The end of Orbán?
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It has been 16 years since Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party assumed power in Hungary – and it might have begun to feel like things could never change. But with a parliamentary election just around the corner, there’s now a glimmer – a hint! a twinkle! – of hope that the EU's most illiberal government could finally be on its way out.
This week, we’re devoting the entire episode to the April 12 elections: what’s certain, what remains to be seen, and most importantly, what’s at stake. And to make sense of it all, we’re joined by two Budapest-based friends of the podcast: the novelist Krisztián Marton, and Viktória Serdült, reporter at HVG, one of the last surviving bastions of independent journalism in Hungary.
- “At last, a figure has emerged who could wrench power from Viktor Orbán in Hungary” – Viktória Serdült for The Guardian, 18 December 2024
- Paul the Octopus on Wikipedia
- Krisztián Marton on Instagram
- Viktória Serdült on X
This week’s Hungary-themed Inspiration Station recommendations are the song “Tizenhat” by Elefánt, the documentary The Trap, and the FT series The Orbán System.
MISS OUR NORMAL PROGRAMMING? This week’s edition of our newsletter, Good Week Bad Week, has you covered. Subscribe over here to learn what’s been going on beyond Hungary’s borders (the good, the bad, the silly).
This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. But it’s contributions from listeners that truly make it all possible—we could not continue to make the show without you! If you like what we do, you can chip in to help us cover our production costs at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (in many different currencies), or you can gift a donation to a superfan. You can also donate via our website if you prefer. And finally: we'd also love it if you could tell two friends about this podcast. We think two feels like a reasonable number.
Produced by Morgan Childs, Wojciech Oleksiak and Katz Laszlo
Mixing and mastering by Wojciech Oleksiak
Music by Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
The Europeans is proudly produced using Europe’s own Hindenburg.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast has been produced in cooperation with Uranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. |
| 0:11.4 | But this podcast would not be possible without the incredibly generous support of our amazing listeners who donate a little bit each month at patreon.com forward slash Europeans podcast. Welcome back to the Europeans. |
| 0:48.4 | It is a podcast about just one continent on this very messy planet of ours, |
| 0:56.3 | what's happening on that continent and sometimes how it interacts with other continents. We were away last week, but we're back. |
| 1:01.7 | How was your break, Dominic? Well, I didn't feel like much of a break, unfortunately. I had to sing |
| 1:05.9 | a lot, and I was sick, and the combination of those two things is not that fun. But I'm not the only one on the |
| 1:11.5 | podcast team who's been sick. There's been like a bit of an epidemic of food poisoning on our |
| 1:16.4 | team, I believe. Yeah, it's spreading via our group chat. How is that possible? I don't know, |
| 1:21.6 | but yeah, someone needs to investigate this. How are you doing? I'm fully recovered from the aforementioned |
| 1:26.3 | food poisoning. Thank you for asking about the state of my digestive system. |
| 1:30.6 | And I'm just coming down from the excitement of the local elections here in France. |
| 1:35.7 | We've got a new mayor here in Paris, which is quite exciting. |
| 1:38.6 | Oh, yeah. Tell me about him. What's his deal? |
| 1:41.1 | His name is Emmanuel Gregor. |
| 1:43.5 | He is a socialist like his predecessor. |
| 1:46.7 | He travelled by bike to his victory speech, |
| 1:49.1 | which maybe gives you an idea of the kind of image he's trying to present. |
| 1:52.6 | Dutch. |
| 1:53.2 | Dutch? Yeah. |
| 1:54.2 | He's going to be a Dutch mayor for Paris. |
| 1:56.1 | But it was a really closely for election campaign. |
| 1:59.2 | It did look for a minute like we were going to have |
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