Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars and to change the world.
~ Harriet TUBMAN
Retired Californian finds fulfilment as Lumphini cat caretaker Bangkok Post
Who are the Japanese? Huge DNA discovery rewrites history Science Daily
Blue Origin rocket explodes during launch pad test in Florida France24
Perfect randomness realized for the first time Phys.org
Trump pal funneled millions of Israeli gov’t cash into US media Responsible Statecraft
Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.
So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?
You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.
This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).
As I wrote last month:
I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.
Trump feels like he’s running the largest casino in the world and he’s gonna take his deserved cut.
Here Are the Adversaries Trump Has Threatened and Prosecuted
President has asked Justice Department to investigate more than four dozen enemies, leading to a spate of prosecutions
Jesse Drucker & Dyland Freedman, Trump Clears Way for Corporate Tax Dodge Hidden in the Fine Print (New York Times, May 29, 2026)
A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.
The cost of toxic leadership in the workplace – and how to avoid it
Financial Review: “MinterEllison has become the first major Australian law firm to admit out loud a growing fear across the world: artificial intelligence-led automation may hurt lawyer numbers, and graduates will be hit first.
Minters has cut its graduate cohort for 2025-26 by almost a third from the previous year, to 72, partly because artificial intelligence automates routine lower-level work. “Client demand remains strong, but the way work gets done is changing, and we are being deliberate about how we shape our workforce,” MinterEllison chief people officer Rachel Banks said.
“Responsible use of AI is improving efficiency in some of the more routine work graduates traditionally start on, while demand continues to shift towards complex matters.
That combination has led us to take a more targeted approach to intake this year.” Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Norton Rose Fulbright, Allens and Mallesons also cut their graduate numbers for this financial year. But all said AI was not the main driver of the reduction, and pointed instead to factors such as seasonal variations and earlier over-hiring…”
I've spent over 50 years fighting for democracy — and I'm not stopping now.
Cryptic Taxing fraud and prevention landscapes of crypticer Human Resources
Pope says ‘world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants’ amid feud with Trump’s White House
NAB is under mounting scrutiny after two staff suicides in as many months and a string of ex-employees alleging an increasingly bullying, high‑pressure culture inside the bank
National Australia Bank is under mounting pressure over its workplace culture after two employees died by suicide in as many months and former staff detailed what they describe as an increasingly intimidating environment inside the lender’s operations.
The two employees, who worked in separate teams in home loan customer operations and fraud operations, died in incidents weeks apart, one of them at NAB’s Docklands headquarters in Melbourne in March.
The deaths, one of which occurred after the staff member had been on extended personal leave, have been raised at board level amid concern about a potential broader culture problem.
In the wake of the March tragedy, current and former workers have described a shift from a previously supportive culture to one marked by rising workloads, sharper management communication and strict performance controls.
Ex-employees allege they were subject to aggressive pursuit of relatively small redundancy overpayments, heavy monitoring of time away from desks, and escalating pressure linked to targets and return‑to‑office rules, with some linking this environment to serious mental health struggles.
As reported by the Financial Review, a NAB spokesperson said the bank has made health, safety and wellbeing support for workers and families.
“This support includes confidential in-person, phone, and online consultations to help our colleagues manage their mental health and wellbeing,” said the spokesperson.
“Following the tragedy at NAB on March 5, immediate efforts were focused on providing care to our colleague’s family, friends and their team. Leaders and external partners have and continue to provide support and make resources available to our teams.”
“We know we don’t always get it right, but we are committed to creating an environment where our colleagues feel safe, supported, and heard on matters that are important to them,” she added.
NAB has been restructuring and offshoring parts of its back office while cutting hundreds of roles, says it is cooperating with authorities investigating the March death.
The bank points to engagement survey results that it says are in line with global top‑quartile benchmarks and maintains it is committed to creating a workplace where employees feel “safe, supported and heard”, even as critics argue that cost-cutting and compliance‑driven policies are eroding that promise for some workers.
If this story has raised concerns for you, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or in an emergency call 000
Glass Empires: “This article is the historical companion to yesterday’s investigation of the WEXMAC TITUS warehouse buildout. Read this before they build the next camp
“If they did not know, they did not know because they did not want to know.” — Primo Levi, Afterword to If This Is a Man / The Truce, 1987.
“The documentary record is not a warning; it is a blueprint for state brutality unfolding again in public view. Violent governments study the methods, refine the procedures, and expand machinery for detention and disappearance.
Contractors sign agreements, corporations harvest profits, and frightened populations rename visible cruelty “normal life” to protect emotional comfort. The Pattern Repeats in Real Time – A Navy contracting vehicle called WEXMAC TITUS lets the Trump administration skip competitive bidding, environmental review, and GAO protest rights. ICE handed GardaWorld Federal Services $313.4 million for a 1,500-bed warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, and KVG LLC $113.1 million for a second in Williamsport, Maryland. Neither contractor had ever run an ICE facility.
KVG had banked only $120 million across thirteen prior years. The permission to brutalize has widened. How does a country build its own concentration camps? Not all at once. The construction is gradual; the contractors are normal. Ask yourself what stage we are watching. R
Republicans Funded the Buildout – Congressional Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill on July 4, 2025, allocating $45 billion for ICE detention warehouses through September 2029. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Every Republican who voted yes bought a warehouse.
Every voter who returned the Republican majority bought one too. GEO Group stock has climbed 73 percent since the November 2024 election. CoreCivic has climbed 56 percent. Both companies donated heavily to Trump. Both told shareholders to expect record profits. The detention buildout moves public money straight into the pockets of political donors. The blueprint has a documented history.
The story starts in Erfurt. The Camps Were Built by Companies With Addresses – Topf and Sons opened in Erfurt in 1878, building brewery equipment, malting facilities, and incinerators. By the 1920s, the firm dominated Germany’s crematorium market. Topf engineers followed regulations protecting bodily dignity.
After Hitler consolidated power, executives and engineers aligned with the regime through contracts, technical cooperation, and profitable expansion into the camp system. Auschwitz required ambitious professionals willing to convert mass death into engineering assignments, production targets, and invoice payments. Dachau opened on March 22, 1933, six weeks after Hitler took office.
The first 200 prisoners were communists, social democrats, and trade unionists. The camp could hold 5,000. Two months in, the guards beat a prisoner to death. Sebastian Nefzger, a Munich schoolteacher, died in his cell. The schoolteacher had been teaching German children weeks earlier. The SS claimed suicide.
Bavarian prosecutor Josef Hartinger had already spent a month investigating prisoner deaths at Dachau with a part-time medical examiner. Hartinger documented evidence of murder and indicted the camp commandant…”
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...
“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
~ John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in
The unexpected science hiding in Dante’s ‘Inferno’Popular Science
Ian Thorpe on learning to fit in after a career spent standing out
Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m working and it’s great.
James Bond fans launch fundraiser for statue of supervillain Blofeld in his Polish “hometown” Notes from Poland
Contemporary pop artist fnnch’s essay on How to Make a Living as an Artist is pretty great. Lots in here that resonates with my experience of turning a creative hobby (KDO) into a business.
Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy. Emails, events, meetings, accounting, and more. These are not only a drag but can actually strip the joy from the rest of your art practice.
Even the work itself can become a burden because you now have to make it. Amateurs can wait for inspiration; professionals must create every day.
If you enjoy making art, ask yourself why that is not enough? Why do you need to make money from this activity? Why do you need to do it with more of your time? Can it not perhaps give you more joy remaining a hobby?
I have played the drums for many years, and while I was once tempted to go pro, I have always resisted. Drumming is a refuge for me. A joy. An escape. I play when I want. I don’t play when I don’t want. This is no longer true for my painting. Beware. Think hard.
And:
Making your challenge more difficult is that artists are usually not just entrepreneurs but solopreneurs. There is rarely enough money in art to support even a single person, so we do not get to specialize as one might in high tech entrepreneurship, in which it is totally common to have one co-founder focus on product and another on sales. Most people, at least at first, must do it all. Most artists do not want to do it all. They want to just make art. I am sorry. Some people have a gallery or life partner who acts as a business partner. But most of the time, there is no one to help you. You must think about your art practice as a business.
Image: paintings of various honey bears by
The Manufacturing of Dictators: We’ve Been Getting Human Nature Wrong for 100 Years
Should we compare Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine with Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938? Or with Stalin’s Winter War against Finland at the outset of World War II? Or maybe it’s more reminiscent of the instability of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.
The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained by D French
This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too
Starting early in the morning on the second Saturday of May, first hundreds and then thousands of people gathered in the square in front of Hungary’s majestic Parliament building to celebrate the start of a new political era. This was the square where tens of thousands gathered in 1956 and 1989 to demand an end to the Soviet occupation and in 2006 to protest a discredited government. It was the square on which Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime imposed a major redesign more than a decade ago — with traffic rerouted away, a large reflecting pool and raised beds installed, narrow pathways laid down — apparently to ensure that no such mass gathering could take place again. Today it was the square where Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist, would be sworn in, promising a rebirth of democracy and liberty after 16 years of autocratic control.
Squeezing into the available spaces and gradually filling up nearby cafes and streets, the crowd absorbed people of all ages: young people who didn’t remember a time before Orban and who had voted in unprecedented numbers; aging intellectuals who didn’t think they’d ever celebrate their country again; multigenerational families who had arrived by bus after seeing Magyar in their hometowns and villages. During his campaign, Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700 locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands” — outposts of support for his party. By the end, Magyar was holding five or more rallies a day.
It had looked like an impossible quest. Orban and his cronies dominated the media, persecuted and smeared opposition politicians and changed election laws to benefit his party, Fidesz. Orban had seemed to achieve what the Hungarian sociologist and political theorist Balint Magyar (no relation) calls “autocratic breakthrough” — the point after which it’s impossible to unseat an autocrat using elections. Illiberal politicians from other countries made pilgrimages to Hungary to learn from Orban; CPAC, the gathering for American national conservatives, started staging an annual convention there; and Vice President JD Vance visited Budapest in advance of the election, in a show of support for Orban. And yet Hungarians handed Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding — and it holds clear lessons for the United States.
One obvious lesson of Peter Magyar’s success lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network. “They had 2,000 Tisza islands with between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers,” Balint Magyar told me, in evident awe. “Just in their call centers, they had 3,000 to 4,000 people in the last week of the campaign.” We talked two days before the swearing-in ceremony, at his office in the spectacular but largely empty building of Central European University. In 2018, Orban’s government forced most of the university’s operations into exile amid an antisemitic scare campaign focused on the Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros, the C.E.U.’s founder and principal funder. Some of Orban’s many other scare campaigns targeted migrants, “the Brussels elites” and L.G.B.T.Q. people. During the latest election campaign, billboards and A.I.-generated social media posts warned Hungarians they were in danger of being overtaken by Ukraine and only Orban could protect them. It should have seemed absurd — it was absurd — but outlandish xenophobic and antisemitic propaganda had served Orban well for years. It didn’t work against Peter Magyar — probably because so many Hungarians got to see him in person, many of them repeatedly. This is another lesson of his success: Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.
In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.”
Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty, inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear. Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over the last decade and a half.
Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.
Instead of shrinking away from direct confrontation, he fortified himself against it. By getting elected to the European Parliament, in 2024, he secured immunity from prosecution in Hungary. When rumors circulated of an intimate video that would be used to blackmail him, he went on the offensive, accusing Orban of using “Russian-style kompromat” (no video was released). Knowing that he would probably be blocked from registering a new political party, he took over one that had become dormant. Even more important, instead of trying to build coalitions among other parties, he focused on conscripting as many actual people as possible, from across the political spectrum, ultimately building a giant organization capable of taking down Orban’s political monopoly.
One could say — and some have — that Magyar won at least in part because he was a former insider of Orban’s Fidesz party. But my interlocutors in Hungary emphasized that Magyar’s credibility lay in the fact that he was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power. That’s a lesson, too: The person best positioned to break the power of Donald Trump would not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the Democratic establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump didn’t happen on his watch — a Graham Platner rather than a Thomas Massie.
For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers. An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel, smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral victory: teachers who had organized against a unified state-dictated curriculum; a young man who spoke up against abuses in the child care system; a high school student persecuted for reciting an anti-Orban poem; organizers of Budapest’s L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebration. The speakers stayed onstage, gradually forming a crowd of the kind — the many kinds — of ordinary Hungarians who had ended the Orban era.
That’s a fifth lesson: Grass-roots organizations that have little or no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already focused on winning votes.
Another lesson lies in the issues that motivated Magyar’s voters. Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me.
Polls have consistently shown that even Fidesz voters generally want Hungary to stay in the European Union. Some surely just want the ease of travel and residency, but others probably have in mind the loftier ideals of the E.U., such as the rule of law, human rights and the essential purpose of the E.U., which is peace.
Hungary is one of the poorer countries in the union, and in the early years of his regime, Orban was able to use E.U. membership to secure funding, and thereby power, even as he railed against the Brussels bureaucracy. But in 2022, the European Union started withholding funding, citing corruption. And in 2024, after Hungary ignored a European Court of Justice ruling that compelled it to process asylum applications, the court ordered Hungary to pay 200 million euros andimposed a daily fine of 1 million euros. (When Orban refused to pay, Brussels deducted the money from E.U. funds earmarked for Hungary.) These actions didn’t just hurt the Hungarian economy — they also allowed Magyar to draw a causal connection between Orban’s policies and the well-being of ordinary voters. One of his major campaign promises was to unlock E.U. funding.
Hungary joined the European Union in 2004. The E.U. flag — 12 gold stars on a blue background — adorned the facade of the Hungarian Parliament building alongside the nation’s red, white and green standard. But Orban’s politics, like the politics of most autocrats, was the politics of grievance. Under his regime, the E.U. flag was removed and replaced with the flag of the Szekelys, a Hungarian minority that found itself living in Romania when World War I’s victors redrew the region’s borders. Orban’s symbolic gesture helped fan resentment against the E.U. and what he claimed were a new generation of attacks on Hungarian sovereignty.
Peter Magyar scheduled his inauguration for Europe Day — the 76th anniversary of the declaration that created the road map for a united continent. Before he was sworn in, the European flag was raised again. But the Szekely flag remained, signaling that Magyar seeks to represent all Hungarian citizens, including those who supported Orban. In some U.S. coverage, Magyar has been labeled centrist or right-of-center. What his politics actually are — and this is another lesson of his victory — is pluralist.
Peter Magyar’s rise began in February 2024, when he gave an interview to the independent media outlet Partizan. He blasted Orban for corruption and failure to represent Hungarians, but most explosively, for a different issue altogether: covering up the sexual abuse of children in state care. A case involving more than four dozen defendants had made its way through the courts, but Orban apparently instructed his justice department to pardon several of them. Two women who had signed off on them at the time — President Katalin Novak and Justice Minister Judit Varga, who was then Magyar’s wife — ended up resigning. Magyar accused Orban’s regime of hiding “behind women’s skirts.” Remarkably, in nearby Poland, the only other European country to have unseated an autocratic government, a child sexual abuse scandal and a cover-up also appear to have played a significant role. Perhaps this is because such stories can shed a particularly harsh light on networks of power, and the abuses of power. This, too, is a lesson that can prove useful in the United States. Perhaps it already has.
Now, speaking in Parliament, the new Hungarian prime minister offered an extensive and detailed apology to the victims of abuse and those who sought justice on their behalf. And he announced that to reckon with the crimes of the Orban regime, he was submitting legislation to create the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, which he promised would “be one of the pillars of the 2026 regime change.” Everyone I interviewed in Hungary insisted that regime change would not be complete until a full accounting of the abuses of the Orban regime had occurred and those guilty of crimes were punished — though no one, including the people whose job it will be to ensure that justice is served, seemed to have a clear idea of how this process could be organized. It’s evident, however, that its goal will be not only to satisfy the desire for retribution but also to separate those who became rich through their connections to the Orban regime from the millions of ordinary voters who enabled it — an essential step toward healing a society that has been ruled by politics of hatred, anger and suspicion. There’s a lesson in that, too.
Like many other autocrats and aspiring autocrats — Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump — Orban had been apparently desperate to maintain power because if he lost his office, he could face criminal charges. For this reason, even as Peter Magyar surged in the polls, and even on Election Day, as early returns pointed to Tisza’s overwhelming victory, many Hungarians assumed Orban would find a way to cling to power. Would he refuse to acknowledge election results? Would he declare martial law? But even after he authorized lump-sum payments of six months’ salary to members of the uniformed services, military personnel were said to overwhelmingly favor regime change. Orban must have known he could not count on them.
He stepped down from Parliament after the election, and on inauguration day he wasn’t in the building. Neither were several of the most prominent members of Fidesz, the party he still leads, which won roughly a fourth of the seats in the legislature. President Tamas Sulyok, an Orban loyalist, was there, however. Before Magyar took his oath of office, Sulyok delivered an anodyne speech about the importance of rule of law and constitutional order.
Magyar refused to play along. “It is ironic to hear him speak of the rule of law now, after two years of silence,” he said. “Mr. President, you remained silent when the failed prime minister called half the country” — those who opposed him — “‘insects to be exterminated.’ You expressed no concern when the secret services were sent after the largest opposition party. You failed to speak up when billions in public funds were used to spread war hatred among Hungarians, including among our children. After so much cowardice and turning a blind eye, how could you represent the unity of this nation? You cannot. It is time to leave with your head held high while you still have the chance.”
Hungarians think of themselves as a polite and reserved people. They arrive on time. They observe decorum. They refrain from confrontation. On election night, however, they had shocked themselves by dancing in the streets, chanting “It’s over!” And now their new prime minister was shocking them again. Inside Parliament there was silence, but the thousands of people watching the speech on the outdoor screens broke out in screams and applause. And when the camera cut to Sulyok, his face frozen in an uncomfortable half-smile, the crowd let out a round of boos that could probably be heard on the other side of the Danube.
Earlier that morning, Magyar and Agnes Forsthoffer, the new speaker of Parliament, had laid wreaths at the statue of Attila Jozsef, an early-20th-century poet whose poem “By the Danube” is a hymn to Hungarian diversity. It ends with this stanza, understood as a call for settling differences:
The battle which our ancestors once fought
Through recollection is resolved in peace,
And settling at long last the price of thought,
This is our task, and none too short its lease.
Most of Jozsef’s poetry is considered so complex as to be untranslatable. And so, when the new political leaders laid flowers at his statue to the accompaniment of a Mozart clarinet concerto, they were projecting a new-old attitude toward high culture.
Here is another lesson of Magyar’s victory: His politics are aspirational and inspirational, a tone that is an antidote to the cynicism and vulgarity of autocracy. It is the opposite of, say, the approach taken by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who trolls Trump by trying to outperform him in the debasement of political language and political life. Speaking in the Parliament building, which Magyar called “the most beautiful building in the world” — and it may well be — he was proclaiming a new era of beauty and love. Forsthoffer had used the word “love” four times in her own brief speech.
As Magyar wrapped up his speech to Parliament, he announced that he had invited an ensemble of Roma children to perform. The person I was standing with — Zsofia Ban, one of Hungary’s most celebrated authors, and a person so unaccustomed to participating in exuberant displays of optimism that she told me it felt like cross-dressing — teared up. Nothing like this had ever happened in Parliament before. The Roma people constitute about 8 percent of the Hungarian population, making them one of Hungary’s largest minority groups — and, arguably, the poorest and most often discriminated against. Magyar had spoken extensively about the plight of Roma children, which he seemed to learn about on the campaign trail.
A dozen and a half preteen boys wearing white shirts and black bow ties played tamburas and sang a song considered an anthem of Hungarian Roma people, followed by a Hungarian folk song. Several newly elected members of Parliament wept openly. But members elected from the far-right Our Homeland party had left the chamber in protest. The deputy leader of this faction, Dora Duro, had once held a news conference to physically rip up one of Ban’s children’s books, which she labeled “homosexual propaganda.” It had been very good for book sales, but I know what it’s like to be denounced by people in your own country. I asked Ban how she felt knowing that Duro was still a member of Parliament. “They have lost,” she responded.
When Magyar emerged from the building to address the assembled crowd, he offered his own lesson of his impossible victory. “Against a machine of power,” he said, “we don’t need another machine of power, but real people who — going from mailbox to mailbox, house to house, in the cold, the frost and the rain — are capable of anything for their homeland, their neighbors, their relatives and their community.”
The next task was “to rediscover how to see ourselves as a community once again,” he said. “Therefore, I ask you to turn toward those compatriots who are disappointed today, who are afraid, or who experience this period as a loss. Do not try to defeat them; do not look down on them. Listen to them and talk to them. Tell them that this country belongs to them, too; that they are needed, just as everyone is needed; and that together, we will rebuild Hungary, because there is no left, there is no right — only Hungarians.”
One of the secrets of Peter Magyar’s success, Balint Magyar had told me, lay in reclaiming the symbols of the nation: the flag, the national anthem, the very idea of Hungarian-ness. Now Peter Magyar was watching over an elaborate national performance: the raising of the flag, soldiers goose-stepping, cavalry in ornate uniforms.
And then the pageantry was over, but Magyar was still separated from the crowd by large expanses of empty space, the distance that Orban’s government had so carefully engineered. Magyar started motioning to the crowd: Come closer, come closer — but people were already pressed up against the edge of the reflecting pool. After a few moments, the excitement and the desire to be fully a part of this historic moment became too much to resist. Some men hiked up their pants and ran across the reflecting pool — which, it turned out, was just a couple of inches deep. Almost immediately, hundreds more followed. They ran splashing through the water and onto the other side, filling the space from which they had so long been excluded. “This is your house now!” Magyar exclaimed.
Everyone I interviewed on this trip to Budapest believes in this new era. Academics believe that they will be free to teach again. Young people believe that they will be the first generation in years for whom staying in Hungary is a desirable option. Civil society activists believe that they will be able to stop fighting for their own survival and focus on helping the people they want to help. Marta Pardavi, co-chair of the only organization in Hungary that provides free legal representation for people seeking asylum, was even hopeful — despite the absence of any such promises — that the new government would resume accepting asylum applications.
Experts I talked to outside of Hungary are more skeptical, concerned about the “blood and soil” notes they had heard in Magyar’s speeches, sure that his focus on the plight of the Roma people was just a calculated overture toward Brussels, made in hopes of unlocking E.U. funds. On the other hand, isn’t that what the European government is for — to encourage and enforce humanistic values? It’s too early to say anything about Magyar’s policies, but his cabinet choices seem consistent with the inclusive spirit of his campaign, politically and socially.
Magyar finished speaking, ceding the stage to Ibolya Olah, a pop star who is ethnically Roma and openly lesbian. She performed “Magyarorszag” (“Hungary”), a ballad that she had not performed in many years because, she had said, its patriotic sentiment had lost its meaning.
Ban, a friend of hers and I sat down at a cafe and ordered Aperol spritzes. “To the first day of democracy,” Ban said, and we clinked our glasses. The owner of the cafe, who recognized Ban, brought us cream-filled muffins. Ban danced in her chair along to Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” I asked her how she felt about placing her hopes in a politician who had come from the right wing, had seemingly never said a word in defense of immigrants and had barely spoken up for the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people. Could he be a wolf in revolutionary clothing?
“Maybe he is,” she said, smiling broadly. “Maybe he is.”
And then we danced our way through the square to the Icona Pop song with the refrain, “I don’t care, I love it.” People of all ages were dancing in a conga line, taking their hands off one another’s shoulders to high-five us. The party in the square continued into the next day.
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Máté Bartha is a photographer and filmmaker based in Budapest.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They are the winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
