaders had all gathered for a semi-ritualised reception, which etiquette dictated we submit to.

Read more.

“Kering mint gólyafos a levegőben.”

— It’s floating in the air like a stork’s droppings. (He has no idea what he’s doing; he’s wandering around aimlessly)

One of BiB’s favourite pieces of philosophical popcorn is Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘Thrownness’. Once described as there being No Terms of Service for life: “You wake up in a moving train with a history and a culture already in progress, without having signed a contract or chosen your starting point.” Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads also makes the point forcefully.

Heidegger was talking from a personal, existential point of view, but Thrownness turns out to be at the heart of many other debates.

Take constitutional law. America has an alpha point: its sacred constitution and the laws that flow from it. Britain has a thousand years of what this guy said to that king in 1215, and how the Speaker has just always sat on a woolsack. It has formed itself around the habits and history of the isle’s inhabitants, and what they thought a good life looked like — every new node forking off from a previous historical vantage point.

Hungary is aware of the tension. Like many a modern European state, it has a Basic Law, to which the newly elected must pledge allegiance. But the Constitution of 2012 also made room for the role of precedent in sculpting the finer points of its politics.

At MCC this Wednesday and Thursday, that balance is coming into focus. How much is a constitution ever separable from a people’s history?

Key speakers include Randy Barnett, Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University. And Harshan Kumarasingham, from the University of Edinburgh.

The show starts at 1PM on Wednesday, then continues Thursday morning till mid-afternoon. If your context is Budapest and your period is the mid-2020s, you may find yourself at Tas Vezér utca. Try to enjoy the ride.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-10-the-role-of-history-and-memory-in-constitutionalism-european-and-american-perspectives-1

June 10 at 3:30 PM - June 11 at 2:45 PM

Busy week for Randy Barnett — legal theorist, and a man whose porn star name is coincidentally the same as his real name. He will be back in action on Friday, putting forth the proposition that Libertarianism just needs a few tweaks. Libertarians have long struggled to explain how they would build nuclear power plants or stop nuisance phone calls. Randy recognises the contradiction, and wants to offer a synthesis position — one that updates the idea of voluntary private contracting for the age of supermassive technology.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-12-libertarianizmus-a-gyakorlatban

10AM. MCC. Tas Vezér.

Last week, we brought you news of Simon Cottee’s paper for us on Jihadism and migration. How 45% of European jihadi plots contained a migrant.

The news detonated like a rucksack through the media — so much that we’re following up with an emergency panel seminar at the Danube Institute.

Wednesday. 5:30PM. The Villa.

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/migration-and-jihadism-in-europe-since-2015-what-are-the-facts

Around Town

June is gay pride month in much of the West, but in Budapest it is Wagner Month at Müpa. Arguably more camp, certainly better tunes. Here, the Müpa orchestra will be pedalling through the entire Ring Cycle, a Tour de France’s worth.

It’s a concert-opera rather than a full blown horned-helmet and women-on-wires thing. You can get a season ticket to all four parts for around 80 000 Ft, which is a lot cheaper than signing up for a liberal arts degree, with basically the same effect.

They’re also doing it twice.

Cycle 1

* Das Rheingold — Thu 18 June, 18:00

* Die Walküre — Fri 19 June, 16:00

* Siegfried — Sat 20 June, 16:00

* Götterdämmerung — Sun 21 June, 16:00

Cycle 2

* Das Rheingold — Thu 25 June

* Die Walküre — Fri 26 June

* Siegfried — Sat 27 June

* Götterdämmerung — Sun 28 June

Tricky will be at Akvárium on Tuesday.

https://akvariumklub.hu/en/events/tricky/

It’s four days till the opening of the Duna Karnevál. The Danube Carnival.

Think: folk costumes, folk music, folkiness, from Hungary and way beyond. Think: South African Ndebele women knitted up in beadwork, Cypriots in broad-brimmed black hats, and Turkmen girls in lace corsets, Poles and Polynesians, Punjabis and Pashtuns.

June 12-19. Margaret Island.

https://www.dunakarneval.hu/en

Metallica are promising a no-repeat weekend for their shows on 11 and 13 June. In other words: two gigs, two completely separate setlists. Who gets The Black Album, and who gets lumped with St Anger? The stakes have never been higher.

Pierre Hugues-Barré is the DI’s French legal scholar. This week, he peers into the confessional booth — and asks why the French government wants to end any presumption of privacy within that box. If passed, the reforms would not only weaken one of the few religious bonds laicité has not yet frayed — they’d also end the careers of writers of ‘taut, psychological’ crime thrillers.

Hungary Helps looks like it might be wound down. Its CEO, Tristan Azbej, fell on his sword as the new government arrived, amidst the initial purple rain of sword-fallers.

Into this vacuum comes… nothing yet, says the DI’s Dániel Farkas in his new HuCon article. Worldwide, Overseas Development Aid fell 23% in 2025, driven primarily by US withdrawal. Global aid is in recession, probably in depression, and thus the world is moving away from the grant model, towards something more like trade-and-loan agreements.

But within this confused and retreating picture, there lies a golden opportunity, says Farkas. Without the colossus of USAID, medium-sized donors suddenly have a chance to make a mark.

Whatever the future of Hungarian aid, a pan-Central European aid agency would have precisely that heft.

Paper of The Week

Journalism is ‘the first draft of history’, but sometimes you want the historians to draft a bit quicker too. Over the past couple of years, we have lived through a twice-a-century change in global geopolitics.

So it is to firming up the answer to ‘What just happened?’ that Juan A Soto turns in his latest paper.

He tracks the US Transactionalist/Multipolarity pivot down to a few crucial days, weeks and even hours: from CPAC 2025, to JD Vance’s Munich speech.

He tracks what that means at the level of policy, best summed up in the chapter header: The Structural American Red Line: No United States of Europe and No Eurasian Consolidation.

Then he sketches than five plausible futures for Europe on that basis. From total fragmentation to a rebalanced Atlanticism.

If these [Conservative populist] forces become more influential at the European level, their political priorities may not always align with American strategic preferences. In particular, tensions may emerge if the United States continues to pursue policies that effectively treat Europe as a strategic extension or operational theatre of American geopolitical competition with other powers. Under such circumstances, a more conservative European Parliament — while rhetorically sympathetic to transatlantic ties — might simultaneously seek to diversify Europe’s external partnerships, strengthening relations with other actors in order to safeguard European economic and strategic interests. Paradoxically, therefore, a more conservative European political landscape could produce two contrasting tendencies at once: a reaffirmation of civilisational Atlanticism alongside a stronger insistence on European strategic autonomy and even independence.

Read More.

“A süket nem hall, a vak nem lát, de a bolond mindent megért."

The deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, but the fool understands everything. (Dunning-Kruger is real)

As the May 31 deadline for President Tamás Sulyok to resign falls away, I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, Magyar is at war with Sulyok.

The PM has been ‘paying him a visit’ this morning. For his part, Sulyok has referred the matter to the EU’s Venice Commission. But whatever the Venetians advise, Magyar has, in his first month, invented the biggest constitutional crisis of modern times.

Exactly the moment when we could all do with some Insights from the Hungarian Constitutional Court — also the title of Thursday’s presentation by Dr. Attila László Szabó, Secretary General of the Constitutional Court of Hungary. One caveat — he’ll be generating insights in Hungarian. Which is fair enough.

5:30PM. Thursday. Tas vezér.

Sign up here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-04-insights-from-the-constitutional-court-of-hungary

Latin America is full of people who seem to want to be somewhere else. Many head due North, to America. Others finagle rights of abode in Spain and Portugal. Yet many more just shift around the continent, depending on the latest run of fascist juntas and Bolivarian revolutionaries. Millions who poured out of Venezuela have poured into Colombia. 30 years ago, the situation would have been the exact opposite. The combination of push and pull factors is unique: so what does the future hold for this most diasporic of continents?

Crises, Integrations and Possibilities: Latin America on the Move suggests the answer may be more of everything. Featuring Gustavo da Frota Simões — Professor at the Brazilian Army Command and General Staff College

3PM, Wednesday. MCC.

Sign up here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-03-crises-integrations-and-possibilities-latin-america-on-the-move

Eduard Habsburg is a former Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See, and 86th in line to the Holy Crown.

Raymond Ibrahim is a former Mr Los Angeles bodybuilding champion, foe of militant Islam, and opponent of what he calls ‘doormat Christianity’: the idea that to follow Christ is to be a supplicant to all.

The duo have already teamed up on Raymond’s blockbuster YouTube channel. Now, in advance of releasing a joint paper for the DI, they’re back at it — asking how we can reinforce the cultural structures of faith, even as modernity tears at the foundations.

It’s the unlikely buddy cop movie you never knew you wanted.

5:30PM, Tuesday, at the Villa.

Link here:

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/the-place-of-christianity-in-the-survival-of-the-west

Around Town

A rumble of thunder down under. Tony Abbott, boat-turner, wombat anthropologist and DI Distinguished Fellow, is to be the next Federal President of the Liberal Party. Since leaving power in 2013, Tony has kept banging the drum for a low-tax, low-migration, Atlanticist West.

Now, with the Liberals having lost two elections in a row, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation stealing a march up their flank, Tony is returning to the front line.

The Federal Presidency is equivalent to being party chairman — not leadership as such, but an important points man in deciding how the party will campaign in the next election.

It has made the press ponder. Robert Menzies was the last Aussie to win two non-consecutive elections — with an 8 year gap between. Could Tony be the first to achieve a 13 year gap?

Our resident Aussie, Andrew Hutchings says Tony is on a hard wicket: “The Liberal Party is under fire from multiple quarters right now. There are the ‘Teals’ — left-leaning green-friendly liberals who have had success running as independents in Liberal constituencies. There is the rise of One Nation. There is the ageing of their own voter base. And there is the fraying of the Liberal National coalition. If he can arrest their decline, it will be very impressive. Seems like Tony has decided to run into a burning building.”

Gourmet Fesztivál is Hungarian for ‘Gourmet Festival’. Held in the lush grounds of Milennaris Park, it’s sort of like Masterchef Live — food stalls, farm produce, plus live cooking demos and talks from the country’s top chefs. This year’s theme is Made In Vidék — a reference to the flavours of the Hungarian countryside, Magyarország Profonde. Day tickets are 8000 Ft, and the show runs for four days, Thursday till Sunday, 3-6 June.

Short films might not always be better than feature films, but they are indubitably shorter. Take advantage of brevity at the Friss Hús Film Festival — Hungary’s premier short film festival — which runs until Wednesday.

In a rare instance of the jokey side-project becoming the main gig, Luke Steele was once known for the winsome Americana of The Sleepy Jackson.

Now, he’s known as an extraterrestrial Xmas tree — electro-pop’s Carmen Miranda.

Eighteen years since their debut, Empire of the Sun have survived that initial burst of novelty remarkably well. This Sunday, they’re at Budapest Park, touring latest album Ask That God.

Europe has misunderstood the meaning of its own modern dominance. That’s the claim of the DI’s Sumantra Maitra in a fascinating 40 000 foot view of how politics will be after the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Sumantra marks out three converging developments: first, the return of India and China (historically inevitable).

Then, AI and automation: particularly its ability to disrupt the middle class. After all, Western political stability has depended heavily on a broad, secure middle class.

Finally, he looks at how, while Europe and North America may still be wealthy in absolute terms, they are having a crisis of self-image as they become less dominant relative to others.

The result, he suggests, is major upheaval. But how we navigate this crisis starts with how we define it.

Paper of the Week

This week, our Paper of the Week is a scoop.

Simon Cottee is a criminologist, lecturer, and a writer for The Atlantic and UnHerd. His first book was The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, and his second and third were on ISIS. For the past nine months, Simon has been doing deep data work, filling in a single question for the DI: how much of the past ten years of post-Merkelwave terrorism was migrant-led?

His answer: 45%.

No one else has run the numbers with the rigour and detail that Simon has — so this is a finding that will drive policy debates for years to come.

Simon’s time at the DI was poleaxed by a major health emergency, and as much as we love his paper, we’re also just very happy that he is still here to finish it. Despite all the time he’s spent poring over beheading videos, he’s one of the kindest men you’ll meet, and we wish him the best as he continues to recover.

Some highlights:

In this decade-long period there were 221 jihadi plots in Europe, of which 100 (45%) involved a migrant. There were 137 migrant plotters in total. Of the 100 plots involving one or more migrant, 51% were launched, while 49% were foiled (see Table 1). For the other 121 plots that didn’t feature a migrant, 36% were launched, while 64% were foiled, suggesting that when migrants are involved in plots those plots are more likely to succeed.

Migrant-related plots killed 279 people and injured 1192 others (see Table 2), while plots that didn’t involve a migrant resulted in 107 deaths and 1449 injuries, which would suggest that when a migrant is involved in a plot it is markedly more deadly, although two migrant-related plots – the November 2015 Paris attacks and the Nice truck ramming attack in 2016 - account for 216 deaths combined.

Across 12 countries, Germany was the most frequent incubator and target of the 100 migrant-related plots, accounting for nearly half, followed by France (21 plots) and the UK (10 plots) (see Figure 1)). Because global jihadism appears to harbour no special animus towards Germany, the latter’s position in this league table can more reasonably be attributed to the sheer number of migrants that it took in during the refugee crisis than to any particular desire to launch attacks there.

Hungary, by contrast, closed its borders to refugees fleeing the civil war in the Middle East and has experienced almost zero jihadi attack activity. (It did, however, incur the wrath of the European Union Court of Justice, which imposed a €200 million lump sum fine and a penalty of €1 million per day until it complies with EU asylum rules.

Read more.

“Lógatja az orrát.”

(He’s) dangling his nose. (He’s sad.)

There’s a workshop on terrorism up at MCC, on Tuesday. Sadly, no pipe bomb tutorials, nothing on when the red wire must/mustn’t touch the blue wire. More of a strategic overview of the present situation, really.

It’s called Terrorism Without Borders: Europe in a New Era of Radicalisation.

2PM till 3:30PM.

Sign up here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-26-terrorism-without-borders-europe-in-a-new-era-of-radicalisation

Around Town

Belá Bartók is famous for his boulevard. But did you know he also wrote music? His only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, about the uxorious Frenchman, is on at the National Opera. It’s a special, cut-price ‘audiophile’ presentation: no full-on staging — instead, musicians popping out of balconies in traditional costume all around the auditorium. ‘3D’, they’re calling it.

Tickets here.

In this Bold New Era of Change, the DI is unknotting its tie, embracing the Inevitable Hungarian Future. The Arc of History is a rainbow, folks — which is why we are happy to recommend Viktor Szeri’s dance piece Reigen.

The blurb says:

“With a sensual yet immersive approach, Szeri delves into the hidden realms of pleasure, sexuality, and nudity, challenging the social conventions and taboos surrounding the intimacy between men.”

So if you’ve ever been curious about the taboos surrounding the intimacy between men, get out of your local MEP’s office and into the Trafó theatre, 28 & 29 May, 8PM.

It’s hard to believe that eternal tweens Scooter are still busting out the schlock more than 30 years after they began. They’re now in their 60s, but expect candy-fuelled musical lobotomies, with added statins. Saturday, 30 May, at Budapest Park.

Summer time: when the great acts of the world descend on Budapest for their arena tours.

To get ahead of the Ticketmaster gods, here are some of the biggest of ’26:

Metallica — heavy legends and psychoanalysis’ greatest rebuttal — Puskás Aréna — 11 & 13 June. With Pantera supporting on the 11th.

Sting— tantric god and ex-copper - MVM Dome — 18 June

Scorpions — change-blowing spandex-rock - MVM Dome — 20 June

Empire of the Sun — Aussie electro-pop from Luke Hayes— Budapest Park — 7 June

Papa Roach — nu-metal’s middle child — 9 June

Mac DeMarco — definitive slacker rock of the 2010s— 23 June

David Byrne — autistic post-punk— 18 June

Primus — South Park theme-makers and ineffable weirdness — Barba Negra Red Stage — 4 August

Nagorno-Karabakh has been through its own Exciting Time of Change lately. In the aftermath of the 2023 war, won by Azerbaijan against previous holders Armenia, a formal peace treaty was convened by President Trump in 2025. That entails the building of a 40km road straight through Armenia, underwritten by a 99 year lease, held by the USA. A Danzig Corridor, if you will.

So does the seeming resolution of this bitter dispute also mean a broader geopolitical unlocking across the region?

Farid Shukurlu, DI Fellow, is sure it does — as he tells the latest episode of Danube Politics.

After the Second World War, a new style of ‘illustrated press’ reshaped the way we saw the world. Magazines like Life, Paris Match, and Holiday brought forth an age of Kodachrome colour. They sent snappers around the world to capture vibrant verité. Tribal dancers in the Andes. Lovers courting in Tuileries. Ceremonial baseballs being pitched in St Lois. Barbers in the Bronx.

One photographic agency, Magnum, was at the frontier of that revolution. Founded in 1947, its message to its photographers was simple: make life cinematic.

Now, their biggest early names: David Seymour, George Rodger, Werner Bischof, Inge Morath, and Robert Capa himself, are part of a new exhibition, Magnum Photos: Early Colour. It’s at the Robert Capa Centre. Ongoing, 1PM to 6PM weekdays, 10-6PM weekends.

Paper Of The Week

(Not) Rolling Out The Welcome Mat: Non-EU Migration in the V4

Michael O’Shea

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary worker,” goes a quote attributed alternatively to Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.

Every Western European country has developed its own origin myth for mass migration. Waterloo Station now has a statue to the ‘Windrush Generation’. Germany believes it was rebuilt by Turks, rather than hardy Teuton engineers. National stories are being retrofitted to incorporate the haphazard policies of yesteryear.

Eastern Europe has none of this historical baggage. Its experience of migration remains recent and limited. Yet even here, the inexorable tide of humanity is beginning to wash in. Warsaw taxis driven by Indians. Budapest’s ubiquitous Wolt men.

Each nation in the Visegrád 4 confronts the same questions of identity and opportunity. Each is piecing together an answer in a different way.

Former fellow Michael O’Shea has decided to survey these differing responses in his excellent new paper:

The Czech government estimates the country’s Vietnamese community at 69,000, the third-highest foreign nationality after Ukrainian and Slovak. By 2011, “Nguyen” reportedly ranked as the ninth-most-common surname in Czechia, with over 21,000 holders.

Irrespective of political blame, scenes that would have been unfathomable a decade ago are proliferating across Poland. In 2024, a Senegalese man defecated in a reservoir, evoking widespread shock and social-media commentary: He was later deported. In April 2025, a Jamaican man stabbed and severely wounded a fellow passenger exiting a Warsaw tram. In July 2025, a Venezuelan migrant murdered a young woman in Toruń after a botched rape attempt. In 2024, camera footage showed an African man attempting to pick the lock of a parked car in Warsaw, climbing and jumping on top of others, and eventually assaulting a delivery driver on a motorised scooter. “Until recently, such scenes could only be seen in the countries of Western Europe,” wrote the staff of pro-opposition wPolityce.pl. This genre of news story, once enumerable by hand, is increasingly common.

Anti-migration political attitudes – particularly when excluding the special case of Ukrainian war refugees – are arguably just as firm in 2025 as they were in 2015, at the time of that year’s European migration crisis. The various types of legal and illegal migration inevitably make for a more complicated environment. Poland, with its large and rapidly developing economy, seemingly is becoming a desirable migration-destination country, in addition to one that sits at a critical geopolitical location. Hungary and Slovakia remain significant transit countries for migrants hoping to reach the wealthier countries of Western Europe. All four countries are juggling the needs of a modern economy with the haunting migration experiences of nearby Western Europe.

Read more.

“Sok lúd disznót győz”

Many geese defeat a pig

IMEC — the India Middle East Corridor — is the latest big piece to be laid on the geopolitical chessboard. The idea is that, as opposed to the Middle Corridor (through the Stans), or the Northern Corridor (Russia, aargh!), Eastern trade can take an easy route from India, bisecting Saudi Arabia, and turning up at Marseille and the Port of Trieste, en route for European distribution. It’s asserted that doing so would also shore up peace in the Middle East — via the proposed Israel link at Hafa.

Sadly, the old ‘no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever gone to war’ trope is now woefully out of date (Ukraine, Armenia, Serbia, Lebanon and Pakistan can all attest to that). Besides, even before WWI, a bestselling book, The Great Illusion, made much the same point about how better trade links would make German militarism impossible.

But whether IMEC is a security system, or simply a great way to shave $200 off the price of an aircon unit from Shenzen, Tuesday’s event: The Abraham Accords and IMEC — Securing the Future of the Middle East, promises to fill in some answers.

Kristof Veres, Sean Nottoli and Melissa O’Sullivan represent the DI.

They will be aided by Eugene Kontorovich, the funny, fast-talking analyst from George Mason University. And Orr Yisachar, long-time friend of the DI, who runs the David Institute in Jerusalem.

Kick-off is at 5PM, at the Villa.

Reserve your seats here:

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/the-abraham-accords-and-imec-securing-the-future-of-the-middle-east

The great leftist bromide is that more migration is always positive. This is being tested to destruction right now by Britain’s Reform Party, who have announced that if elected they will house big migrant sites exclusively in areas that voted for leftist pro-migration parties. Understandably, there has been flappy consternation on that part of the political spectrum, as various right-on types attempt to spell out their horror without ever actually saying why they’re horrified.

No such double-talk at MCC, Thursday at 2PM, where they host Migration As A Weapon, a fascinating look at the human materiel of the 21st century.

From Belarus and Poland, to Morocco and Spain, to the ongoing threats of Erdogan, migration is leverage — and he who controls the chokepoint holds the cards.

Register here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-21-migration-as-a-weapon-power-pressure-and-politics-in-a-changing-world

Peter Slezkine is Director of the Russia Program at the Stimson Center.

He’s in Budapest for a Budapest Lecture, entitled: The Crisis of the Transatlantic Order: Where Is European Security Headed?.

More details here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-18-the-crisis-of-the-transatlantic-order-where-is-european-security-headed

Around Town

Kontroll is a classic Hungarian film, and very watchable. The 2003 sci-fi story of ticket inspectors on a futuristic Budapest Metro, it was written and directed by Nimród Antall, who went off to Hollywood after its success. It’s on at Bem Mózi, 6:30PM.

Farrokh Bulsara, the Zanzibar Indian better known to the world as Freddie Mercury, gained his distinctive overbite by being born with four extra incisors — a mouth like a flute, to which he later attributed his singing prowess. BiB’s interest in Freddie was rekindled recently by a viral video breaking down the dense harmonic layers of Bohemian Rhapsody. He is also the subject of a major new exhibition, hosted at the House of Music, which promises a deep dive into his short and never dull life: stage costumes, personal items, pieces of furniture and manuscripts.

Katsushika Hokusai is an artist best known for ‘the big wave’: real name Under the Wave off Kanagawa. He lived in the late 18th century, but his influence on Japanese popular art has persisted and pervaded. Hence a new exhibition at the Museum of Ethnography, called Manga – Hokusai – Manga, which traces how much of contemporary Japanese cartooning finds its roots in the master’s work.

In 1948, Robert Capa was already 35 years old, an American citizen, a recipient of the Medal of Freedom, John Steinbeck’s travel companion and collaborator on what would become A Russian Journal, when he returned home for the last time.

In the autumn of that year, he found himself back in Budapest for three months, wherein he took a sequence of photos that captured the country at a pivotal moment, between the ashes and the autocracy. The Capa Centre, up by Opera, is hosting a new exhibit of these shots.

Rod Dreher is leaving on a jet plane. At the end of the month, he’s moving to Alabama, to care for his ailing mother. Ahead of his departure, we sat down with the DI’s most well-known fellow to talk through his experience of five years in Hungary. What emerged was a touching personal portrait of the people and ideas that defined his time here.

It’s a bittersweet one for us. Rod has been fundamental to the DI’s identity: a strange and beguiling dinner companion, a far-sighted seer of the right, and a happy warrior in his everyday work. We’ll miss the overshares, and the kind words. Go well, Ray Oliver.

We missed Saddam’s Palace in 2003, so if you’re in the mood for damnatio memoriae, it might be worth taking a tour around the Karmelita, Viktor Orbán’s former Prime Ministerial residence. Like many historic dictators, Vik simply hired some moving men and left when his mandate was up. The former nunnery has since been opened up to the public by gracious and humble new overlord Péter Magyar (who has instead decided to live in a portakabin opposite KFC, Széll Kalman tér). Guided tours took place last weekend, and there may be some more coming up. All together now: “The regime’s decadence was a crime against the people!”.

Meanwhile, as the old guard falls away, Nick Thorpe has been profiling one of the oldest and guard-iest, Zsolt Németh, former head of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Fidesz founder. Nick, an ex-BBC journalist who has been in town since the late 80s, has a very clear-eyed view of the place and its present upheavals.

A Kind of Solution

Last of the Mohicans?

My photograph of Viktor Orbán in the Parliament building in January 2015…

Read more

2 months ago · 15 likes · Nick Thorpe

Paper of the Week

A War of Narratives in the Air: Hungary’s position at the intersection of hybrid warfare and communication pressure

Norbert Szári and Géza Gazdag

Hybrid warfare is a worryingly recent term. It only comes into the lexicon after Russia’s 2008 attack on Georgia, and only really develops common currency after the 2014 Ukraine offensive — remember the ‘little green men’? In brief, it is plausibly deniable warfare. Messing with stuff. A definition that could take in scrambling the control systems at Heathrow, or floating barrage balloons over the Estonian border. Increasingly, war is ambient: it is the leveraging of power to weaken and to push broader goals.

Hungary appears to have had its share of hybrid war lately — and the authors of our worrying new paper pick out one aspect: three mysterious drone incidents in the Carpathian region. One involving a Hungarian drone, the others drones of foreign origin. None ever truly ‘solved’.

Airspace-related incidents become particularly sensitive issues in this environment. When Hungary refers to the lack of technical evidence or adopts a cautious stance regarding a given case, some actors interpret this as if it were relativising the danger or weakening the alliance narrative.

Yet the essence of the Hungarian approach is precisely realist differentiation: as long as it has not been proven that a drone or aircraft is the result of deliberate state action, the incident cannot be classified as aggression but at most as a security risk. For Hungary, therefore, the greatest challenge is not physically defending its airspace – for which a modern, NATO-integrated system is available – but remaining independent in the narrative space. In this sense,

Hungarian strategic culture undertakes a dual task: it adheres to an evidence-based security-policy logic and seeks to prevent its sovereignty – in communicative or political terms – from dissolving in the current generated by wartime rhetoric.

Read more.

Ha nincs ló, jó a szamár is.

If there is no horse, a donkey will do as well.

Will Wood, a man whose name is an exemplar of both the future and past tense of the verb ‘can’, will (and can) talk to Dr David Levy, today from 4:30 PM till 6:00 PM.

Professor at the John Cabot University, on Plato and Aristotle on How Music Can Make Us Better (Or Worse).

Plato was famously anti-art, suggesting it was mimesis — representation of reality rather than reality itself (and thus corrupted our experience). Though perhaps if he’d seen the films of Rob Schneider he might have changed his mind.

Tas Vezér utca. Register here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-11-plato-and-aristotle-on-how-music-can-make-us-better-or-worse

On Thursday, MCC are putting The Youth under the microscope at their new seminar: Emerging Voices 3.0, Perspectives From Scholars In The Next Generation of Youth Research.

A one day conference, it focuses on two themes:

“Revolutions” – Political activism, changes, and shifts in participation among the new political generation

The AI-generation – Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of artificial intelligence

10AM till 4PM at MCC HQ,

Sign up here.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-14-emerging-voices-3-0-perspectives-from-the-next-generation-of-scholars-in-youth-research

Etymology can be a great form of social archaeology. Many will know that before the 1960s the word ‘genocide’ didn’t exist — yet today we think of it as being as old as the hills.

Likewise, did you know that the term ‘soft power’ was made up, in 1990, by one American professor with a book to sell?

Joseph Nye was that professor. He died last year. But not before gifting the world an expression that covers everything from Coca Cola to Rhodes Scholars to think tanks in the Castle District.

Soft power has come in for a lot of flak lately: it’s immeasurable, after all. Best rebutted by Stalin’s quip about the Pope.

Far better, many now argue, to buy another Lockheed Martin PrSM guided missile, than to put on a folk opera in Gdansk.

Raking over the role of soft power, MCC is hosting a one day event, featuring clean-living Ralph Schoelhammer, among many others.

It’s Wednesday, 9AM-5PM.

Sign up here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-12-convincing-the-world-soft-power-potentials-and-competitiveness-in-the-digital-age

Ibrahim Mammadov is the Khanate incarnate, a man who certainly knows his geopolitics onions when it comes to Asia Minor. Ibrahim is a DI fellow of course, but today he’s up at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, from 4PM, explaining Peacebuilding in the Shadow of a War – The Iran War and the Future of the Karabakh Peace Process.

https://hiia.hu/en/esemeny/peacebuilding-in-the-shadow-of-a-war-the-iran-war-and-the-future-of-the-karabakh-peace-process/

Around Town

Do some Israelis hate Christians? That was the frame for Raymond Ibrahim’s sit-down discussion with Netanyahu last week.

“Political leaders in the West are weak,” Netanyahu told Ray.

“How can I respond to the action of a single soldier who’s an idiot, who’s maybe full of hate?” Netanyahu went on.

That’s right: this was an exclusive interview with Dr Iddo Netanyahu, the world’s second most famous Netanyahu (and brother of the first), on Ray’s fantastic YouTube channel.

Sean Paul is in Budapest. Act accordingly.

Now is the summer of our content. Tonight it’s Richard III at the Nemzeti Szinház, in English, with an Israeli touring cast. We may also have two tickets to the show. Enquire within if you would like to snap them up.

Still not enough Shakespeare? Ballet Pécs are doing Romeo & Juliet at the MUPA, Friday and Saturday.

If you loved Episode One of Who’s In Who’s Out, the DI’s excellent new podcast with the excellent Dr Jonathan Price, then you’ll adore Episode Two.

Jonathan talks to two very fine Oxford academics about their cultural bête noirs and hidden gems. Jane Cooper of All Souls chose to banish Bob Dylan from the Western Canon. While Charles Foster, barrister, magistrate and polar explorer, chose to chuck out The Waste Land. In: exquisite Elizabethan poet Robert Southwell, and the 19th century romp Zorba The Greek.

Paper of the Week

The Place of Christianity in the Survival of the West

Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a genre-defying academic who asks the biggest questions about who we are. Most famous for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019), he was a key speaker at our Christian Revival Conference at Oxford Pusey House in March. Now, we’re happy to have a paper from him, spun out of that speech.

In brief: McGilchrist believes we are losing the capacity to narrate ourselves, as narrative gives way to slop: the cacophony of AI, social media, a fractionated attention span. What can redeem that? Perhaps only The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Low self-respect leads to moral degeneracy, deceitfulness, selfishness, lower achievement levels and addiction. This is where I believe we now are, and we need to rediscover all that our right hemispheres at a deeper level know, but which we are now taught to disattend to and disregard. The right hemisphere alone has the capacity to understand the depths of meaning required by those who would approach the ideals on which anciently Western civilisation was founded: Plato’s the good, the true and the beautiful. And I would add at the pinnacle of all the sacred. Without this wiser understanding, human life is already over.

But life can be snatched from the jaws of death. We matter and there is hope. That too is the Christian story.

Read more.

Ki koran kel aranyat lel

‘Who gets up early will find the gold’

Events This Week

Every visitor instantly recognises the quantum aspect of the Hungarians.

Gentle but proud: softly-spoken yet full of a kind of Don’t Tread On Me independence of spirit. An outlier, linguistically, ethnically, and by choice.

The Soviet Empire’s most reluctant citizens; the EU’s most troublesome quarter. Mordant lovers of history, always questioning their place in modernity.

As a visiting fellow once said to Based In Budapest: “Once you recognise the Hungarians have the highest IQ in Europe and the highest suicide rate in Europe, you’re halfway to getting it.”

Part of the work of the DI is in explaining Hungary to the wider world, and our new film is a fantastic stab at it. It’s called simply, rather brilliantly, Hungarians, and takes in much of the 20th Century, before casting an eye to now — sport, art, everyday life.

It debuts on Tuesday, 5 May, at 5:30PM at the Villa. You’ll need to register in advance. After the screening, there will be a Q&A with our own Gergely Dobozi — Tom Cruise lookalike and auteur behind the project. As well as László Kondor, Award-Winning Photojournalist, and Tamás Lévai, World & European Bronze Medalist in wrestling, who features in the film.

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/hungarians-documentary-premiere-at-the-danube-institute

Chantal Delsol is a fascinating figure. Like the best French philosophers, she comes bearing paradoxes. Despite being on the right, she believes in European federalism, and argues that the EU has not gone nearly far enough in binding together its parts; yet she sees populism as the expression of our frustration with the limitations of our democracy.

Delsol is the star of our panel on Thursday 7 April, 5:30PM, entitled The End of Secularism? The State Taking Over Morality. It features her compatriot and our fellow, Pierre-Hugues Barré, a Sorbonne trained legal scholar, who specialises in the collapse of the Church-State distinction, “In 21st-century societies without religion, morality itself functions as a form of religion,” says Pierre-Hugues. “Christian religious authority once held the exclusive power to establish moral norms. But with the collapse of the power of the Church, these are established by the State and its assemblies. Consequently, there is no longer a separation of powers.” With the lion of liberal-conservatism John O’Sullivan also on the panel, this promises to be intellectual rocket fuel.

Sign up here:

https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/the-end-of-secularism-the-state-taking-over-morality

Wednesday, Mme Delsol is up early —- it’s a 9AM start at MCC for Fashions in Politics — a compellingly meta analysis of what you might call the semiotics and mimetics of modern government.

“Current trends in power and sovereignty, the transformation of classical ideologies, patterns in political communication and rhetoric, as well as questions of symbolism, style, and attire,” in their own words. Did Trump make Milei possible? Is one way of thinking about it. Is the greyness of Keir Starmer actually a kind of postmodern performance of power in a Foucauldian sense? Are we all lost in the Society of the Spectacle, doomscrolling our way to oblivion? First panel is on “Luxury Beliefs and the Clandestine King” and it only gets fruitier from there on out.

Sign up here.

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-06-fashions-in-politics

Can you feel your Fitbit buzzing? Matt Goodwin is back in town. Thursday, 6PM, the treadmill-toned truth-teller will be threshing through his bestselling new book — Suicide Of A Nation — an account of the strange death of Britain. He’ll be joined by clean-living professor Ralph Schoelhammer — one of the most gym-friendly duos to ever hit the MCC stage.

Sign up here:

https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-07-suicide-of-a-nation-a-conversation-with-matthew-goodwin-1

May the 4th be with you. Starting the week at MCC is Geopolitical Stress Test: The Middle East Crisis and Europe’s China Dilemma, a whole day featuring eminent Chinese scholars, plus Serbian hardman Misa Djurkovic 9AM till 3PM.

Link here: https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-05-04-geopolitical-stress-test-the-middle-east-crisis-and-europes-china-dilemma

Around Town

Not quite an event, but certainly a Big Moment — David Campanale has been with the DI for six months. As his fellowship closed, he received news that he had won his landmark case against the Liberal Democrats. In an alternate timeline, David — a pal of the Fidesz founders back in the 1989 Freedom Era, and one of the guiding spirits of Tusvanyos — would today be the MP for Epsom & Cheam. Except that in 2022, he was unceremoniously de-selected by Britain’s third largest political party, for the crime of holding Christian beliefs on abortion — which he never intended to make policy.

David’s case has been rumbling through the courts for years. Now, the Lib Dems’ case has collapsed — they have effectively conceded. Suggested damages from his legal team are around 250 000 Pounds. Which poses the vital question: Would he like to buy a Central European think tank?

Read more in The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/04/29/ed-davey-pressure-apologise-discriminating-christian/

Can it be Budapest Beer Week again? Yes. Yes it can. Dürer Kert hosts a week-long craft beer programme; unlimited tasting sessions are on Friday and Saturday, 2PM-8PM. Around 45 breweries will be on offer, with street food, live music, and a ‘dog-friendly environment’, hooch and pooch.

After the crisp sunshine of the Mayday weekend, Budapest’s rowdy Summer continues with a three day festival of ideas, music, and family at Ludovika University of Public Service. There’ll be military demonstrations for the kids, and a bouncy castle for the adults. There’s also a dog show, and a live demonstration by emergency service of cutting someone from car wreckage, for the Ballard fans.

Tibor Gate, Hungary’s astronaut, will be in the Party Tent on Thursday. And don’t miss our new favourite speaker at “The College of Professional Studies” panel — Kiss Fanni.

https://ludovikafesztival.uni-nke.hu/ludovika-szabadegyetem-reszletes-programok-2026/

Budapest100 is a boon to architecture nerds and nosy people. Basically a city-wide ‘open house’ weekend: normally private or semi-private buildings open their doors, with residents and volunteers doing history displays, walks, concerts, etc.

For 2026, it runs Saturday 9 till Sunday 10 May and the theme is “Újra!”: “Again!” — they’re returning to the original concept of celebrating hundred year old buildings, specifically those built from 1916–1926.

Forty houses and institutions are on display: inner-city apartment houses, suburban villas, churches, a cinema, a department store, even a kindergarten.

Here are some highlights:

Puskin mozi - Kossuth Lajos utca 18, District V
An old cinema.

Goldberger Ház and Blinken OSA Archivum — Arany János utca 32, District V
Sunday 3PM, there’s a house tour, explaining both the building and the OSA archive’s work. It’s registration-only.

Építészek Háza - Ötpacsirta utca 2, District VIII
There’s a Saturday evening event called Építészpadlás, about the history of the House of Architects. Registration-only.

Pasarét cluster - District II
Pasaret is lovely. A personal fave of BiB, with its stout Germanic follies set in steep hills. This tour affords you a chance to wander through some of its strangest and most handsome villas: Érmelléki utca 8, Rhédey utca 8/a, Riadó utca 2/a,b, Torockó utca 3.

The website will fill you in on everything else, complete with a map of all venues:

https://budapest100.hu

Paper of The Week

In which old friend Markus Johansson-Martis returns to a favourite topic of his. Migration. Having less of it.

He details how the EU first decried Boris Johnson’s failed Rwanda scheme, and then slyly copied it. As ever, covering fire is key to the EU’s rhetorical slitherings.

But considerable hurdles stand in the way of Third Country arrangements. Mainly around ECHR law, and duties to ensure the deported asylum seekers are not mistreated in their new home.

The solution, he says, is chiefly to be found in Subsidiarity — making individual members states legally responsible.

A shift towards a more subsidiarity-based model would resemble the previously mentioned Australian approach, which has proven effective, and could help reduce the pressure created by current migration flows to Europe.

The existing system is also more costly and, paradoxically, disadvantages genuine refugees, while irregular migrants who reach EU territory often acquire multiple legal grounds, established through European case law, to avoid return to their country of origin. Such an outsourcing mechanism would not differ fundamentally from the EU’s existing “migration deals” with Turkey and Libya, nor from the efforts already attempted by Italy, as discussed earlier in the report. This approach could be implemented either at the EU level or through bilateral arrangements between individual Member States.

Read More

Szamarat fülén, embert szaván kell fogni.

“A donkey should be taken by its ears and a man at his word”

(Keep your promise)

Welcome BACK to Based In Budapest.

Film pitch: Goodbye, Lenin!, but for Fidesz supporters?

We fear we rather overdid it at our election night event. Tatratea is a cruel mistress. And an even crueler wife. But as the smoke clears, and the flaming hole cools sufficiently that it can be excavated, we find that the initial crater is actually destined to become an attractive water feature.

No doubt the Exciting Era Of Change ahead will come with many Interesting Opportunities, but Budapest remains the European Capital of Conservatism for a reason: this is where it’s at. Where else is it at? Den Haag? Malmö?

Besides, whatever their plans for government, our Very Welcome New Insect Overlords will preside over a city still dripping in culture — and the work of setting the frame, sharing ideas, continues.

That’s right: life goes on.

Events This Week

First up on Tuesday at the DI. OTS Observer status - is it a strategic advantage for Hungary? What is it like to watch the Organisation of Turkic States? Do you occasionally get to chip in from the bleachers? Or is it a bit like one of those experiential theatre gigs, where the performers sort of dance sensually amongst you on a Golden Age of Hollywood set? At 5:30PM, the biggest Turcophiles in the DI will be debating this important step for the country, as it continues to broaden its Turkic outreach. Sign up here.

One more imaginative exercise this week: what’s it like looking out from the judge’s bench? Do they keep snacks in there? Do the lawyers wink back? Is there actually a button for a trapdoor beneath the accused, or is that just an urban myth?

On the whole, A View from the Bench: Personal Reflections on the Practice of Constitutional Adjudication, covers the more workaday stuff of finessing constitutional law in a world of conflicting rights and case law with quasi-legal status. Hosted by Marc Bossuyt, the former president of the Belgian Constitutional Court. You’ll have to go to the Kinizsi Pál Room at MCC (Tas vezér utca 3-7), at 5:30PM.Tuesday. Register here.

CTRL+ Youth – Raising Conscious Digital Citizens is the title of a talk by the MCC Youth Research Institute at the MCC Scruton. 10AM, Tuesday. Personally, Based In Budapest’s favourite control-key is Ctrl+Shift+Z - Re-do. Much more useful than Undo. FYI: if you have an iPhone, shaking it produces the Re-do function.

Around Town

Speaking of Da Yoot, our colleague Tamás Maraczi has some thoughtful points on the recent youthquake that took Tisza to victory.

Shortly before the election, Henry Olsen was asked at dinner who he thought would win. As one of America’s top pollsters, Henry was nervous about committing a hostage to fortune: “But if you had to put a gun to my head, I’d say Tisza,” he mused. Henry’s self-execution strategy comes up trumps again.

Three days before the poll, he had given a psephological master class, in collaboration with John Fund, Ralph ‘Clean Living’ Schoelhammer, and John O’Sullivan.

Talking through the key issues and big cultural splits in the Hungarian voter base. Much like that headline prediction, the underlying data work holds up remarkably well in the light of what we now know. Viewable here.

Anthropic may be making up with the US Federal Government, says Fellow Traveller Gavin Haynes in UnHerd. The White House recently blacklisted the company for refusing to give them a blank cheque on the end uses of their models. But Anthropic has the edge right now, and the implications for defence from a more human-centred AI are paradoxically vast. A killing machine is always first a deciding machine. Besides, Anthropic’s new model, Mythos, has a capacity to engage in both defensive and offensive cyber-war that changes the strategic calculus. Imagine if someone had privately come up with The Manhattan Project, Haynes suggests: that’s what we’re looking at.

Immediately after the election, the DI wanted to do something a bit more uplifting — lighter than the news cycle.

So the subject we alighted on was international terrorism, murder and mayhem. If you’re in the mood for black arts in the kitsch and cosy surrounds of 1980s Budapest, take this 90 minute seminar on Carlos The Jackal and Socialist Spycraft, starring Research Fellow Dániel Farkas — author of an excellent paper on the subject.

This was a rich multimedia piece, featuring narration, a full slide deck (with pictures of Carlos’ elegant sociopathic squeeze, Magdalena Kopp), video, and a unique Q&A format.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet rejected our assertion that she is ‘the doyenne of France correspondents’. But she nonetheless issued a governess-tier education in France when she came on the podcast. In the latest episode of Danube Politics, she explains why the French love civil servants, what’s going on with the Le Pen conviction, and why the RN would win 10 times out of 10 in a run-off election against Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Stop what you’re doing and listen to Jonathan Price. Louche learned Jonathan hosted the first episode of Danube Culture’s new show: Who’s In, Who’s Out. The premise: take two guests, give them ultimate power to port one overlooked piece of culture (art, music, poetry, books) INTO the Western Canon. And then, chuck one over-rated work OUT. First episode: John O’Sullivan and Cristiana Sessini - an Oxford classicist.

Cristiana decided she wanted Boethius (who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while under death sentence) IN, and Catullus (leery poetry often plated up to titillate teens into going further with Latin) OUT.

John O’Sullivan wanted to give Samuel Beckett the old heave-ho — “I bow to no one in my loathing for Beckett” — and to insert the whimsy of PG Wodehouse. These are thin characters, he conceded, but how beautifully thin!

You’re not going to believe this (well, maybe you will if you have great capacity for belief), but Kiefer Sutherland is playing A38 on Tuesday. That’s right: the Musketeer and spawn-of-Donald is now a musician, with his own unique line in alt-Americana. Suspend your disbelief here.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Tori Amos, grandmére to the Zoomer angst of the likes of Mitski, is on at the Erkel Theatre. For 25 000 Ft, a bargain.

Did you know that one of our Fellow Travellers was once in the French Foreign Legion?

Of course, in keeping with the lore of the Legion, we’re not allowed to say which one. But that does mean that there are now at least two Danube fellows who can kill you with their bare hands (John O’Sullivan being the other).

In fact, our anonymous fellow has written an anonymous book on his experiences: The Monastery of the Damned.

Recently, the book has been on sale on Kindle — please fill your boots.

Nick Thorpe is the Steve Rosenberg of MittelEuropa. The BBC’s regional correspondent sits in a now sadly old-fashioned BBC tradition of patient and thoughtful journalists who really get to grips with their region. His interview with Péter Magyar in February drew much out. But this week, it was Thorpe as a gangly young journalist nearly forty years ago that drew our eye.

The BBC Archives channel has just re-released a charming 24 minute portrait of Budapest and its young people that Thorpe made in mid-1989, months before the system came crashing down. Also features an early appearance from a 19 year old József Szájer, later known for, well, other things…

Finally, Friday is May Day - and it is definitely Still A Thing here, though the Majális has been re-coded to fit a less Stalinist age. Many events to choose from, but the best example of this is probably A Modern Majális, where Széll Kálmán tér transforms into a music, food, and entertainment hub, kicking off at noon and running late into the evening.

Paper Of The Week

The MAGA Effect: The Impact of US Domestic Policy on Security in Europe and the Indo-Pacific

“The biggest mistake people are making is believing that America is abandoning its allies,” says Fellow Traveller Sean Nottoli. “It’s not - it’s just recalibrating how those alliances work.”

In a world of Trump whisperers, this is perhaps the best overall comment on the art and science of inducting DJT’s trajectory.

But Sean makes a good point: the game of diplomacy is now as personal as it has ever been, and in the Trump White House is conducted by fits of intensive bargaining over highly specific claims, plus a broad ‘vibe check’, best cultivated through personal relations. Can DJT like your leader? Do they seem like they mean it?

There are big lessons here for the future of Hungary — which has so far displayed both the flexibility and commitment to slot into the new paradigm.

In other words, the MAGA movement is not isolationist. It believes that US military might should be used unilaterally, if necessary - to support the key interests of the United States. Those key interests include the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro, the former President of Venezuela. They include the move towards regime change in Iran. They include countering the military rise of China in the Indo-Pacific region.

However, those key interests do not necessarily include countering Russia. Russia is not seen as a serious, let alone primary, threat. In this respect, Trump supporters’ view of the world is very different to that of most European governments.

Read More.

“A hangulatom a béka segge alatt van”

— My mood is below the bum of a frog

Events This Week

Strap in. Big week. Something in the air. Can’t imagine what… 

JD Vance is a young man with great potential. Military service, Yale Law School, private equity, author - and apparently Vice President of the United States, which always looks good on one's CV.

Here he is in Vienna, simpler times, 2023, enjoying a bevvy, a giant pretzel, a sausage, and some weird yellow gloop with Rod Dreher (who took the picture). 

Today and tomorrow, the promising Vance will be back in town, holding talks with the PM, and ‘delivering remarks’ on the Hungarian-US relationship, at the MTK Sportpark for what is billed as Hungarian-American Friendship Day. 

More prosaically, expect major road closures, from the Castle District to Andrássy to the airport. Basically, if you were thinking of using a road, don’t. Daily News Hungary has the full list.

On Thursday, do not miss Henry Olsen. He’s a big guy - hard to miss - but intellectually, Olsen is also one of the most respected pollsters in America, and host of the excellent Beyond The Polls podcast.

He’s in Hungary, doing some final field work ahead of the election, which he will summarise in a talk and panel entitled Hungary Chooses (5:30PM at the Villa). 

Plenty of big names will be weighing in — 

John O’Sullivan - law giver 
Ralph Schoelhammer - clean-living professor
Patrick Egan - founder of Brussels Signal 
John Fund - National Review columnist
István Kiss - one of the biggest psephology nerds you will ever meet 
Calum Nicholson - vaguely piratical Research Director

The Hungarian election has all the makings of a humdinger — but will it be Thatcher in 1979: a big swing towards the untested? Or will it be the John Major in 1992 - a failure of nerve over the quality of the opposition? 

Olsen’s insight is that beyond the campaign tinsel, voters often go with their gut. 

For the past six months, the DI has been cracking deals and auditioning starlets. 

We’ve entered the movie biz: wine-ing and Stein-ing producers, directors, and camera crews to shoot our first feature. Now it’s time for the gala. 

Wednesday is the premier of The Future At The Gate - the DI’s hour length documentary, directed by Isaiah Smallman, about 2015 and the Hungarian experience of immigration. Come and see the future from 6PM at the Uránia National Film Theatre (1088 Budapest, Rákóczi ut 21). A beautiful Art Deco space that’s worth seeing in its own right. 

In a world where… migrants break down fences… this is Central European policy architecture... as you’ve never seen it before… etc etc.  

Today, the Danube Institute is hosting a joint event with MCC, at MCC - 4PM till 5PM. “Where’s our goddamned money?” could be the unofficial subtitle - the infamous ‘million a day’, plus other structural funds sums to 18 billion Euros at last count: enough dough to fully modernise the country’s rail network - or build two new subway lines in Budapest.  

Officially, of course, it is called The EU’s Double Standards – The Case of Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Ukraine, and features the Fedex-forward Gergely Dobozi, and the ever-excellent Rodrigo Ballester.  

Moderation by the fragrant Noémi Pálfalvi, who has promised not to talk about her Pauly Shore obsession.

Are you ready for a time of upheaval? Based in Budapest had enough trouble when Carlsberg changed the recipe a couple of years back - never mind the multipolar thunderdome we’re entering. But the question is rhetorical. 

Song Lilei is Director, European Research Center, a Chinese think tank in Europe. She wants to tell us how Europe can keep itself together at a moment when the Hungry Hippos of the Great Game are gnashing like never before. That’s: Strategic Autonomy in a Time of Upheaval: How the EU's Quest for Sovereignty Reshapes China-Europe Relations”

Wednesday 5PM till 6PM, down the MCC.

In 1990, the US won the First Iraq War by a country mile thanks to their Revolution In Military Affairs doctrine: tight fast phalanxes of tanks, aerial supremacy, getting inside the OODA loop of their opponent: seeding Shock and Awe. 

But that was a long time ago now.

The new model army is about drones, ballistic missiles, and AI systems. It is rough and ready, improvisational, almost guerrilla, unlike the clean lines of the old paradigm. 

This discontinuity is the focus of the MCC-MKI Center For Geopolitics panel, 5PM Thursday. Featuring Robert Clark, a British defence and foreign policy researcher. 

Finally at the MCC: we are glad to be graced by Oxford Researcher Jacob Williams. Jake is about to finish up his PhD in Post-Liberalism, and has eyes on a full time move to the capital of Post-Liberalism. Here, he’ll be presenting on quite what post-liberalism means (always a bit hazy - do we want Papal Supremacy and The Inquisition or not?). That’s 5:30PM Thursday at MCC. 

Finally finally —Sunday night, the MCC is hosting its own election night party. 

They promise live coverage, and panels (panels!). Oh, and booze. Hungarian elections, we are reliably informed, tend to tally quickly. As opposed to British ones, where after the initial shock of the exit poll, everyone waits increasingly careworn till 2:30AM for results to start trickling in from Moreton-in-Marsh, followed by a massive info-dump of 300 seats around 4AM that basically confirms the exit poll. 

9PM till late. Tas Vezér utca. 

It only remains to say that, because of all this election stuff, next week Based in Budapest will come out on Tuesday. 

Or will it? Perhaps there will just be eerie silence, radio static, a furious SOS tapping against a fading sine wave? 

Anyway, Tuesday. 9PM till late. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Best panel of the day involved the irrepressible Ashley Frawley, who gave a brimstone ad libbed speech about helicopter parenting, safetyism and inflated expectations of marriage. “I mean, I just saw a boy I thought was cute, and I said ‘I want to marry him’ and so I did it. I really didn’t think too hard! You just have to deal with things!” 

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Make A Place To Bury Strangers your pre-election gig. Get into the mood with coruscating sheets of industrial rock from these eminent survivors of the 2008 indie boom. They never compromised an inch. Much like the PM. 

A38 (the boat) - doors open at 19:30. 

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Doug Stokes is a Non-Resident Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, (more lately leading the charge at Modul University in Vienna). 

In the European Conservative, he’s taken on a new report from The Cato Institute’s Johan Norberg which surveys the track record of Orbánism’s 16 years. 

Norberg was critical - and Stokes is equally critical of his methodology. 

Hungary, Doug concludes, was punished for when it did things relative to the rest of the EU - rather than for what it did. After all, the EU has now come round to Hungarian ideals on migration (even if the implementation is still wild). And they are about to bend beneath fundamental reality on energy. 

Full piece here.

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Last week was a big one  for God. We had Iain McGilchrist on ‘Why We Need Religion’ and the recent Pusey House conference he attended, in UnHerd.  

And Lord David Frost, past and possibly future Fellow, turned over the revival of Christianity in his Telegraph column. 

Paper of the Week

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The Post-Liberalism Debate

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Philip Pilkington, Jacob Williams and Andrew Koppelman trade perspectives on what Post-Liberalism means in this follow up to their recent talk on the matter.  

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The above is, of course, roughly what happened in most Western societies from the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Laws enforcing sexual morality and substantively privileging religion were, fairly quickly, either repealed or abolished: liberal politicians offered the public a cacophony of often-conflicting rationales for their actions. How, then, should we assume Convivians, or citizens of Western countries in the last third of the last century, interpreted what was happening?

The obvious answer is that they understood the law, which had always been a “coercive teacher”, to be witnessing to a new set of purported moral truths. Citizens will, of course, respond to this legal witnessing in various ways. Some will consciously resist the teaching. Some will embrace it enthusiastically. Some will regard it with ambivalence. But the state has just put its thumb on the scales of judgement in a powerful fashion. Few will be able to escape the influence of the new teaching, even if the influence manifests itself mainly in virulent rejection of this new progressive regime.

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Comings & Goings

The Big Man or the Little Princeling...

Stay tuned.

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Dates For Your Diary

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NatCon Jerusalem — June 8-10

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ARC Conference — 23-25 June

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"Kutyából nem lesz szalonna"

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 —You can't make bacon out of a dog.
("A leopard can't change its spots")

Events This Week

The DI's annual Family Conference is like a trade show for fundamental human forms of belonging. Do you want one? How about a new one? Could they be better dressed? 

Whether you hire or purchase, family is the greatest investment you'll ever make, and the Villa is where it all comes together. Two day event - 9AM Tuesday till 5PM Wednesday. 

Here are some of the bigger wigs appearing this year.

Edward Davies - Director of Research at the Center for Social Justice
Emma Trimble (née Webb) - top notch British commentator
Laoise de Brún BL - CEO & Founder of The Countess Foundation, Ireland
Delano Squires
Ashley Frawley - loquacious and vivacious American from MCC Brussels 
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović - Former President of Croatia
Gladden Pappin - Killary theorist, and President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs
Tony Abbott - Former Prime Minister of Australia and wombat folk-psychologist
Eduard Habsburg - former Ambassador to the Holy See, and 96th in line to the Holy Crown. 

Closing remarks by Mr István Kiss - a put-upon local father of three. 

North Macedonia is easily the least troublesome bit of the Balkans. Unlike the rest, it calmly melted away from the former Yugoslavia, like an Irishman at a party, without so much as a Slovenia-style weekend war. Yet despite being wildly calm and having an attractive capital the EasyJet set would love, this fragment remains slightly beyond the bounds of the EU, languishing in landlocked obscurity. 

Obscurity no more: tonight, MCC is hosting a special event on North Macedonia, focusing on the European integration of the Western Balkans. It features Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski.

6:45PM, at MCC.

Of course, if you hate families, perhaps you'd prefer a morning seminar at Ludovika Univsersity of Public Service, on Maps Of Power. Canvassing geo-politics in yer typical 'time of upheaval'. 

Features John Hutchinson from the London School of Economics on How Wars Shape Nations: Memory, Identity, and Power, the all-powerful Márton Ugrósdy, Gladden Pappin as standard, and our very own wunderkind Calum 'TM' Nicholson. 9AM - 2PM, Saint Ladislaus Chapel, Ludovika. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Fans of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo have had a fantastic week. Opponents of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo have had a shocker.  Last week, 90s goofball comedy pinup Rob Schneider was in town, soaking up the rabidly right wing ambience of the Gathering of the Patriots, and putting on a talk at MCC. "The best way to fight tyranny is to laugh at it," he told his audience. A sentiment that didn't take The 2nd Royal Satirists' Battalion very far on D-Day.

Here he is with his number one fan and a couple of rubberneckers. 

Spring is sputtering into life. The days are widening, the layers are coming off, the central heating is in that awkward fiddling-phase. But it doesn't officially bloom until the cherry blossoms do. 

Next week, the ELTE Botanical Garden hosts the annual Sakura Celebration in their cherry orchard, inspired by the Japanese custom of Ohanami – the practice of viewing and appreciating the transient beauty of flowers.

Book in advance to avoid disappointment.

Sir Richard Bishop (knighthood self-bestowed) is one of the backbones of experimental Americana. Maker of 19 albums since 1998, he's collaborated with the likes of Devendra Barnhart, Animal Collective, and Bill Callahan. 

On Thursday, he hits Lumen, 8PM.

Come for Elektronika Demonika, stay for While My Guitar Violently Bleeds. 

Ferenc Puskás was the Maradona of Hungary. A footballer who became bigger than the game. Best known in England for thumping them 6-3 at Wembley, then 7-1 on the return leg, Puskás was the platinum leader of Hungary's 1950s golden  generation - who revolutionised play with their fast, sweeping style. After 1956, he defected, and banged in four for Real Madrid in the 7-3 European cup final often heralded as 'the greatest club game of all time'. FIFA's 'Goal of the Year' trophy is named after him. 

Today, he donates his name to a football academy, a football club that grew out of it - and to his own personal museum. 

We were reminded of the latter by our Events manager, the indefatigable Katerina Nagy, who, it turns out, is immortalised in its foundation stone as its founding co-ordinator. 

It's inside the Puskás Aréna complex, housed in the only surviving part of the old Népstadion. The Puskásmúzeum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10AM–6PM. The address is: Istvánmezei út 3-5, XIV district. 

The election temperature gets ever-hotter.  

This week, the BBC reported on a documentary it said was made by 'independent film makers: The Price of the Vote:  

"Local mayors exercise an iron grip over daily lives," reporter Nick Thorpe wrote. "Providing work, firewood, transport to polling stations and, in one case, even access to medicine, in exchange for the "correct" vote on election day, according to claims made in the film." BiB should point out that private polling booths do exist even in the sticks of Hungary. 

Having expended all their bandwidth on the independent filmmakers, the BBC will not be reporting on the MCC's new paper: The Managed Ballot (Schenk et al). A hundred pages that picks through the EU playbook on shaping national elections, through a complex chain of the Digital Services Act, intelligence, judicial bullying, and fund withholding.

The report picks out three cases in particular: 

Romania - wrong candidate gets tarred with 'Russian TikTok' allegations and disbarred 

Poland - seven years of withholding funds, Euro-court overrules, and opposition-funding. 

And Czechia - where Babiš won anyway, despite the EU installing its Rapid Response System, which gave various foreign NGOs privileged access to content-moderation channels during the elections. 

Eminent British journalist David Aaronovitch may have lost his column in the Times, but that hasn't stopped him from Bouncing Back. 

The left-liberal Aaronovitch has turned his focus to Substack, and there, last week produced a less-than-glowing review of our Pusey House Christian Revival conference, in which he broke every Chatham House rule going. Convenor Jonathan Price was aware Aaronovitch wanted to get in, but decided to admit him -  even to the private sessions - in a spirit of Christian charity.  

It all reminded Based In Budapest of a legendary folk-tale about the bombastic Aaronovitch, in which he is conned by an Albanian into buying a fake leather jacket. Judge his acumen for yourself. 

Paper of the Week

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Derisking Children: The Foundations of Hungarian Family Policy

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Across the world, as Europe stares into the demographic abyss, policy makers are fishing around for a solution they should have begun to work on twenty years ago. 

Hungary's answer might still be imperfect, say Gergely Szűcs and Mátyás Vajda, but it at least understood the question.

In fact, as they point out, the Hungarian family policy is the lodestone of a greater re-imagining of the role of the welfare state: a move away from piecemeal handouts, towards a human flourishing state: a system that takes an active view on what the good life looks like. 

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According to data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the average age of women at the birth of their first child rose from around 23 years in the early 1990s to approximately 29 years by 2023. 

While the underlying causes of this shift are complex and cannot be attributed to a single factor, public policy has increasingly sought to create more favourable conditions for younger generations contemplating starting a family. 

From 2026, this measure reduces monthly tax liability by up to HUF 20,000 for one child, HUF 40,000 per child for two children and HUF 66,000 per child in families with three or more children. In this way, the financial recognition of parenthood may begin even before the child is born.

Alongside the family tax allowance, several targeted personal income tax exemptions have been introduced. Employees under the age of 25 are exempt from personal income tax on earnings up to a defined threshold, while mothers under the age of 30 may be entitled to full tax exemption following the birth of their child.

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Comings & Goings

Going

Daniel Hannan, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, is the godfather of Brexit. At the DI, he’s spent the past six months working on a soon-to-be-released survey of Conservatism in the Anglosphere, alongside David Oldroyd Bolt. We’ll miss the late night chats and the extemporised Shakespeare soliloquies. .

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Dates For Your Diary

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NatCon Brussels — April

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ARC Conference — 23-25 June

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"Egy bolond százat csinál"

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 — A fool makes a hundred. (Stupidity spreads fast).

Events This Week

If CPAC didn’t quench your appetite for red meat, then the lineup of The First Patriotic Assembly is a mammoth’s worth of carne. Czechia's Andrej Babiš, ice cream-haired Geert Wilders, cat fancier Marine Le Pen, Herbert Kickl, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, Santiago Abascal, head of Spain’s Vox, and Viktor Himself. It’s Anne Applebaum’s cheese-fuelled nightmare, and it’s really happening: at Millenáris Park, today, 10AM-6PM.

The death of Len Deighton got Based In Budapest thinking about literary fashions. Deighton wrote some of the greatest spy thrillers — snappier than Le Carré. In the ‘80s, his paperbacks adorned every airport lounge. Then they fell from favour. His passing, at 97, seems to have jolted him back into the popular memory. 

In The Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, Dr. Nicholas Tate takes a longer view of that same question. Walter Scott was once the Alasdair Maclean of the 19th Century — every schoolboy’s favourite ripping yarn merchant. Skip back a couple millennia and Cicero’s On Duties was prescribed reading for young men on the make. These and others come under discussion, as Tate seeks to remind us of all the treasures we forgot to remember. 

4PM. Wednesday, at MCC. 

Do you yearn to ‘map the emerging fault lines of the global migration shockwaves’? Sounds like To Greener Pastures – and Back: A Global Outlook on Migration would be perfect. 4PM tomorrow at the Villa.

Plug time: please do come along to the Danube Institute’s two-day Family Conference next week Tuesday-Wednesday, 1 and 2 April. Family comes first, after all. 

Sir Nick Gibb was perhaps the most consequential Tory in the dismal government of 2010-24.

As Schools Minister, Gibb didn’t believe in the educational establishment’s vogue for teaching reading by ‘the searchlights model’: in which children would be given the entire word, and have to memorise it, like Chinese ideograms. 

So he pushed for an older system — phonics. Recognise the particle of a word: ‘th’, ‘ough’, ‘ie’ — and use these building blocks to pronounce the whole thing. 
That one change has radically improved reading comprehension in schools, saving many now-adults from functional illiteracy. 

On Wednesday at 5PM, he’s talking over what he learned with the functionally literate Calum Nicholson, and János Setényi, Head of the MCC Learning Institute.

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Some very fine art going on at the Museum of Fine Art. Masterpieces of Swiss Art from the Christoph Blocher Collection brings together works by Ferdinand Hodler, Albert Anker, and several others. 

Anker is best known for his adoring, luminescent portraits of children. Hodler is perhaps the opposite - starkly beautiful landscape scenes in the Swiss mountains. He happened to arrive on the scene at the moment when various viewpoints were suddenly becoming accessible via railway, and took full advantage, working in idyllic solitude far from popular tourist sites.

Tickets are 6200Ft and the show runs until the 21st of April. 

1989 was an extraordinary year in Hungarian history — unless you were 18 and just wanted to party. That’s the setup for Moscow Square (2001), a Hungarian film that takes the events of ’89 as its background for the story of a group of teens only looking to pass their finals and finally get rid of the V plates. Dazed & Confused meets Goodbye Lenin? That's the tantalising hybrid at MCC’s Film Club, Kino Café, István korut, 6PM tonight. 

Last week, the EU activated the 'rapid response' clause of its Digital Services Act in Hungary. The DSA, an elephantine web of internet safety laws, is designed to stamp out 'disinformation'. The regulations will stay in force until one week after polling day. This comes on the back of unsubstantiated claims of 'Russian election interference' that have swept Hungarian media in recent days. 
 
Thomas Fazi, of MCC Brussels, has been tracing the familiar narrative of interference in his latest piece for Compact. 

These accusations carry real consequences. They allow Brussels to engage in its own forms of electoral interference, weaponizing locally embedded, EU-funded NGOs and media outlets to amplify establishment narratives while using the Digital Services Act (DSA) to silence critical voices and steer outcomes towards “their” candidate. As I have noted previously, since the DSA came into force in 2023, the Commission has pressed platforms to adopt heightened content moderation measures ahead of elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, and during the 2024 European Parliament elections.

GipsyFest, the festival you didn't know you needed, is happening Thursday till Saturday, on Margaret Island. Evening concerts, showing off the best of Roma folk music and art. Tickets are 10 000 Ft but requesting Volare voids them.

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The Future of America's Alliances is Industrial says Sean Nottoli, in National Review.

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Paper of the Week

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Salonfähig: The Mainstreaming of the Freedom Party
of Austria

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Austria is still an enigma. A neutral state. Occupied by the Soviets - then somehow given its liberty. Nazism's 'first victim', or its first collaborator? 
And the first state in Europe to see the rise of hard right politics in the form of The Freedom Party. 

In the immediate post-war, a severely divided electorate was bound together by an act of political genius called proporz: a system of power-sharing, in which the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats doled out ministries to each other in a Grand Coalition, even down to local level. 

But the cosy consensus politics began to fracture in the 1970s, as DI Visiting Fellow Stefano Arroque explains, when the Freedom Party broke through. Best known for its charismatic possibly-gay '90s leader, Jörg Haider, the Freedom Party put immigration on the table in a way that was at odds with the tone of the times. 

Initially, that meant isolation, a cordon sanitaire. But the cordon has broken down in Austria in a way it has not yet in Germany. 

Arroque explains the transition in terms of the Austrian sense of Salonfähigkeit - salon-worthiness, clubbability. His paper considers the VPÖ's many small steps toward respectability.

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Haider’s leadership closed a chapter of national liberalism in the history of the FPÖ. The party’s new platform, heavy in a kind of nation- based or outright nationalistic language not seen in Austrian politics in at least three decades, focused on issues such as migration, culture and security rather than economics or individual liberties. 

The Carinthian’s success was immediate: within months of his leadership, the FPÖ nearly doubled its vote share in the National elections, albeit returning to the opposition as Vranitzky refused to work with a more nationalistic FPÖ. Less than three years later, the FPÖ achieved unprecedented success in the elections for the Carinthian Landtag, securing a narrow majority with the ÖVP. 

Carinthia, despite still using Proporz rules for the composition of the cabinet at the time, reserved to the Landtag the right to elect – and depose – the Landeshauptmann by simple majority. With an agreement reached, Haider was inaugurated as the FPÖ’s first-ever Landeshauptmann.

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Comings & Goings

Going

Father Mario Portella has been a Visiting Fellow for six months, and is ending his term just before Easter, in time to nip back to Florence, where he has an ecclesiastical base. Father Mario is widely loved for his gangster chic cigars, his firm opinions on Vatican II, and his elliptical historical tangents. Having a priest as a friend and colleague turns out to be pretty cool. He has promised us all a discount on future christenings. And maybe even an indulgence or two if you see him round the back…

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Dates For Your Diary

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Family Formation and the Future, Budapest — 1–2 April

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NatCon Brussels — April

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"Amit Jancsi nem tanult meg, János fizetni fog."

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 — What Jancsi didn’t learn, János will pay for. (Jancsi is the diminutive of János — in other words, the boy who doesn't form good habits will reap the downsides in later life)

Events This Week

 The CPAC is a little-known place where we can get together. Last year was a two day affair, mid-week. This year is much more of a one-and-done job: a single day, 21 March — and a Saturday to boot. Expect Fox News-tier jawlines, Matt Gaetz-tier hairgel, much brimstone on Iran, and plenty of reverend references to the speaker’s relationship with The Man Upstairs (DJT). 

Also at CPAC, hanging out the passenger’s side of his best friend’s ride, is Dave Rubin — who will be interviewing Dutch firecracker Eva Vlaardingerbroek (the only influencer whose name is an anagram of everything). Eva has recently been banned from the United Kingdom for being ‘un-conducive to the public good’. Moderation by the ever-moderate Anglosphere Fellow, David Oldroyd Bolt.

Test whether Eva is conducive to your own good, at the Danube Institute, 5:30PM, Friday night. 

Emma Gilland wants you to have your babies. She’s the Event Coordinator of the Academy of Ideas, in town at MCC to present her findings on Gen Z, motherhood and family formation in Britain. It makes for typically grim reading: the rising generation see motherhood as a stressful time-suck in an economically precarious world. This one’s a matinée - 2PM Tuesday. 

Connor Tomlinson is back at MCC to advise potential conservative influencers on how to make their way in the digital world.
Wednesday, 7PM

Is your week creaking at the seams yet? Got time for a wafer-thin roadshow? Just the one? 

The Free Market Roadshow has been rolling into Budapest with the regularity of Russian tanks — this year is its 20th edition, co-hosted with Austrian Economic Center. 

2026's key topics include: 

“The Beauty of the Free Market”

“Is the West in Civilisational Decline?” - with the excellent Max Rangeley. 

“Is there an AI Bubble?” - by Edward Chancellor. 

“Is the West in Financial Decline?” 

And “Can Free Markets Save the West?” - with the prodigal Lord, David Frost — back in Budapest after six months running the free market IEA think tank. 

So good that, as Hayek might’ve put it: were there not already a Free Market Roadshow, the inherent demand for it would create the profit incentives to marshal the resources to bring one into being. 

Thursday, 2-6PM. Danube Institute.

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Oxford is a town with no mobile phone signal. Delegates to the DI’s Pusey House Christian Revival conference were left dangling their rectangles at the sky, imploring the gods of the ether to send them just one bar so that they could find just one more bar. 

Initially we assumed this was to do with Hungarian roaming, until various locals confirmed the grim truth: yes, Oxford has precious little 5G, 4G or even 1G. Some blamed the sandstone buildings (scientifically illiterate). Others, the town planners. But as a city with perhaps the highest ‘g’ ('General Intelligence’) on the planet, it did seem darkly funny that all this intellect was being frittered away on waiting for the bus timetable to load.  

Spotted above the basin in the bathrooms of Pusey House: “To clean hands, chant verses from Psalm 51.” 

Mary Harrington gave the most bracing speech — a McLuhan-inflected overview of literacy and its discontents. The print era, she suggested, was only an interregnum, a brief five hundred year gap between two oral cultures: that of antiquity, and the coming one, where AI spoons us back to ourselves in a soothing baritone. What’s coming will be two types of human: a possibly-elite, certainly-minority class of those who can and do read; and then a great mass of those who don’t find it necessary. One possible solution? “Bring back the monasteries…” Repositories of deep culture in a world of shallows.

Full text here.

John O'Sullivan, asked onstage what could bring about Christian Revival: "Reading GK Chesterton - it worked for Meloni. Oh - and a Near-Death Experience always helps..."

Maurice Glasman onstage: "Please, quit with the applause. I'm in the Labour Party, I'm not used to it."

Watch the whole conference here. 

Economist, gadfly and Colour Revolution hater Philip Pilkington is pointing to a gathering storm as the Hungarian election season quickens. Recent reports in the VSquare journal, have alleged a Kremlin-linked plot to influence the Hungarian election on behalf of Fidesz. The article cites anonymous intelligence; Pilkington has spent much of the week challenging VSquare to reveal its sources. No reply so far. 

At the same time, he points to a growing row over AI-generated deepfakes. That story was started by a Hungarian fact-checking outlet called Lakmusz. Lakmusz  forms part of the EU-financed Hungarian Digital Media Observatory. For its part, VSquare is funded by programmes connected to USAID and the German Marshall Fund.  

Pilko’s verdict? The ground is being laid for a post-election cry of foul — see Romania in 2025 for how that works. Read his full analysis here.

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Sean Nottoli was once a USAID-er: in the employ of the National Endowment for Democracy, via its International Republican Institute arm. Now a Fellow at the DI, he’s a poacher turned gamekeeper — or at least poacher turned different kind of poacher. In this week’s Danube Politics, he gives us the lowdown on what life was like inside the world’s biggest donor org. 

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It's St Paddy's Day, Tuesday. The best Irish pub in Budapest, by common consent, is the James Joyce, just behind the Basilica. 

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Tune in for some Shahed-level penetration of the discourse in the new View From The Danube. Rod Dreher was so sick with mono had to pretend to eat fish soup for the intro (he couldn’t stomach a single spoon). Then, Raymond Ibrahim explained exactly why Shia Islam is so much more Doomsday-oriented than Sunni — and why that means Iran must never be allowed near the plutonium jar. 

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Paper of the Week

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Brösel-Politiken: Is Democracy Working in the UK and across Europe?

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The populists keep winning. This we know. Yet their victories still catch out mainstream analysts almost every time. 

That may be because mainstream analysts are measuring the wrong things, says Stephen Balogh. In fact, democratic disenchantment is more real than we'd ever imagine.

In a hefty piece of high-end political theory, he contrasts his measurement approach to that of The Economist's Intelligence Unit (EIU). The EIU's five ‘deficits’ (equality, party, choice, ideas, citizenship)  work for atomised individual. But, he says, they neglect a nationality-based demos: emphasising high-trust cohesion and demographic sustainability. 

"How can we be happy with our politics if it lacks a polity?", to put it one way.

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Serious consideration should be given to creation of a new democratic deficit category under the EIU democratic deficit scheme, dubbed ‘National Interest deficit’. Necessarily different in nature to the existing five in that it would aim to reflect a sense of democratic collective identity as the demos of the nation rather than purely in terms of atomized individuals, its measurement would increase the explanatory value of the EIU scheme. For completeness, the full revised list would be:

A.   Equality Deficit
B.   Party Deficit
C.   Choice Deficit
D.   Ideas Deficit
E.   Citizenship Deficit
F.   National Interest Deficit

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Dates For Your Diary

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Family Formation and the Future, Budapest — 1–2 April

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NatCon Brussels — April

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"Halvány lila gőzöm nincs"

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 — I have not the faintest purple vapour about it. (I have absolutely no idea)

Events This Week

 MCC is Reclaiming The West this week. Well somebody had to. 

It's a big deal to reclaim an entire philosophico-cultural continuum, so they have budgeted three days for a full conference - 10 -12 March, with a wide array of speakers. 

Highlights include: 

Matt Goodwin - who recently won the silver medal for Reform in the Gorton & Denton by-election. 
Ralph Schoelhammer - the clean-living professor 
Gladden Pappin - professional Hillary-baiter 
Alp Mehmet - chair of influential think tank Migration Watch UK 
Philip Cunliffe - influential geopol prof at University College London 
Michael von der Schulenburg - Member of the European Parliament and former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Jerzy Kwaśniewski -  President of the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture

Register here.

How sustainable is your workforce? Are they limping towards the copier like knobbled pit ponies? Do they audibly sigh every time they shift a cell in Excel? Do they sometimes look at your morning croissant with the gimlet eyes of a Somali pirate? 

Workforce sustainability is the hot topic of Sustainable Workforce Development in Emerging Regions. A one-morning conference, comparing US and Hungarian attitudes to work, workers, and the pipeline between 'skills' and 'jobs'. Thankfully, Based In Budapest is written entirely by a particularly sardonic instance of Claude Code, so we don't have to worry about job security for now. 

For the rest, it's up at the Danube Institute - 9AM till 1PM.  

Before the main conference at MCC, there's also an evening event tonight: Quo Vadis West? (Surely that should be Quo Vadis Occidens? - Latin Ed.). It stars Professor Anatol Lieven, who will be joined in conversation by the lively Serb Misa Djurkovic.

5PM, MCC Scruton.

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Hungary is naturally rich in national days: from 1956 day, to 1848 Day, to 896 Day. 

This coming weekend, March 15, Sunday, it is 1848 Day. There will be a flag raising on Kossuth Square, in front of Parliament, followed by  a procession of Hussars from Parliament towards the Hungarian National Museum. And for one day only, all local museums are free this Sunday. Get in early. 

But the real draw will be between Deák Ferenc Tér and Ferenciek Tere. 

The two candidates for the Hungarian premiership, holding their biggest rallies ahead of the vote date. On Andrássy ut, Péter Magyar and his Tisza camp promise to 'fill the boulevard'. Meanwhile, by the National Museum, Viktor Orbán will be over at the larger open air arena, for what he has dubbed The Peace March, hammering his theme of ending the war in Ukraine. 

As with last year, much will be made in the press of the respective crowd sizes. 

Magyar has called for 'the same spirit as 1848' in this election - but he might recall that even Petófi had only 12 points. By contrast, the Tisza manifesto, released this week, weighs in at a door-stopping 240 pages. Despite or perhaps because of this, it has been criticised as a bit thin: for example, their energy policy states that they would move away from Russian gas, to put Hungary at the European target percentage, 'by 2035'. Vote for change, it seems, but only within three election cycles. 

Some big names attending the DI's Pusey House Christian Revival Conference in Oxford, this week. The brainchild of Calum Nicholson, Jonathan Price and David Campanale, its central idea is one that's been dangling in the cultural ether for a couple of years: God's back. And this time he's right-wing.

The lineup includes: 

Danny Kruger MP - Head of Policy for Reform UK
Miriam Cates - frequent Budapest visitor, GB News presenter, ex-Tory MP, voted Most Likely To Defect To Reform three years running
Iain McGilchrist - philosopher of consciousness and the brain, who in prêcis believes in rightie-tighty leftie-loosey
Mary Harrington - ace writer at UnHerd, almost too Based to live
Fergus Butler-Gallie - witty vicar
Maurice Glasman - uproarious 'token leftie', father of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement
Rod Dreher - that guy from The Atlantic
John O'Sullivan - law-giver

There will also be a couple of Very Special Guests we cannot presently name (but trust us, they are very special - and also guests). 

It's Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th of March. 

It’s not every day a DI fellow gets into The Atlantic for a good reason. But this generous portrait of Rod Dreher is just that.

 Includes the memorable line: 

More than anyone else I know of, Dreher offers a full-fledged portrait of the cultural despair that haunts our era. 

And this time they weren't just talking about his hair. 

Raymond Ibrahim just can't stop winning. 

Conan The Civilizationist has just pocketed the 2026 Sappho Prize. 

The citation says: 

The Danish Free Press Society awards the 2026 Sappho Prize to Raymond Ibrahim for his fearless, source-based scholarship exposing the persecution of Christians and the historical realities of Islamist violence — pursued with intellectual integrity despite sustained efforts to silence and discredit him.

It's Denmark's most famed free speech prize - born out of the 2005 Muhammad cartoon riots - previous recipients include Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and Nigel Farage. If you're in Denmark on 21 March, do come along to the ceremony. 

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Post-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor, hit town this week. Coming to prominence in the late-90s, they were were pioneers of droning on the A string for six minutes while static filtered through a transistor radio fuzzes ominously in the background. Which certainly seemed cool at the time.

Tomorrow, they're at Dürer Kert, 7pm.

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Paper of the Week

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Addressing the Irregularities of Subsidiarity in the EU

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Subsidiarity is the EU's favourite idea - that decisions must be taken at the lowest appropriate level of authority. 

Subsidiarity is meant to keep the peace between 27 wildly different countries - and to establish the democratic legitimacy of the EU system. There's only one issue - the EU regularly ignores subsidiarity whenever it is convenient. See: Hungary and the mass migration compact and the million Euros a day.

Examples abound: in 2013, the European Public Prosecutor's Office took away the exclusive privilege of nations to prosecute on their sovereign territory. 

So - should we hang onto it?   

Father Mario Portella holds a doctorate in canon law and a degree in real law, which at least sounds like the start of a decent detective drama. In his new paper, he turns his skills towards the contradictions in the system, and whether we can flush them out. After all, as he says, subsidiarity is originally a Catholic concept, descended from Pius XI in 1932, rooted in the Church's campaign against totalitarianism. 

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For this reason, Hungary, above all Member States, should establish an “Office of the Legal Adviser” to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade modelled on the US State Department’s Legal Adviser Office, which furnishes advice on all legal issues, domestic and international, arising in the course of the Department’s work. This “Office” would be responsible for publishing legal doctrine on key questions of subsidiarity and competence to shape the interpretive environment, and for issuing authoritative legal opinions on treaty interpretation and sovereignty disputes. In turn, it would provide internal support for Hungary’s international negotiations, Council of Europe and EU Council positions, as well as defending Hungary’s actions before EU institutions and the EUCJ.

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Coming & Going

Coming

Farid Shukurlu is from Baku, Azerbaijan, a city he calls “a mixture of Vienna and Dubai.”

He says his birthplace shaped his world view: “The house I grew up in was right next to a Catholic church, where I would often go to play football as a child. My current neighbourhood is within walking distance of two synagogues, one Sephardic and one Mountain Jewish, as well as Catholic and Orthodox churches and two mosques where Muslims, regardless of their religious background, come together to pray.”

He’s here to help with our burgeoning Turkic relations centre. For the next three months, his key project is entitled: ‘Beyond Double Standards: Analysing Hungary’s Distinctive Approach to Israel within the European Union’.

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Dates For Your Diary

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CPAC Hungary, Budapest — 21 March

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Family Formation and the Future, Budapest — 1–2 April

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"Most ugrik a majom a vízbe"

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 — Now jumps the monkey into the water (Now comes the crucial moment where their fate will be decided)

Events This Week

Democracy - a god that failed? Or just a god that just never got started? Eric Hendricks wants to take on the liberal ideal that democracy must be mediated to us commoners via judges and an elite class. In that, he is joined by Philip Manow,  a professor of International Political Economy. And by Stefan Auer, Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong. 

This one's early doors. 4:00 PM on Tuesday at the Villa. 

Prosperity Institute star Guy Dampier is back in Budapest this week, at a one-day seminar at the MCC on the question of political Islam. Guy is speaking on something spicy: "From Londonistan to the Gaza Independents: Britain and Political Islam". But there are plenty more spices in the rack:  9AM till half-three on Tuesday, at MCC. 

Finally, tonight DI Anglosphere Fellow David Oldroyd Bolt is hosting an event on Enoch Powell - not in Budapest, but in London. 

DOB has recruited a stellar lineup of speakers: Simon Heffer (Lord Blackwater), the eminent Telegraph columnist, who was Powell's official biographer. Alongside him is Lord Glasman, the jocular Blue Labour peer, and Tim Montgomerie, former editor of UnHerd. 

For non-Anglos, Enoch was a kind of prophet, with a strange accent, who wrote poetry and never met a hill he wouldn't die on. A bit like the last Ayatollah. A seminal figure in British public life, Powell's influence only grows by the year. 

It's at 5:30, at the King Harald Room of the Naval & Military Club, 4 St James's Square. RSVP to events@danubeinstitute.hu. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Stop what you're doing (and why were you doing that anyway?) - and listen to the new episode of Danube Politics, in which infinitely-storied John O'Sullivan talks through his time refereeing the Paleocon-Neocon wars of the mid-90s, when he was editor of National Review. Aided by Markus Johansson-Martis, we whipped John into a fugue of memory, in which he spilled out all kinds of glorious details about who said what to whom in the lift with Pat Buchanan at the Dole convention. A fascinating glimpse into a lost world, capped by his story of his time with arch-Paleocon Sam Francis: 

"Sam was asked to explain American politics to these visiting foreign dignitaries. He said: there are two parties in America... the Stupid Party... and the Evil Party. I am proud to belong to the Stupid Party. But sometimes the Stupid Party and the Evil Party get together to do Stupid-Evil things: this is the worst possible outcome, and it is called 'bi-partisanship'." 

Blasphemy: the hip new scene in the Catholic Church, at least according to Father Mario Portella, who has picked on the second-ever Catholic 'National Queer Christian Youth Retreat', held in Italy this month. It's the spur to a general attack on the forces of woke in the papacy. The title of the Queer retreat in question? ‘Lazarus, Come Out’ (aka John 11:43).

Remember Ann Selzer? 

Most will only remember AlkaSeltzer, but for a few days in late 2024, Ann really stole the lead from her antacid rival. 

Selzer was  the 'queen of polling', who published that SHOCK Iowa poll, three days before Election Day, showing Harris up 3 points over Trump in a Republican tilted state.

In the end, Trump won Iowa by 13 points. And that was the end of Ann’s career. Philip Pilkington brings her up as a way of discussing the extraordinary variance in Hungarian polls right now. There is a 20 per cent spread between Tisza-skewed polls and Orbán-favoured ones. What could it mean? 

Fraud, is Pilko’s typically brisk answer. Indeed, he appears to have uncovered a data scandal, in which a ‘shock poll’ released last Wednesday was groomed to look as though Tisza was firmly ahead, when in fact the two were neck and neck. 

For anyone with a background in statistics, Pilko’s suspicion is down to the variance between the polls: the Fidesz polls tend to have much more regular variance: implying larger sample sizes and more internal consistency of method. While the pro-Tisza polls are wildly different from each other, just all over the shop. Make up your own mind here.

Anika's I Go To Sleep was one of the most piercing tracks of the 2010s. Like being harpooned with ice, it was a sort of Sandie Shaw chanson, filtered through Nico, then reimagined in the arc lights of the  synthwave revival. Lately, Anika has scored a new Jim Jarmusch film. She finally makes her Hungarian debut tomorrow, aboard the floating gig venue A38. 

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It's ONYX's 19th Birthday. 

This is ONYX Műhely, the reinvented version of what was CEE's first two-Michelin-starred restaurant. 

They now hold a Michelin Green Star (eco stuff) and operate as a "creative community", normally via an immersive 11-course tasting menu that is as much experiential theatre as food. 

To celebrate their birthday, they're running five separate events, breakfast through dinner, each with a different vibe, with the rare chance for cheap eats and much more casual dining. Sunday 8 March 2026
Vörösmarty tér 7-8, District V.

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Paper of the Week

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Ne damo svetinje: The Orthodox Church’s Political Role in Montenegro

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Montenegro - late lamb of the Balkans, now potentially ready to eclipse them all in sheer tourist potential. But beyond the beauty of its obsidian rocks, this is a society divided: a place where the Serbian Orthodox church holds tremendous sway, but where it is both challenged and bolstered by a kind of religious street protest, known locally as the Litije. 

Visting Fellow Stefano Arroque has been teasing apart Montenegro, in a delicate piece of religious anthropology, asking what lessons could it hold for Hungary? 

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Montenegrin politics have been shaped since independence by the instrumentalization of its ethno-religious cleavages for political purposes. The adoption by the Democratic Party of Socialists, the ruling party until 2020, of a ‘Law on Religious Freedom’ targeting the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral, the largest Orthodox denomination in the country, triggered mass clergy-led protests, known locally as Litije. The Litije positioned the Church as the country’s most important non-Parliamentary political actor, a role it has continued to play following the 2023 Parliamentary
elections. 

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Dates For Your Diary

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Christian Revival Conference, Oxford — 11 -12 March

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CPAC Hungary — 21 March

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"Halból lehet halászlevet főzni, de halászléből nem."

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 — You can make fish soup from fish, but you can't make fish from fish soup.

Events This Week

As we've all been made aware since the collapse of USAID, international aid is no longer sacks of wheat with a red cross tossed into dusty marketplaces from flatbed trucks. It is litigation and activist-training, LGBTQ+ and DEI. It is sock-puppet NGOs, influence networks, and soft power with hard objectives.

On Tuesday, all day, the DI is hosting a conference on The Politicisation of Aid. 

This one features UnHerd journalist Thomas Fazi, Man of Mystery Nicholas Naquin (once a soldier in the French Foreign legion), and Hungary's somewhat uniquely titled government minister: Tristan Azbej, the Secretary of State for the Aid of Persecuted Christians. Starts at 9AM at the Villa. 

Then, on Thursday, the second half of another mad week (we're reliably informed there is an election soonish), Green Promises, Grey Realities - about the EU's rather fanciful green energy transition, and its rather flimsy results. An evening panel, led by our very own Research Fellow, Matyás Vajda. 

Things are no less full-on down at the MCC, with Dr Max Otte, Germany's version of 'the economist who predicted the 2008 crash'. Otte will be bringing the curtain up on a lecture series he's running in the Spring, in conjunction with the HIIA, on competitiveness. 5PM at MCC Scruton. 

Thursday, 9AM - 2PM, MCC's Centre for European Studies has got it in for the  Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) - not to be confused with the ECHR (Britain's bête noire), or indeed the ECJ (trade and national government stuff). The ever-entertaining Rodrigo Ballester leads the caper, alongside János Bóka, Hungary's Minister of European Affairs. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

We have a lesser-seen, much-admired fellow in the depths of the DI's research team. Dr Sumantra Maitra, Director of Research at the American Ideas Institute, whose main focus is on great power strategies. 

This week, Sumantra was outed by Politico as the brains behind Trump's NATO strategy. The story is this: in 2024, Maitra authored a much-circulated essay in Foreign Affairs, laying out what he called a 'Dormant NATO' strategy. In this reckoning, the US goal would be to get Europe much more engaged with the NATO project, thereby leaving America as a mere nightwatchman - there to step in should all hell break loose. As Sumantra puts it: "I may hate my neighbour, but if his house is on fire I'll still put it out." He was interviewed on the idea by POLITICO here.

Meanwhile, Research Director Calum Nicholson got himself on the 196 Podcast, in an episode entitled Crossing The Danube With Calum Nicholson. Presumably a  homage to the legendary punk rock record Crossing The Red Sea with The Adverts. 

Have you celebrated King Matthias lately? Fear not. Next Saturday, February 28, on the anniversary of his birth, there will be a medieval fete at Buda Castle, with musical performances, armaments, adventure games, and much else. 

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Fascinating piece on the HuCon this week, by the bullet-shaped military specialist on the DI's research team, Norbert Szári. 

Norbs has been researching the role of video games as a training and activation system on the frontlines of the Ukraine War. It has long been lore that the best gamers are snapped up to operate drones and remote weapons systems. Indeed, the trend was foreshadowed by Buster Bluth in a vintage episode of Arrested Development, over 10 years ago. 

On the Ukrainian side: 

One pilot, 29-year-old Oleksandr Dakhno from the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade—a former avid gamer—claims to have eliminated around 300 Russian soldiers in 18 months, using FPV drones to deliver explosives with sniper-like precision over artillery distances.

Meanwhile, in Russia:  

Programmes recruit minors as young as 13 into tech contests and platforms for drone design and coding, engaging over 600,000 users and offering incentives like exam points.
 
A chilling look into a sci-fi future already with us. 

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Is Europe Doomed? Find out with Raymond Ibrahim, the DI's most mesomorphic fellow, who was interviewed by The Sun's political editor, Harry Cole. 

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The MCC Film Club screening this month is The Fifth Seal (Az ötödik pecsét, 1976) directed by Zoltán Fábri, a Hungarian drama set in 1944 Budapest, during the Arrow Cross terror.  

Not a sequel to The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman's Death-plays-chess snorefest. This evening, 6PM-9PM, Kino Café Cinema. English subtitles. 

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As we shudder through the dying breaths of winter, it may finally be time to cast our eyes forward. To Spring. A time for houseplants. Based In Budapest still shudders at the time we accidentally X'ed an innocent ficus with a spray bottle that happened to contain bleach. It took a week to die, shedding leaves every morning like a cancer patient's hair. Take professional advice. Go to the houseplant fair. 12-6 next Sunday at Pilea Projekt.

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Paper of the Week

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A River Runs Through It: The Danube River in Hungarian Strategy and Identity

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One top fact about the Danube is that Johan Strauss II never actually saw it before he wrote the waltz that bears its name. As anyone exiting Pest will confirm, it is slate-green, the colour of turtle soup. It does, however, extend between two blacks: The Black Forest in Germany, and the Black Sea, in Romania. 

In their latest paper, three Hungarian fellows, Gergely Szűcs, Dániel Farkas and Balint Binder, take on Hungary's defining waterway at the level of history and geopolitics, concluding that it remains under-used: taking approximately half as much freight annually as the Rhine - and no one ever wrote a good song about the Rhine.  Rhine-to-Five? Doesn't work. 

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“In summary, the late-20th/early 21st-century vision is to transform the Danube into a freely navigable, multimodal corridor matching Northern Europe’s inland waterways. For Hungary, this represents an opportunity: a fully upgraded Danube corridor could restore some of the country’s old role as an exporter of its agricultural and manufactured goods, now under EU conditions. It also means that Hungary could serve as the hub of a broad logistics network, linking Black Sea and Adriatic ports to Central European markets."

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Comings & Goings

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Coming: 
Zoltán Egeresi
Zoltán is a Turkic-world watcher, now part of our growing Turkic world team. It was he who made us aware this week of something called the Great Kurultáj. Every August, thousands of Huns of every description descend on the Hungarian town of Bugacs to practice the old folkways, up to and including the goat-carcass polo known as kokpar (buzkashi). No word on whether Zoltán is a participant, but we do know he loves to cycle. 

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Going: 
Markus Johannson-Martis
Finally, after six months, Markus is back off to Sweden. A legal scholar and advisor to the Sweden Democrats, Markus has been one of our most doughty and committed fellows, famous for his Pomodoro self-pummellings. What will the office look like at 8:30AM now? Without Markus, no one will know. He leaves an impressive body of work, capped by his excellent Beautiful Cities Matter event last week. We wish him and his charming fiancée Isabella all happiness in their future life together. 

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Dates For Your Diary

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Christian Revival Conference, Oxford — 11 -12 March

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CPAC Hungary — 21 March

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"Az egyik kutya, másik eb."

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 — One is a dog the other a hound. (They are both the same regardless of what they say, equally bad)

Events This Week

The Swedish House Mafia are in town. For Why Beautiful Cities Matter, DI Visiting Fellow Markus Johansson-Martis is joined in conversation by Eric Norin, the founder of a viral Instagram account on architectural revival, and inventor of the Sverigehuset - a new generation of typically Swedish houses. Throw in Gergely Böszörményi-Nagy - father of the Brain Bar - and this promises to be an IQ-maxxing evening full of mortar-Chads and Scruton-Stacies event-mogging the MKI. Tuesday, 5:30PM at the Villa. 

In 2006, Germany's Benedikt Böhm set the speed record in 'high altitude mountaineering with downhill skiing' at the Gasherbrum II. He's climbed some of the world’s most dangerous mountains through what he calls 'speed-optimised decision-making'. 

In Böhm’s philosophy, performance is not about the romance of endurance, but the ruthless risk management: the longer you remain under pressure, the worse your decisions become. On Wednesday, he's bringing his unique angle on the psychology of decision-making to the MCC (7PM). 

Later at the MCC, Ambassador Mitch Fifield, former Permanent Representative of Australia to the United Nations, is talking Trump 2.0. 

February 20, 3:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

If you see a squadron of red-hot half-naked people plunging into the river this week, that will be the BLACCC. 18-22 Feb, they're operating a mobile sauna on the lower banks of Buda, down towards Dürer Kert. It fits 20, and tickets are 4000 Ft for 90 minutes. An icy dip in the Duna is also recommended. Every day at 18:30, there is also a talk on sauna culture - but given that one will be on 'hydro-feminism', perhaps tackling the frozen river is preferable.

Pierre-Hugues Barré is our newest fellow. This week, he got into the muck of the recent court cases involving Marine Le Pen - convicted under a procedural law that bars politicians from diverting their EU Parliament researchers into French party-political work. 

 Return to your roots: the 14th Africa Expo Budapest opens 19 Feb, until the 22nd  at HUNGEXPO. Twenty exhibitors representing twenty African countries. There'll be masks, sculptures, art, clothes, drums, dance,  music, kids stuff. 

Based In Budapest arrived at Budapest Global Dialogues early last Tuesday, but a little late for Péter Szijjártó's opening speech. Whereupon an elderly gent came up to us in the lobby. "Beautiful ladies in this town," was his opening gambit. 

This, it later transpired, was Edward Luttwak, 83, honoured speaker, former advisor to Shinzo Abe, and author of Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook (later made into a film, in which Luttwak himself was played by Peter O'Toole). 

 And, after telling us about how he'd advised South Africa's Apartheid government to evacuate Pretoria in order to create a defensible ethno-state in the Cape, sucked into his personality vortex, thirty minutes later, we'd begun a mad dash across town to find a kilo of high quality Rubin paprika he could ship back to America. Over the course of three cab rides, he unfurled a life story that was somewhere between John Le Carré, Philip Roth and Woody Allen's Zelig. 

At one point, he mentioned that he'd been at LSE in 1961. 

"Ah, Mick Jagger would have been there about then, no?" 

"Jagger?" he replied. "He was in my econometrics class. He was the top student. When he told the teacher he was dropping out to pursue his band, they said he was crazy! They said he had the chance to be one of Britain's top economists. Why would he give it up for doof-doof-doof! 

"I still go out to St Barts to see him. One year, we played a game, where we tried to guess the nationalities of people walking from the harbour up to the beach. Really smart guy."

The only lesson here is: always be late to conferences - you never know who you'll meet. 

Paper of the Week

Small States, Heavy Pressure: Hungary and Slovakia in the Crosshairs of Liberal Power

In which Michael O'Shea is on the case of the Brussels influence machine.

As he points out, in recent years, the EU has channelled whopping sums to pro-EU organisations. Its Citizens, Equalities, Rights and Values scheme has a budget of €1.5 billion. 

To pick one case, the pro-EU Brussels think tank the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) received €250 million – one quarter of a billion – just over the past 10 years. 

More troubling still, it has funnelled money to anti-government orgs within its most troublesome members states, Slovakia and Hungary – €38
million and €41 million respectively, just through the CERV.  

'Is this democracy?' O'Shea wonders.

MEMO 98 and CHCEM TU ZOSTAŤ were not the only nonprofit groups engaged in leading pre-election activities in 2023 [in Slovakia]. For example, the organization Mladí proti fašizmu ([the EU-funded] Youth against Fascism) funded and organized trips for
students living in Czechia to return to Slovakia to vote in the parliamentary elections. 

While such activities met a technical definition of nonpartisan behaviour, they targeted at least two demonstrably left-leaning voting blocs (young voters and expatriates). Expatriates voted in record numbers in that election, and more than half of them voted for the left-wing Progresívne Slovensko (Progressive Slovakia – PS) party.

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Going:
Alex Lefebvre
We have thoroughly enjoyed the presence of the liberal political philosopher Alex Lefebvre in the department over the past month. He has been squeezed hard for content, but his final work was possibly his greatest - an hour on Danube Politics, unpacking what he learned from studying The Hungarian Model. 

His vision for repairing liberalism at an electoral level? "Basically something like non-predatory Bill Clinton - and I can't emphasise enough, no sexual predation..." 

CPAC Hungary — 21 March

NatCon Brussels —  April

"Azt hiszi, ő szarta a spanyol viaszt." 

 — He thinks he shat the Spanish sealing wax. (Someone thinks he invented something novel that was, in fact, perfectly obvious)

Events This Week

We've been trailing it for weeks - it's finally time for Budapest Global Dialogue. 

Gladden Pappin opens the show tonight at 6PM at the Hotel Corinthia, joined by Samir Saran, President of the Observer Research Foundation. 

 Day Two starts at 9:30AM, ending around 4:30PM. 

The runners and riders to look out for: 

Graham Allison - Professor of Government at Harvard
Balázs Orbán - the one & only... 
Sarah B. Rogers - US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
Péter Szijjártó - Hungary's Foreign Affairs minister
Edward Luttwak - Author of Turbo Capitalism and Coup d'Etat: A Practical Manual (our bedside reading). 
Sohrab Ahmari - US Editor of UnHerd 
Maka Botschorishvili - the Georgian Foreign Affairs minister
 
And many many more. See here. 

The Minorities Conference is running consecutively (it starts Tuesday night, then all day on Wednesday). 

After all, the Middle East is no Arab monolith. 17 per cent of Kuwaitis are Christian. Even Egypt has 10-20 per cent (some 15 million people). 

The Danube Institute has teamed up with MCC to examine how the history of the region has been shaped by its smaller ethnic groups: from Assad’s Alawites to Saddam’s Kurds, to the pebbledash of Lebanon. 

The Tuesday reception requires an RSVP. Wednesday starts at 9AM. Register for both here.

That's more than enough events for one week, but there's still space to plug next week's Why Beautiful Cities Matter - Tuesday 17 Feb. For lovers of revivalist architecture and the urban planning movement, they'll be discussing the usual glazing bars and mansard roofs, but situating them in the light of the Haussmann Project in the Castle District: real existing retro-urbanism. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Carnival Of The Busó is a terrifying Hungarian spectacle, the deepest of folk cultures. Men dress like woolly demons and parade before a bonfire. Women are occasionally pelted with rubber chickens. It's like Brixton on a bad day.

This is basically the Hungarian Mardi Gras. 

It takes place Thursday until Tuesday (the day before the start of Lent), in the town of Mohács, famous for its battle. 

Legend has it that the defeated inhabitants, hiding in a swamp, were visited one night by a spectral figure who told them not to be afraid - to wear scary masks, and they'd have their lands returned. So, uh, thanks spectral figure.  

Friday is the Kisfarsang (Little Farsang) carnival, with the biggest celebration two days later, on the seventh Sunday before Easter. 

If you go on Sunday, make sure you're ready for big crowds, and wear old clothes - the masked ones may sprinkle you with ash and flour. 

Saturday is Valentine’s Day - a day that will live in infamy for those who don’t sort themselves out right now. 

Moszkva Tér is a charming Russian restaurant with a Michelin Guide listing just beneath the Castle Hill. They are offering dinner for two off a set menu for 40 000 Ft. Wine not included. Email them, pay an advance deposit, secure your spot, avoid infamy. 

You may have been too young for Joy Division, but White Lies are an efficient précis. This Friday, they hit Dürer Kert.  

 So long and thanks for all the pish: Rod Dreher is in focused and ascerbic form as he takes on the recent job cuts at the Washington Post. 

Many are saying these cuts mark the end of the road for old school shoe leather journalism, but Rod charts a longer story of its decline and fall, dating back as far as 2005: 

Long before the Great Awokening, when I was at the Dallas Morning News, a black colleague went to our editor and accused me of “creating a hostile work environment” because I called a Pakistani mob that burned down a Danish consulate “savages.”

I made it my business to stay as far away from that previously valued black colleague after that. He had my career in his hands, and he knew it. Many such cases.

Based in Budapest spent much of last week in Barcelona, at the On Think Tanks Winter School. In a web design group task, Director of Research Calum Nicholson drew this fetching logo for our team, but was cruelly down-voted by the lecturer, who said that he'd never heard of an attercop (an arcane English word for spider). Truly, liberal bias is everywhere.

Paper of the Week

Truth (And Faith) Prevails: An Archbishop Of Prague In A Godless Time

Archbishops of Prague never have it easy. Whether it's your defenestration leading directly to the Thirty Years War, or just trying to maintain the faith under Communism, the path is fraught. 

DI Visiting Fellow Stefano Arroque has profiled one of the 20th century's most under-appreciated anti-Communists. Archbishop František Tomášek (who died in 1992). A kind of V4 analogue of John Paul II, Tomášek's cautious but resolute opposition helped bring about the 1989 Velvet Revolution. 

Opens with a memorable digression on Milan Kundera, who once spent a whole chapter musing on the Czech word 'litost’: “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery”.

In many ways, the fact that the Church has even managed to survive to this day, let alone retain its respect and soft power within Czech society is due to the tireless work of Tomášek and all priests and bishops who joined him in resisting the regime. The history of the Czech church in the 20th century was one of resistance: against apathy, against oppression, against infiltration. Whenever it was led by men who followed the teachings of the Church, it prevailed. Whenever some of its clergymen chose political convenience over resistance, it faltered. 

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Coming:
Bailey Uwe Schwab is 27 years old, and from Middlesborough. He once interviewed Margaret Thatcher's political enforcer, Norman Tebbit, for a university project. After telling Tebbit about his family background, the notoriously waspish peer replied: “So... you are English, Argentine, and German? You’re a right dog’s dinner, then, aren’t you!”

Every dog has its day, and now Bailey is at MKI, to work on American foreign policy’s reconfiguration under Donald Trump, particularly in the western hemisphere. Likes? 'Civilisation-states, realism, his wife and daughter, football, boxing, Germany, steak, and beer'. Hates? 'I wouldn’t say I hate anything.' Let's hope that sentiment outlast his contract renewal. 

Also coming to MKI: Stefan Antić, a former Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development in Serbia. He’s the Managing Editor of Horizons, the international relations journal. 

Law PhD Pierre Hugues-Barré is perhaps unique in that he has clerked for both the Cour administrative d'appel de Versailles, and the Florida Second District Court of Appeal. 

Something of a coming thing on the French new right, he is editor-in-chief of the Revue de philosophie du droit, author of one book, and midwife to another. His first concerned laicité, and whether we misunderstand it. His second will take that prospect even further, arguing that the state should actively fund religious organisations that agree with its goals - and defund those that do not. He will be with the DI till the end of July. 

Munich Security Conference — 13 - 15 February

CPAC Hungary —  21 March

 “Majd ha piros hó esik"

 — When the red snow will fall (Never)