Hello, welcome to Coffee House. I'm James Heel. And I'm Tim Shipley. Today we're going to be talking about the blossom victor Allback in Hungary.

And guess who's back? It's Henry VIII. His powers are being used again on Brexit.

So, James, Parliament is back and so are we. How are you? You've been holding the fort in my absence. It's been good, went to Wales, which should be featuring the magazine next week. But I think that you've had a... Not on your holly bobs. Not on my holly bobs. No, no, no, no. Just... Fact-finding. Going around the country, stirring up apathy. Taking the temperature. Absolutely do my bit, but I think you've been having a more interesting week by going to somewhere different, right?

Yes, I my bit. But I think you've been having a more interesting week by going to somewhere different, right? Yes, I've been to France, which would be interesting at the best of times, but I'm into Disneyland. Somewhere you swore you'd never go. I swore I would never go to Davos or to Disney, and I've now done half of that. I'm sticking to the Davos bit. but, yeah, no, I mean, it's a bit like party conference. There's a whole bunch of unlikely characters roaming around, some of them dressed inappropriately, and a lot of delirious fans who don't understand that these people aren't real and what they're saying isn't real. And all run by an overlord, hell-bent on World Domination. Anyway, it was a very uplifting experience. And now back to the world of reality, which is that politics is once again proving not that uplifting. We've got a heck of a lot going on internationally and domestically. Should we start with our friends to the east? Absolutely. So Hungarian elections. And 16 years in power, Viktor Orban was swept aside last night. Peta Maja, who's the leader of the opposition party, won with a two-thirds majority, I think 138 of the 199 seats in the parliament. And it's a crushing victory of him. But I think it's been misplaced in some respects. I mean, because people have seen this as a sort of a winivism against the forces of All-Ban. There's a lot of lefties out saying, oh, we have renounced populist right-wingery across Europe. No, no, no. I mean, Maggiac is a proper right-winger. You know, he's criticised All-Ban from the right on migration restrictionism. and he's also been critical of the pride ban last year in terms of actually not being...

Talk about pride as a sort of good thing,

but it's just saying, oh... restrictionism. And he's also been critical of the pride ban last year in terms of actually not

talking about pride as a sort of good thing, but it's just saying, oh, Auburn's trying to distract us. He is not simply just someone who is a sort of social liberal. He's trying to reach out to social conservatives as part of his victory. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a guy who was in Orban's party until 10 minutes ago

and basically fell out with him.

I mean, he ran primarily, didn't he, on corruption

and kind of anti-corruption ticket, which tells us you can still do right-win politics as long as you don't get stuck with your hand in the till. That was essentially what this was about. And that's probably why the scale of it has been so large. Precisely. And I think that this is an interesting result for a couple of reasons, because the result goes far beyond Hungary's borders, first of which is, of course, the impact on Europe, and particularly Maja has already signalled that he's potentially going to back the 90 billion EU loan for Ukraine, and what that means there, despite historical sort of difficulties between Hungary and Ukraine. And second of all, it means for conservatism, because Orban's Hungary was seen as a model all around the world. J.D. Vance, of course, had that last minute intervention last week, sort of trying to do a joint appearance with Alban. There's an amazing graph if you go online. Yeah. It shows Allban's support. The second Vance pipes up and says, this man good, his numbers start to do this. Well, J.D. Vance

almost seems to the reverse-milus touch, doesn't he? Met the Pope, the Pope then died. He went over to the seat of the AFD rally and they lost that election. He's gone to the Middle Eastern talks and they failed. And now he's done this as well. So I think that it's the one lesson, if you're a barma at the back of the queue or vans in Hungary, don't make foreign interventions.

Nobody likes a foreigner coming in and telling

them how to vote. It doesn't matter whether they sort of broadly agree with your worldview.

It's just seen as interference. And to a degree, I'm not sure the Trumpies have kind of

worked that out. No, and also each nationalism is slightly different, actually.

Funny enough, I was reading Liam Bern' new book, and he was talking about how...

Oh, I'm sorry.

Maloney talks about her sort of sweep of history. It's much more to do with the Catholic Church and Faith. Farage in this country prefers to talk about British history. So it's a more kind of secular force, but in national characteristics. It depends where your national self-identity comes from. Precisely. And in this case, it's quite a Catholic thing.

I think Maya has said that his first trips are going to be to, is it to Poland and to Vienna? Yes. You know, the old twin city of the Habsburg Empire, they've still got that history with the Austrians, and that's what they're seeking to tap into. But the Ukraine thing's interesting, isn't it?

Because there's a lot of Hungarian speakers in Ukraine. And I think the flip side of this is that the Ukrainians have tried to sort of forge a more recognizable national identity to fight the Russians.

But that has then meant suppressing kind of minority languages and specialist schools and all that sort of thing, which has upset the Hungarians.

This is not the accession of some great Zelensky-loving new sort of European.

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