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

22 days 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. 

Read More

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)

Events This Week

Busy week at the Institute. Tuesday it's time for The Interconnector State: Hungary as Central Europe’s Future Energy Hub. In essence a discussion of how the old liberal saw of ‘Hungary is taking Putin’s gas’ will be finally put to bed by the end of the decade. The Black Sea Submarine Cable project, a Kazakh energy terminal, and the port at Trieste: all mean that Hungary will not only be less reliant on Russia, but will in turn become its own hub for the rest of the continent. Presumably sparking future quandaries over whether pure-blood liberals should take Hungary’s gas. 5:30PM at the Villa.

Then, Thursday sees The Hidden Price Tag, a discussion of the cost of the Ukraine Peace, based on the leaked Prosperity Framework dossier: turns out the EU is lining up an $800 billion reconstruction package, plus fast track EU membership. Philip Pilkington would like to beg their pardon. He’ll be joined by the always excellent Rodrigo Ballester, and our very own Deputy Director of Research, Péter Szitás. 5:30PM at the Villa. 

Lots of talking Turkic this week. Ludovika is running an afternoon-evening conference on the ever-pressing matter of Security Issues and Military Cooperation in the Turkic World. Thursday, 4PM till 8PM. 

Then on Thursday at 5PM, those interested in how babies are made should head down to MCC, where Clara Muzzio, Deputy Chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires will explain all — in dialogue with local experts. That’s: Exporting the Hungarian Model? Family Policies to Tackle Argentina’s Population Challenge.  

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

When did you last write in cursive? Based In Budapest recalls many unhappy hours at school with double-lined notebooks, dabbing the quill in the ink pot; yet today only writes in blocky print, perhaps because that cursive fell so far into disrepair. 

Gergely Szũcs is one of our newest Hungarian fellows — and he has the script of an angel, or at least a 19th Century bank clerk. In his new piece for the HuCon, he explores the rise and fall of cursive, arguing that its national particularity has implications for conservatives. 

The grand halls of the Anantara New York Palace Budapest play host to the 9th Indoor Beer Festival this weekend. The event will provide nearly 100 drafts on tap; and, should you sample all 100, plenty of floor space.

It's Chinese New Year. Late as ever. Downtown Saturday and Sunday. 

It’s thirty years since Mónika Lakatos first burst onto the Hungarian music scene via a TV talent show: Ki Mit Tud? (‘Who Can Do What?’) Not only has the naming of Hungarian talent shows improved in that time, Mónika herself has become a force in the culture, using her voice to bring Roma folk to national and international audiences. At Müpa, she is hosting a thirty year retrospective of her career. Thursday at 7:30PM. 

 Last week, Father Mario Portella sat down with the podcast team to talk about the post-Greenland world and what he calls the ‘transactional mode’ of US foreign policy - as distinct from the post-1945 and post-1990 modes of ‘nation building’. Forget the soft stuff, he says: America is at its best when it functions like a corporation with nuclear weapons. 

Master of the Dark Arts (Oxon.) Carlos Roa is back, swooping down from his DC belfry with another high-level analysis on The Big Questions. This time, Venezuela. After Donald Trump’s heavies had tagged and bagged Maduro, the matter seemed to fall from the international agenda, presumably because no one could think of the next step. Where are the oil partnerships? How can Trump drink Maduro’s milkshake? Enter Carlos, who proposes establishing a Caracas Economic Development Zone (CEDZ), modelled on the Dubai International Financial Centre. Grants, special tax rates, international policing.

Paper of the Week

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Augustine Against the Age of Identity - How an Ancient Saint Helps us Understand our Fragmented Politics

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Was St Augustine woke? 

After all, he cared about the poor, he criticised empire, and he universalised moral worth. 

Not at all, says Dr Jonathan Price (well placed to comment, as a Theology Don at Oxford): St Augustine is Based. In fact, to understand his conception of love is the key to unlocking the Chinese handcuffs of bad Christian theology, and bad living. 

Pace Jonathan, since the 90s, human rights culture has moved towards an abstruse sense of what it is to love our fellows. It stems from the belief that we are all ‘the same’: that there is a single inert gas of humanity, shovelled into different vessels. But this conception erases the very stuff we love: particularity. 

Modern identity politics takes this one step further: we are not only all the same stuff, but we somehow also have innate aspects that are sacred to us. Which means are encouraged to see ourselves as both morally interchangeable and subjectively unknowable. 

As Dr Jonathan points out, this is a recipe for hell - man as an island: “But when interiority is oriented toward something higher than the self—toward truth, God, the shared good—then social life becomes coherent again. Unity forms around what citizens mutually love, not around what they privately demand.” 

Well, we mutually love this piece. But we’re not above privately demanding it. 

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Seen through Augustine’s eyes, the task for CEE is not to reject either universal ideals or particular identities, but to find a way of binding them together through shared loves that both transcend and include the local. In this respect, Augustine’s thought provides not a blueprint but a compass.

It reminds us that a flourishing society requires neither ideological homogeneity nor a marketplace of competing identities, but a coherent vision of the good around which citizens can rally. Without such shared loves, political lifebecomes a contest of isolated inwardnesses; with them, it becomes a genuine commonwealth. 

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Comings & Goings

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Coming:
Three incomers this week for MCC:  

Samuel Trizuljak — a junior lecturer at Kolégium Antona Neuwirtha. 
Marco Crivellaro — an Italian Doctor of Philosophy. 
Tsega Gebrekristos Mezgebo — Assistant Professor at the Ethiopian Civil Service University. 

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Dates For Your Diary

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Budapest Global Dialogue — 9 - 10 February

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Munich Security Conference — 13 - 15 February

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 “Nem hajt a tatár"

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 — The Tatar is not chasing us (no rush)

Events This Week

Statecraft? Nuh-uh. Soulcraft? Uh huh... 

Alex Lefebvre, Visiting Fellow and Kind Of A Big Deal in the world of post-liberal philosophy has drawn in the heavy hitters to debate his vision of From Statecraft to Soulcraft, about how a new wave of governments are 'ruling through the good life', aka 'Soulcraft'. How can we use institutions, incentives, and cultural power to cultivate particular virtues?

 Speaking on the panel will be Dr Eric Hendriks, the flamboyant Dutch sociologist, Philip Pilkington, an economist, and 
Ralph Schoellhammer, the clean living Austrian professor from MCC, with moderation by the 'vaguely piratical' (copyright The Observer) Calum TM Nicholson. Wednesday, January 28. 5:30 P.M.

Today at 5PM, you can take a turn up the MCC to ask: Are Western Balkans Economies Ready for the EU? Your question will be answered by Professor Igor Luksic, who is expecting it. Register here. 

Effective altruism has been a mainstay of the tech world since 2015, fanned by star philosopher Peter Singer, Slate Star Codex's Scott Alexander, and more dubiously, Sam Bankman-Fried. But is a fresh obsession with utility taking us anywhere we haven't been before? In the language of EA: would you switch the trolley tracks to kill the lot of them if it meant saving one particularly adorable otter? 

Thursday, David Edmonds will be sorting the cant from the humbug in Effective Altruism: A Philosophical Reckoning. MCC, 5:30PM.

Finally, while Hungary and Ukraine continue to trade words over whether the latter should be let into the EU, Ralph Schoellhammer is teaming up with his long time sparring partner Rodrigo Ballester to peer over the edge of one potential future: if it did happen, how would Europe's taxpayers bear the costs of incorporating a war-ravaged state? 

Is this a Marshall Plan, or just a Bad Plan? 

Tuesday, 5:30PM, MCC.

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Wednesday, at the Villa, the DI held its Israel in 2026 conference to a packed house. The Israeli Ambassador, Maya Kadosh, was followed around by some seriously heavy duty security, lurking in various alcoves of the building throughout the day, fiddling with their earpieces - well you wouldn't want to miss The Joe Rogan Experience.

Biggest laugh was reserved for Radek Vondráček, chair of Czechia's parliamentary foreign affairs committee, who mentioned the Slovenian roots of Melania - and Czech Ivana - in the context of strengthening relations with the White House. "Central Europe has already given Trump two wives - we've done our bit!" 

It's Oscar season: time to fill up on Hollywood's good films for the year. 

Of the year's Best Picture contenders, these are the ones still watchable in Budapest this week. 

Playing everywhere: 
One Battle After Another ('Egyik csata a másik után')
Hamnet
Selected cinemas: 
Marty Supreme - Special preview, January 29, 2026, at 7PM, Cinema City Westend, ahead of general release. 
Bugonia - Monday and Tuesday nights, 9:15PM, Művész Mozi. 

At a mid-week seminar, former bodybuilder Raymond Ibrahim talked the DI crew through his publishing journey: from his first book, pitched after discovering obscure untranslated Al Qaeda texts in the Library of Congress, to his more recent re-tellings of the medieval battles between Christendom and Islam. Even in this sphere, Ray has the go-hard or go-home gene: he confessed he sometimes smashes out 8000 words in a day. How much can you write, bro? 

Kovács Lehel left home twenty years ago to start freelancing for the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. Now back in Budapest, his playful, hypercolour illustrations are going on exhibit. Book here.

Greenland. What was all that about, eh? Only five days since Mark Carney rather jumped the gun by declaring the Western Alliance DOA, the news cycle is suddenly eerily quiet. But the ramifications of Trump's ramraid on his allies will linger on, in a diverse, multi-national coalition of hurt feelings. Rod Dreher has picked apart the implications for the European right, who still have to go into bat for Trump and national sovereignty, with their bats newly splintered by the team captain. 

Elsewhere, at The American Conservative, Philip Pilkington sees the Greenland issue from the White House's side: as a punishment beating, delivered to break EU intransigence over the Ukraine peace deal. 

Paper of the Week

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From Keleti to Kilburn High Road and Back. Personal Reflections on Europe's Migration Crisis

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Wir schaffen nichts. Ten years after Angela Merkel made her famous declaration, several European countries are openly talking about 'remigration'. The hubris of becoming a harbour to the world has shown itself in the metrics for German unemployment, French terror, and British gang crime. It's hard to recall the Cameron-Merkel-Hollande political world that birthed it, or the liberal sense of optimism that it has gradually extinguished across the continent. 

DI Visiting Fellow Adam Lebor was at Keleti Station in 2015, as a 150 000 person human wave began its ascent towards the North and West of the continent. In this  pacy paper, he assesses how Europe, and his own views, have changed in the past decade. 

For teargas connoisseurs, it contains a memorable evaluation of the difference between the Romanian and Serbian brands: "Romanian tear-gas is like a bad
attack of hay fever—Serbian has you crawling on the floor." 

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The old shops of Kilburn High Road had clearly been replaced,
but in the same buildings which still stood, now bedecked in
Arabic calligraphy. I could only trust my instincts—and the
evidence in front of me. The High Road of my youth, and
even my twenties and thirties, was clearly long gone,
unlikely to ever return. Now at least I understood the
meaning of ‘unheimlich’—the feeling, the moment when a
once-familiar place finally becomes something else, unfamiliar and unsettling.

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Read More

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Comings & Goings

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Coming:
Eduard Habsburg
Eduard is perhaps our first fellow to take the pronouns 'Your Excellency, His Excellency, His Excellency's'. 

The former Hungarian ambassador to the Vatican is not, contra popular rumour, the next in line to the Triple Crown. That honour passes to a cousin, Archduke Karl von Habsburg (whose own racing driver heir apparent recently won Le Mans).

Though the rumours are true that he is a former animation producer - and that he penned an Austrian zombie movie. The question of what exactly Cardinal Ratzinger made of his thesis on Thomistic philosophy is a blank he says he will fill for us shortly. 

At the DI, he will be working on Christian Democracy - where it went, whether it could come back. Hope to see you down Pointers with the lads, Your Excellency. 

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Dates For Your Diary

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Budapest Global Dialogue — 9 - 10 February

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Munich Security Conference — 13 - 15 February

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 “Nagy az Isten állatkertje"

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 — God has a huge zoo (There's no shortage of strange people in this world)

Events This Week

Don't miss Yuan Yi Zhu at MCC. Zhu has become a prominent British Twitter personality in recent years, an acerbic wit, and a true Based Patriot In Control. He is perhaps most famous for his amusing book reviews, notably his skewering of the gadfly liberal barrister Jolyon Maugham. By day, though, he is a top legal scholar at Oxford. At the MCC he will be telling the assembled crowds about how the ECHR first began to burst the banks of its mandate. 20 January, 5:30PM. 

Thursday, Balázs Orbán and Rodrigo Ballester are in conversation on the problems with EU migration policy, and why these issues should be devolved to the nation state. 5PM. 22 January. MCC.

How can the Middle East and Israel build on a tentative peace? Anyone looking to answer that should attend A Pivotal Year: Israel, the Middle East, the US, and Europe Come 2026, the comprehensive if not exactly catchy title of the DI's one-day conference, on Wednesday, 10AM at the Villa. The event will be preceded by Tory bigwig Sir Liam Fox giving a 'fireside chat' from 5PM the day before, at Ludovika University. Rumours that Sir Liam will be bringing his own fireplace are unsubstantiated.

Based in Brussels? It happens. The Liszt Institute there will be hosting a double bill of Danube: Director of Research Calum Nicholson and super-intern Max Keating talking about the future of cultural diplomacy. Friday at 6PM. 

Around Town

Perspectives and people from the week

Visiting Fellow Sean Nottoli has shrunk. He lost some 50 pounds (22kg, to metric system observers) by... not eating in America. This has been easily done, as Sean is not in America. He credits better food regulation in Europe with cleaning up his diet: no artificial hormones, no hidden sugars and corn syrups. Trumpism's pro-EU turn will be closely watched. Last week, Sean presented his medical findings to the wider world, via a piece in the Spectator. 

This is against conventional wisdom: in the diplomatic corps, the regular diet of langos, sour cream, pork knuckle and egg pasta makes Hungary a notorious '20 pound posting'. 

None of which showed up on the waistlines of the US diplomatic corps, who were up at Aranybastya mid-week for a three course lunch with DI top brass. István Kiss, Melissa O'Sullivan and Kristóf Veres met the impressive US attaché, Caroline Savage, along with the Embassy's political and economic counsellor, Richard Heater; and Daniel Lawton, the 'Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Central Europe and Southern Europe in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs' (a title which belies his importance). Talk was of pages turning, new collaborations, after the fall of ex-Ambassador David Pressman. Lawton was particularly interested in recent troubles with the historical Beneš Decrees. And of course our coming election. We put him straight. 

What's worse than the Third Reich? Must be the Fourth Reich. In his forensic new piece for Tablet Magazine, Adam Lebor has traced what would have been Reich #4: Germany's plans for continental dominance after the war. The piece is based on his original research on The Red House Report, a secret memorandum drawn up after high ranking Nazis met the banking fraternity in Switzerland. These would have included a customs union and currency pegging, underwritten by a European central bank, controlled from Berlin. Any parallels to today are somewhat coincidental. 

Winston Marshall was in town at the start of snowmageddon: part of a posse of Anglo journalists and media personalities being given the full tour. For the lowdown, Winston made his way to the Star Bar, off Deák Ferenc, along with his fellow influencer and fiancé, Melissa Chen. Melissa gave a nuanced perspective on democracy in her native Singapore, unusually Rod Dreher brought up civil war, while several attendees confessed they'd never actually listened to Mumford & Sons. Later that night, as big tufts of white continued to drop on Budapest, one Fellow disgraced himself by falling over in the  snow, and had to be helped to his feet by the kindly niche celebs. 

Snow was certainly a theme at the inaugural Erdély Essay Club, held in a cabin in the highest hills of Székelyföld, with no WiFi, and no phone reception. It was somewhere between The Secret History, Dead Poets Society, and Piers Paul Read's Alive. Take eight top-ranking MCC Transylvania students. Add two Danube Fellows: Calum Nicholson and Gavin Haynes. Then get ten essays designed to feed up the next generation: everything from David Foster Wallace's What Is Water, to Joan Didion's On Keeping A Notebook. A weekend of intense seminars and snowball fights ensued, concluding with a pleasing sense that the kids are gonna be alright - even if the lecturers won't. 

Paper of the Week

Conservative Realism and the Consequences of the Managerial Revolution

It's been about six years since James Burnham and his 'Managerial Revolution' theory became voguish in Conservative circles. 

Burnham first published his book, The Managerial Revolution in 1941, but its rediscovery has illuminated modern discourse about 'populism' and 'elite theory'. 

In a world of data and bureaucracy, the class struggle, Burnham says, is between a managerial class and the people it manages. Cool idea, but it has generated more heat than light so far: how are we supposed to react to this insight?

DI Visiting Fellow Markus Johansson-Martis is taking on the challenge. In his new paper, he argues that conservatives must change in order to conserve: there should be a restoration of our institutions to their primary purpose; rather than serving the needs of the managerial class, they must be brought back under democratic control. He calls this new mode Conservative Realism, and dips into the lively work of Samuel T. Francis to back up his claims. 

“In his 1993 essay Message From Mars, Samuel Francis
outlined what he saw as the future base of conservatism: the
Middle American Radicals, or MARs. This group, largely
excluded from the prosperity of the managerial elite, consists
of the broad swath of Americans living outside metropolitan
centers. The same demographic is present in most western
countries and have a similar attitude toward politics.
Francis’s vision reads like a populist manifesto—one that
could easily align with the rhetoric of the MAGA movement
or other New Right currents across the West today.”

Read More

Comings & Goings

Coming:
Raymond Ibrahim
Raymond is our biggest fellow to date: a former Mr Los Angeles (ask him to show you his bodybuilding era pics). While no longer the colour of a mahogany commode, he still has biceps you could fire from a Napoleonic cannon. Rumour has it he subsists entirely on a diet of hamburgers.

By trade, Raymond is an author on the clash between Islam and the West, and presently holds the top three slots in that Amazon category (only briefly disrupted by Tom Holland). In the last year, his YouTube account blew up to over 100 000 subs, despite him claiming he 'doesn't know how YouTube works'. His chat with Winston Marshall alone has over a million views. 

Raymond is still getting his head around Budapest, so if you want to help him ground, or just fancy five Big Macs, let us know. 

Alex Lefebvre
Our most difficult to spell fellow to date, Alex is a Canadian philosopher, a self-confessed liberal, who is researching a project on the politics of 'the good life': post-liberalism, what does it really mean? He is the author of 12 books, and Kind Of A Big Deal in his space. 

 Alex is on a five-city tour of places that map onto that conception, so he is with the DI as an observer-interviewer: Jane Goodall to the rightist wonk classes. 

As such, if you think you have insights into the Hungarian experience with post-liberal politics, please do get in touch. He'd love to interview you. 

Going: 
Alexander Pelling-Bruce
Alexander has been with us since September as a Visiting Fellow. He's the very model of the modern major-general: unflappable, loquacious, and a hardcore Westminster obsessive. His passion for music was such that when he arrived, he arranged for a piano to be installed in his apartment so that he could keep on kicking out the jams. We suspect we've not heard the last of him.

Michael O'Shea
Finally, Michael O'Shea's has had possibly the longest fellowship in our history. Though based in the US, he's a specialist in the CEE, who taught himself Polish, a bit of Slovak and Hungarian. Michael is passionate about the region, owing to his half-Polish roots, and has worked doggedly to bring its story to the wider world via his journalism. We'll miss his dapper charm. 

Dates For Your Diary

Budapest Global Dialogue — 9 - 10 February

Munich Security Conference — 13 - 15 February

 “Bort iszik, vizet prédikál"

 — Drinks wine, preaches water (He/she is a hypocrite)"

We are in that brief isthmus before turning the page, when we can scrabble back through our brains to ask: what happened?

So, what happened?

Well, a lot, and not much.

Sometimes it was warm, sometimes it was cold. Various dignitaries passed through our passages, and dealt in their own ways with our robust keycard system. People signed contracts (in blue pen, in triplicate, appending their mother’s maiden name and their last 15 dental records).

Grand projects were launched. Grand projects were quietly shelved. Planes flew off carrying delegations to Tokyo and Tashkent. A Wizz Air struggled manfully to DC. And somewhere, we heard a new world being born.

In 2025, Budapest became a redoubt for a certain kind of conservatism, a city you had to build into your itinerary, whether you believed in its brand or not—this year, the polite curiosity of international think tankers became a more studied kind of curiosity: what exactly was the formula? How did we, you know, do it?

It’s been a short 12 months. What happened seemed trivial at the time: it was measured out in bleary coffee queues at 9AM conferences, in handfuls of the over-baked vol au vents they serve in the theatre, in endless chicken paprikash set menus at Aranybastya, and late nights scheming over ‘Stalin’s favourite wine’ at The Georgian.

But between the hangovers and the espresso injections, one fact became obvious.

Something is happening here.

What follows is us decompressing—flicking through the scrapbook of memory, to arrive at a Top 50 miscellany of Budapest, us, and the year that was.

50. Carlos The Jackal In Budapest

Farkas and LeBor’s paper on Carlos The Jackal’s time in Budapest was one of the most readable things we’d ever published (quiet at the back!). A meticulous researcher and a detective novelist turned out to be the perfect combo for this crisp Cold War thriller. The film rights remain available.

49. Nathan Levine on How To Live In A Dying Technocracy

Nathan, known to Substack as the wildly popular blogger NS Lyons, was here for a summer before he headed to the State Department as a policy analyst. No longer a theorist on technocracy, he’s now a practitioner. Feels like the Deep State has ingested a sleeper cell.

48 The Death of Merit

Effortlessly cool Visiting Fellow Dr Jonathan Price is at Oxford. Alongside Ashby Neterer, he produced a revolutionary paper that was something like Goodhart’s Law of Education: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. They even found a Greek word to cover the new spirit of instinctual holism they proposed to replace the targets culture: paideia.

47. Matt Goodwin on UK Civil War

This year, the pessimistic right couldn’t look away from the prospect of civil conflict. Whether the darker realities of Molotovs and baton charges made any sense, the notion seemed to sum up a feeling, a kind of deep gloom on the right, and a yearning for kinetic catharsis. Our most-viewed episode of View From The Danube (80k and counting) had Goodwin, Gavin Haynes, and Rod Dreher chipping in on the end of the world as they knew it.

46. Rod Dreher Eating Yoghurt In The Kitchen

“I came back to our lodgings at Tusványos to find Rod Dreher eating an entire tub of yoghurt in the kitchen with a spoon. After dark, there was nowhere to eat in town, and no takeout. You had to yomp all the way back to the festival site to get so much as a sandwich, and there was nothing of any consequence in our digs. So Rod was just going down the all-yoghurt dinner route. He offered me a share. I decided against it, but later regretted going to bed hungry. A reminder that Rod is normally right.” — Gavin Haynes

45. Adam Lovinger: In The Final Net Assessment

One day, twenty years into his career, Adam Lovinger found himself terminated by a shadowy State Department special unit, the Office of Net Assessment. The ONA was set up by Kissinger to give 30 year forecasts on the geopolitical climate. But as Adam explained in his Le Carré-level podcast, what it made became less important than who got to hold its reins.

44. The Turkic Dialogues Unit

This year, Ibrahim Mammadov graduated from intern to head of the Turkic-Western Engagement Initiative. A meteoric rise; in keeping with the traditions of his people, he is pictured here, instructing the indentured labourers who are laying down the foundations of his Kubla Khan-tier presidential palace.

43 Gladden Pappin Talking About The Progressive Turn In Education At The Scruton Society

Dr Pappin always gives good copy, and in late April he was on top form, blowing through his own experiences as first a student, then a lecturer, at Harvard. If you want to know why we’re screwed, Gladden will tell you with a winsome grin that somehow makes it all OK.

42 The Closing Down Party At Három Szerb

Három Szerb was a bar co-managed by Great Power Aficionado and Good Friend Of BiB, Lilla Kakuk. In September, it shut up shop, and hosted one of the more raucous finales of modern times. Even clean-living professor Ralph got Schoelhammered. Which made us wonder why we couldn’t drink there every night.

41 Visiting Fellow Father Mario Portella

Agatha Christie eat your heart out.

40 Jacques Sapir Day

Lots of people have strong opinions on Russia. Far fewer want to learn about Russia. Sapir, an economist, has been studying the country for forty years. Invited in by our own Hugo Martin for a day of seminars and podcasts, he managed to drop a few truth bombs — and some floating munitions of analysis. Check out his interview with our excellent colleague Tamász Maráczi.

39 Carol Thatcher Misunderstandings

Around the Thatcher do, A Certain Research Director got into conversation with a lady of a certain age at a certain drinks evening. She was good company; but he sensed he’d already met her at some other event in town. “Sorry,” he said, already five minutes deep with this game broad, “Do you work for the MCC?”. “I’m Carol Thatcher!” came the somewhat miffed reply.

38 Is Transgenderism Dying?

John O’Sullivan had wanted to profile Kellie-Jay Keen, the women’s rights campaigner, ever since he’d seen her at an event in New Zealand, set upon by a transgenderist mob and nearly shredded like Ready-Brek. What is it to have courage in the modern age? Kellie-Jay wasn’t much of a one for introspection, but she had a salty humour that knitted it all together.

37 Unknown Knowns: David P Goldman

Anyone wondering where the already delirious Budapest property market was headed would have done well to book a space at Philip Pilkington’s Unknown Knowns event. Renowned analyst Goldman had made a comprehensive study of home ownership and personal debt in the country. He turfed up one solid gold fact: Hungarians are the least household-indebted nation in Europe. Thus, the BP property market was, if anything, still under-valued. The results of his study have effectively become government policy, in the form of the new first-time-buyer loans.

36 Peter Boghossian In Da House

Peter and his crew: manager Erin and videographer Travis, installed themselves in the DI for much of the middle of the year, conducting their YouTube hit Street Epistemology sessions (think of them like rap battles for people who know a lot about the morality of vivisection). Who can ever forget Rodrigo Ballester spitting bars against Hugo Martin on whether we should kill everyone over forty?

35 Jimmy Carr

Last week, Britain’s fifth-best comedian Jimmy Carr outed himself as a bit of a rightie when he told the Triggernometry boys that Philip Pilkington’s new book, The Collapse Of Global Liberalism, had rocked his world, and that Philip was some kind of genius. Here’s the clip for proof. He also tipped Philip’s podcast as his personal ‘gold standard’. Multipolarity is available on all good mobile phones.

34 Danube Knowledge: Homeland! Language! Faith!

In which the always urbane Stefano Arroque took 150 years of Georgian patriotism, compressed it into a single slogan, then extruded it out again across five distinct eras. This lush podcast told the deep story of this increasingly important outpost of the West.

33 Peter Caddle: In Bruges Edition

Colin Farrell should be nervous. Caddle’s image makeover (above) leaves him in poll position for leading man roles in gritty euro gangster flicks. Humour connoisseurs please note: this item is funny if you know Peter Caddle.

32 The Duchess

Drink enthusiast Markus Johansson Martis has been wowed in 2025 by this secret cocktail bar, in the eaves of the Matild Palace. “The cocktails are practically an art form — just be prepared, the prices might make even a Norwegian raise an eyebrow.” And Norwegian eyebrows are notoriously non-muscular.

31 Making The Machine Go: Dominic Cummings As Management Guru

The Cult of Cummings got a new glass of Kool-Aid with this seminar, examining whether the deep structures of management theory that Cummings likes to rely on are compatible with modern bureaucracy, starring Cummings’ sometime protégé Andrew Sabisky and techno-sage Nathan Levine.

30 Yookay If You Want To: Travels In A New Britain With Lord Frost

David Frost may be exquisitely polite, but he is also prepared to go to places most of the political class won’t touch. He penned the first mainstream British article on the live rail of YooKay discourse, and we fully entered the era of Dark Frost when he opened up to our podcast team on Britain’s endemic bluetooth speaker abuse and vape shop Potemkins.

29 This Friday

Fresh from his hit podcast on Tusványos, on Friday, David Campanale is launching his extended paper at The Whale, District 9. The paper is about the long history of the festival, featuring previously unseen pictures of Orbán Viktor as a slightly sozzled 26 year old. We’re so convinced it’ll be good, we’re already dropping it at a hefty 29 in the best of the year list. Though if you attend and feel it is not worthy of this position, please do feel free to write in and complain.

28 Mátra Borozó

Wine bar of the dirty apron kind. We often haunted it, and the next day it normally haunted us.

27 István Looking East

István Kiss is the DI’s supremo, a scrupulously polite, rather feline boss, who never raises his voice, but somehow always makes things happen. He’s pictured here placing his hand in the mould of the hand of Nursultan, the first president of Kazakhstan.

And here: well, we’re not sure, but it seems very Turkic. Either that or chill rooms at trance raves have improved a lot since our day.

26 Tony Abbott’s Papal Confusion

“Back in May I was at a reception at a certain university of public service (whose name I will not give). A very long speech was underway when, like something out of a film, everyone’s phone in the room started buzzing at once. I checked mine: white smoke. A New pope elected.I was standing next to Tony Abbott and whispered, “There’s a new pope.”

He replied, “Ah wonderful mate, do they know who it is?”

I talked to someone who reports on the Vatican, asking exactly that. He replied: “As they say in Italy — boh.”

I momentarily thought this referred to Cardinal Bo of Myanmar, so I turned to Tony and said, “Apparently it’s Cardinal Bo.” After a second of looking mildly surprised, Tony diplomatically replied, “Oh — interesting choice!”

Turns out ‘boh’ means ‘I don’t know’ in Italian. Thus I became a brief but enthusiastic source of fake news at a diplomatic reception.”

- Calum Nicholson

25 Halloween Nottoli Style

Not a lot of people know that Sean Nottoli once worked for the Trump campaign. In fact, the subject still did not come up at his excellent USA-style Halloween party, where he dressed up as a former Trump campaign manager and told spooky stories about campaign management and hair weave maintenance.

24 Star Wars: The Seminar

This year, a certain galaxy seemed less far away. Born of a dippy joke at a staff meeting, the Danube Institute committed to the bit, and executed a pretty fascinating two hour symposium on the geopolitics of the LucasFilm universe, with a keynote from Operations Director Gergely Dobozi. Jar-Jar was behind it all? That was what the more conspiracy-minded took away.

23 Keith Hayward at BrainBar

The largely unknown criminology professor Keith Hayward put in a punchy turn at the BrainBar fest, talking about the dangerous merging of childhood and adulthood — adults are clinging on to childish things longer, children are being given the tools of adulthood earlier. It was scary enough to make us clutch our Yoda dolls tighter.

22 Danube DC

Rumour has it we’re getting a baby sister in 2026, in that other capital of conservatism, Washington. Aw, cute!

21 Living In The Conservative Pod, Eating The Conservative Bugs

When Carlos Roa transferred to DC, he immediately found himself living in the same building as Michael Anton, king of the Claremont Institute and now State Department lynchpin. Apparently this sort of thing happens a lot over there, in Washington Village.

20 Budapest Trump Summit Rumours

Multiple people, tapping their noses and telling us it was happening this Tuesday, next Wednesday, the Thursday before the blood moon… Nothing like an epoch-making treaty in the offing to bring out the tipster in us all.

19 Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Security Detail

The sight of the slender Ayaan Hirsi Ali walking the short distance to her hotel across the carpark at MCC Feszt, entombed between four meat-wall security men, reinforced to us quite how dangerous it can be to speak up for conservative ideals. A month later, Charlie Kirk’s killing would bring home the full jeopardy.

18 Cultural Diplomacy: Max Keating

How soft is your power? At a time when USAID was folding up, Irishman Max Keating’s paper brought cultural diplomacy back to basics: how can you sell a story about who you are as a nation that is crisp and likeable? If Ireland is already a cultural diplomacy superpower, then what’s the Hungarian equivalent of Guinness and Riverdance and talking a lot of waffle?

17 George Yeo at Geopolitics Conference

www.facebook.com/georgeyeopage/photos/my-speech-in-budapest-at-the-danube-institute-last-month-i-should-have-used-the-/1359302345553020

The Former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore gave off shades of his old boss as he put in a powerhouse performance to open Day 1 of the Geopolitics Conference, schooling the audience on the complex situation in the Malacca Strait. After all, this is not a game of cards. Whoever speaks at Geopol must have iron in him!

16 Are Conservatives The New Globalists? Juan Soto

Juan Soto turned a certain conventional wisdom on its head to ask the right question: what if conservatives have become their own Davos class? If each nation conserves what is singularly dear to it, where does that leave us, in a world of CPAC, Con Inc, and increasing administrative homogenisation?

15 Mary Harrington, Szófia Rácz, Louise Perry, Miriam Cates

The DI’s April Family Conference saw some of the smartest women now thinking step into their metier. It was enough to make us channel Sister Sledge: we are family.

14 Making Liszt, Checking It Twice

Michael Walsh sure plays a mean honky-tonk. The journalist, author, and frequent Danube fellow, is one of those annoying blokes who can also play the tremulous final symphonies of Franz Liszt on his grand piano, while giving an assembled audience biographical chapter and verse on how the composer came to write it. It’s a helluva party piece.

13 Hungary’s Indo-Mediterrannean Strategy: Carlos Roa

There’s grand strategy, and then there’s whatever Roa is smoking. Weighing in at a hundred pages, the intellectual architecture for an overground link between Hungary and India will have ripples for years to come.

12 Persecuted Christians In Nigeria: Nicholas Naquin, Dániel Farkas, Calum Nicholson

Two months after our field trip to Nigeria, Donald Trump decided to chip in on the topic, and suddenly a copy of our fifty page report was winging its way to the White House, where it landed directly in the Vice President’s hands. Call it good timing, call it divine providence.

11 Folk Tents

MCC Feszt and Tusványos both had special rooms where, to the sound of a scratchy violin, you could link hands with the persons to your left and your right, then step towards the centre, then move back out again, then clap twice, then rotate on your axis, clockwise, elbow-in-elbow with the person next to you, then clap again. Apparently it’s called a táncház — dance house.

10 Eric Hendriks Asking Questions

At every event, Eric had a question at once esoteric and on-point. The moderator would ask for hands. No one would raise theirs; then, after five awkward seconds, The Eric Question would arrive. It would begin with a few peremptory remarks about the quality of the discussion. It would meander on for a bit, then make a sharp right turn through Hegel, encompass a traditional Chinese saying, wander towards the growth of the AfD, dance around Rilke and the true meaning of Romanticism, then, just as it seemed as though that someone had passed the Encyclopaedia Britannica through a shredder, it would land as perfectly as a SpaceX returnable rocket.

The panelist’s response was always the same: “Um, great question…”

9 Yarvin Reads Defoe

Curtis Yarvin was charming and kind to all who got to meet him at the Geopolitics Conference. His decision to read out an entire Daniel Defoe treatise imploring Queen Anne to smash the nonconformists, in the middle of a small Buda wine bar, literally all 42 pages of it, was clearly in service of some broader historical point, but the exact nature of that point has been somewhat submerged with time. Papists bad? Anyway, the people at the next table certainly seemed to enjoy it.

8 LeBor Goes On Rubin, Comes Off

Anyone who has seen Dinner For One would have understood the plight of Adam LeBor, who became stand-in compere for Dave Rubin, as the host went missing in front of a live studio audience for about an hour, due to technical difficulties: “I had to keep talking and talking and compering for ages because we did not know when Rubin would arrive; eventually Peter Boghossian (who likes to talk) came to the rescue. When Rubin finally arrived, I sat down in my seat on stage… whereupon he sent me away.”

7 Taylor Swift Crossover Appeal

The most-listened to musician among our podcast audience is Taylor Swift, according to Spotify’s data analysis. Presumably she’s getting notifications about us too, then.

6 The Georgian

Tifliso to the uninitiated, is a cracking Georgian restaurant which seems to sell debentures to former Thatcher speechwriters. We lost many happy hours whenever John O’Sullivan uttered the magic words: “Shall we, shall we go to, uh… well I was thinking of, well, The Georgian actually…”

6 Film Making

This year, the DI became film moguls. We spent months in Development Hell. We fought The Moneymen. We chomped on our cigars. We concepted. We moodboarded. We attached people. We unattached them. We reattached them. They basically had to be made of velcro to survive. We scraped together brooding sequences of Brussels looking a bit rough. We panned over the Paris suburbs. We videoed a dead pigeon — in slo-mo. Turns out making films is hard. But the fruits of all this labour will be with you in the new year.

5 Israel & Hungary

Israel has been through the wars this year. It is a complex geopolitical entity. But after a successful visit from Netanyahu to Budapest, and a seemingly successful peace treaty, maybe it’s time to acknowledge quite how important its existence is for the free world. We’ve done lot of work there in the past 12 months. Our researchers, Dr. Péter Szitás, Sáron Sugár, and Ibolya Lubiczki, put together a paper, charting the long story of Hungary & Israel, from Cold War antagonists to firm friends. And Adam LeBor’s latest book, The Promised Land, is a narrative history of the country, due out next year to mark its 80th anniversary.

4 Based In Budapest

In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father Kingsley telling him that he threw Mart’s novel Money across the room and ceased to read it ever again, at the point on p. 112, when Amis fils introduced the character of ‘Martin Amis’. In the same postmodern spirit, you are now reading a listicle on Based In Budapest, about the success of BiB. Since our September debut, we’re now read by over 3000 people, including many liberal media NGOs ‘monitoring democracy in Orbán’s Hungary’ (hi guys!). Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Now back to business.

3 John Whittingdale on Thatcher

After Maggie’s counsellors, biographers and ministers had spent a day dissecting her life and legacy, after Robin Harris, Lord Lilley, Bill Cash and John O’Sullivan, it was the turn of a man who’d been in his early 20s when he’d turned up at Number 10. He gave an intimate, personal account of what it was like, hunched in a stuffy upper room, taking dictation from the world’s most demanding, most brilliant boss. It capped off an extraordinary and moving 24 hours.

2 The David Martin Jones Library

Dedicated to two of our most esteemed departed professors, David Martin Jones and Jeffrey Kaplan, in 2025, the DI Research Department inaugurated its own library, formed from the late David’s own personal collection.

Hugo will explain more:

1 Bears And What They Do In The Woods

At Tusványos, you were never more than six feet from being attacked by a bear.

The pine-saturated hills of Romania formed the backdrop for the festival, and these hills, as we were told over and over, were full of bears. Here, bear talk was like weather talk is to the English. People dug up Daily Mail stories of tourists having their faces ripped off. They handed you thingamies of bear spray. The town was strung with anti-bear electric wires like tinsel. As bear paranoia took hold, some began to suspect their nearest and dearest of being bears themselves.

You really had to drink a lot of chilled white wine to take your mind off the problem. Here is an image of DI affiliates, steeling themselves through the terror.

Happy Christmas and all that, from the DI Research Team.

Budapest This Week

Regular readers will have noted the uptick in Turkic-service in these pages. Diplomatically, Hungary is going all-in on the rising Stans. From Ludovika's new Turkic Studies centre, to the Danube Institute's regular Turkic programming, spearheaded by our Azerbaijani colleague Ibrahim Mammadov.  

Now, we're about to see the biggest Stan fan plan yet. On December 9, the DI hosts its first Turkic-Western Geopolitical Dialogue. The idea is to span three continents by adding America to the mix (here represented by old friend of the DI James Carafano, senior counsel at The Heritage Foundation). It's a whole-day programme, from 9AM - 4PM. Register on our website.

Karol Nawroski won Poland's recent presidential election. So can he reunite the V4 under the banner of EU-skeptic national populism? Péter Szitás and Pawel Pawlowski are among the panel discussing on Thursday December 11 at 3PM. Register here.

Today, a one-day conference on youth politics is playing out at the MCC Scruton. What do Zoomers, and indeed the mythical Gen Alpha, actually want? What media are they consuming, given most have never met a TV? Are they really all frothing Nazis and Communists, or have one or two settled for a quiet life of camomile and Isaiah Berlin? It's not too late to tune into the hip jive of today: the registration form is here. 

David Dusenbury is an elder statesman of the Danube Institute: he was here for two years before he left to become a professor at the University of Florida. He's known for his award-winning theology, but lately he has picked up an interest in China's deep philosophical exchanges with the West. In service of that, at 10AM, December 12, at the DI, he'll be in conversation with Philip Pilkington on their joint 'Re-Civilisation' project. As Ghandi might've said: “I think it would be a very good idea.” 

What’s Based

America The Slightly-Too-Brave?

In the early hours of Friday morning, with no prior notice, the White House released its first National Security Statement - a map to what it wants, geopolitically. For the chancelleries of Europe, it made for uncomfortable reading. 

Here's what you need to know:

1 — The US says it will be actively 'cultivating resistance' to current EU policy within the bloc.  It argues that data suggesting many NATO members on the continent will soon become 'majority non-European' represents a security threat.

2 — It goes on to say that "America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent—and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security." They love us, really.

3 — It digs in on a post-war reset with Putin, arguing for: “Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia.” 

4 —  In response to the new document, German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said Europe did “not need outside advice”. Please send cash only?

5 — The document also dials down US commitment to the Middle East, dials up the importance of the Indo-Pacific, and formally acknowledges the so-called Don-roe doctrine (recently witnessed in strikes against Venezuelan narco-boats). The full version is here - and well worth a read. 

Other News

Hungary is now a net contributor to the EU

The New York Times investigates Budapest's dwindling supply of bathhouses

Israel allowed to stay in Eurovision
Hungary ranks 17th on global 'Peace Index'

Paper of the Week

The Death of Merit: How Metrics Replaced Judgment in Higher Education

Why are Western Universities getting worse? According to research by Dr. Jonathan Price, Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute, and Ashby Neterer, Torrance Scholar of Theology at Oriel College, Oxford, it may be down to our obsession with making measurements into targets.

The fix? A teaching regime that treats students more like trade apprentices and less like cogs in a bureaucratic machine.

"If we could imagine a higher education freed from empiricist merit—the relentless need to weigh and rank—it might look more like an apprenticeship than a bureaucracy. Students and scholars alike would be judged by the clarity of their thought and engagement with subject matter, not merely by their numerical outputs and ideological adherence.

If peer review took truth seriously, its emphasis could shift from quantity to quality, from accumulation to understanding. Care of the soul might even return to the center of scholarly pursuits."

Read More

Eyes & Ears

What Lebanese Christians Need from Pope Leo XIV - Hungarian Conservative

No, Budapest Is Not Dirtier than Delhi - Slop Check

Daniel Hannan On The Madness Of The Covid Inquiry - Danube Politics

Liberalism's Last Stand - Danube Knowledge

Comings & Goings

Coming:
Ludovika University of Public Service has a couple of new fellows turning up this week for short stints at their new Public Diplomacy hub. 

Mansoor Ahmad Khan was the Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2020-22. He was Chair of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, and Ambassador to Austria. 

Then, Dr. Pawel Pawłowski was Chairman of the Foundation Council at the Warsaw Institute. He's a legal scholar turned policy expert, and works on disinformation, free expression, and digital regulation. He's also helped build the Centre for Disinformation & Cybersecurity Research in Wrocław. He will of course also be on the DI's Poland panel. 

City Life

It can't be Christmas unless you're off to see The Nutcracker Suite at the Opera House. 

Fans of €7 cappuccinos will already know the W Hotel on Andrássy. But if your taste in Christmas markets is more than just wooden toys and glühwein, you might consider a visit to their own rather chi-chi market, in the W Lounge. Entry is free, but life's little luxuries are not. 

If you have never fallen on your derriere in front of a confused child at the Hero's Square ice rink, can you even say you belong in this city? The annual tradition of the heroism of the un-coordinated takes place every day from now till February, until 9PM. Tickets are about 4000 Ft.

Scandi Christmas is its own vibe: next Sunday, the Norma Grand is offering entry to their salmon and meatballs hygge wonderland for only 25 000 Ft, including wine pairings.

This is the last week of regular programming for Based In Budapest in 2025. We'll be back next week with something a bit different, then back to our desks in 2026. Thanks to our readers for their tips and bouquets throughout the year. Now please go out and inhale Christmas through every pore.

Dates For Your Diary

Danube Institute EU Tech Summit — 29 January

Wiener Akademikerball, Vienna — 20 February

 “Nem kolbászból van a kerítés"

 — “The fence isn't made of sausages” (It's not as good as you think)