It doesn’t take a mathlete to calculate the cost of Orbán’s last sixteen years. Elected in 2010 after four earlier years as prime minister and eight as obstructionist member of parliament, he reassumed office with a two-thirds supermajority in the parliament and a full-throttle shift to the authoritarian right. He rewrote the country’s fundamental laws (its constitution), took nearly complete control of all national media, and remade the nation through a system of cronyism and corruption that brought staggering power and riches to himself and his chums. Orbán managed the rare feat of projecting dictatorial invincibility behind a façade of democracy, exerting near total dominance with little use of military or constabulary force. All of this made him a hero of American ultraconservatives, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and capitalist pirates. Orbán was, as Steve Bannon famously said, “Trump before Trump.”
This story is about just one part of the Hungarian “illiberal” blueprint our current administration has followed: the attack on higher education. The Trump administration’s legal and extortionist assault on universities has been shocking. These attempts to dismantle a nation’s higher education system and bend it to the will of an authoritarian government draw inspiration from Orbán’s radical overhaul of Hungary’s public universities. Orbán’s Fidesz party used the cover of relentless, systematic attacks on “woke ideology” and alleged LGBTQ+ “indoctrination” to seize hold of the schools. His government’s so-called “model change,” a euphemism for “privatization” and “takeover,” has been a stupefying success. It has eradicated all university autonomy, determined what gets taught and by whom, and effectively transferred the assets of public universities into private, loyalist hands.
Of all the universities in that country, only one fought back. Guess which one… (You win!)
Beginning in 2020, this hostile takeover provoked mass protests from the students, faculty, and administration at the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE), sparking a movement that, while small, changed the course of lives and was heard around the world. After Kafkaesque attempts at negotiation and Bleak House-style legal battles, SZFE’s administrative leaders, followed by over half the faculty, resigned. Together, students and teachers created the Learning Republic, a community-based educational program to continue training amidst their David-and-Goliath struggle. Rather than admit the new, wildly antagonistic, government-appointed leadership, the students launched a blockade of university buildings and a brilliant repertoire of daily, performative demonstrations and ritualized actions, replete with sharable and often viral visual design elements—the kind of playful, exuberant, and super-catchy public protests whose spirited influence can currently be felt in our own “No Kings” rallies.
There’s every reason to believe that these daily activities, which lasted seventy-one days before being shut down by a second COVID wave, roused a sleepy, depressed, even hopeless populace. Certainly their street actions set the scene for a rising tide of protest that peaked in the “illegal” Pride parades throughout Hungary in 2025 and excited the courage, participation, and widespread resistance that surged on 12 April to win. But, as that unstoppable theatre kid Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in Hamilton, “Oceans rise; Empires fall.”
