When she returned in 1989 to the homeland that her family fled after Soviet troops crushed an uprising in 1956, Kati Marton was “filled with great hope” as she watched a “young, skinny bearded guy” shout for Soviet withdrawal.
Then, after she started making annual trips to Budapest, the Hungarian capital and place of her birth, Ms. Marton, a Hungarian-American writer, watched aghast as Viktor Orban, no longer young or skinny but Hungary’s strongman leader, cozied up to the Kremlin and championed what he called “illiberal democracy.”
Media outlets he controlled began denouncing her as a subversive who was plotting to overthrow his government in cahoots with George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier and liberal philanthropist. So she halted her visits home.
After Mr. Orban’s crushing defeat in an April election, Ms. Marton recently returned for her first trip back in eight years to attend the Hungarian premiere of a one-woman play based on her 2009 family memoir, “Enemies of the People.”
The play, also called “Enemies of the People,” about the perils of authoritarianism, might have been staged not at all, or with some risk, were Mr. Orban still in power. Its opening, now that his once seemingly invincible Fidesz party has lost heavily, is being celebrated by the former government’s opponents as a sign of changing times.
It features Erika Marozsan, a prominent Hungarian film and stage actress, playing Ms. Marton as she recounts the ordeals, hidden histories (including their Jewish roots) and infidelities of her parents in postwar Budapest, accompanied by a violinist and accordion player.
Both parents worked as journalists reporting on Stalinist show trials for American wire services, the AP and UPI. They played bridge with American diplomats and cruised around town in a white Studebaker convertible, and they were arrested in 1955, branded enemies of the state and convicted of espionage.
Released amid a brief retreat from hard-line Stalinism, they fled with their two young daughters, Kati and her older sister, Julia, to the United States in 1957 after Soviet troops stomped out an anti-Communist uprising.
Hungary’s recent election, Ms. Marton said, “wasn’t an uprising” but was still “splendid proof that Hungarians were unbowed and that you can only push them so far. They said: ‘No, enough, we don’t want this anymore.’”
The English-language play about her family was performed at the Central European University, a bastion of liberal thinking in Budapest that, like Ms. Marton and much of Hungary’s intelligentsia, is now rejoicing at Mr. Orban’s departure.
Founded in 1991 by Mr. Soros to “promote the values of open society — including free expression and diversity of beliefs,” the university was stripped of its right to issue degrees by a law passed under Mr. Orban in 2017 and relocated most of its teaching to Vienna.
Mathias Moschel, the university’s vice rector, said there were no immediate plans to move students back to Budapest but added that a partial return may be possible now that Mr. Orban, who was prime minister for 20 years in all, had been sidelined.
“All of a sudden, there is a different reality in Hungary, and it is wonderful,” Mr. Moschel said in an interview. Mr. Orban’s ouster, he added, “removed a sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads. You never knew when or if it would fall.”
Not everyone, of course, is celebrating. Hardcore fans of Mr. Orban are in a deep funk as the people they reviled before the election as “woke globalists” and traitorous “Soros agents” return to the fore.
Mr. Orban, passive and mostly silent after his defeat, announced over the weekend that the time had come “to take off the gloves and fight.”
For the moment, however, the “new reality” seems secure, and Hungarians glad to see the back of Mr. Orban are exultant.
“People are smiling again,” said Krisztina Bezi, a schoolteacher who attended the recent premiere in the university auditorium. The play, she said, “would not have happened under Orban.”
Flora Laszlo, the head of the Central European University’s culture unit, said the play could perhaps have been performed before the election but only after careful review of the possible consequences. “We always had to pay attention to the events we organized and the government’s attitude,” she said.
Ms. Marton, addressing the packed auditorium after the show, feted what she called her “second homecoming,” rejoicing that Hungary is now “on the right side of history.”
She had stayed away from her homeland, she explained in an interview, not because she thought she would be arrested but because she wanted to avoid any “risk of harassment, provocation or other unpleasantness” of the kind that often befell people Mr. Orban viewed as enemies.
Among the first acts of the new government was the abolition in June of the Sovereignty Protection Office, a state agency set up in 2023 to investigate people and organizations deemed to be serving foreign interests. The agency had turned its sights on Ms. Marton and several of her associates after an elaborate dirty tricks operation in 2024 targeting Hungarians with ties to a New York-based group, Action for Democracy.
“Like most autocrats or would-be autocrats, Orban needed demons, a constant supply of them, and toward the end I became one,” Ms. Marton said.
For Mr. Orban’s foes, the show’s opening signaled the end of Hungary’s long detour from the European path that was first staked out with the collapse of Communism in 1989.
Attila Punyi, an economist in the audience, said it “feels great to be back in Europe” after years of increasingly close ties between Budapest and Moscow. “I can’t describe how happy we are.”
Ms. Marozsan, the actress, said the play had been conceived before the April election as “an act of rebellion” against Mr. Orban’s seemingly immovable system and as a warning of where he might take Hungary next.
She said she “cried for a day with joy” after Mr. Orban had lost. But she cautioned that Hungary’s new prime minister, Peter Magyar, a onetime Orban ally who is himself a conservative, was unlikely to swiftly satisfy the hopes of Mr. Orban’s many critics in Budapest. “Everything is not going to change overnight so we have to wait and be patient again,” she said.
The mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karacsony, a longstanding liberal standard-bearer, attended the show and said he liked its message. But he lamented that Mr. Magyar had so far done nothing to relieve his city’s financial troubles, which, he said, were exacerbated by the previous government’s hostility toward Hungary’s liberal capital.
Janos Mohacsi, a veteran Hungarian director who wrote the script for the play with his brother, Istvan, said Orban loyalists responsible for his dismissal from teaching and theater jobs still dominated major cultural institutions, including the national theater. “I’m not a vengeful person,” he said, “but they should leave.”
Hungary under Mr. Orban, Mr. Mohacsi said, “was not a police state” but a “mafia state” and it will take years to uproot entrenched networks in the arts, the media, the judiciary and other arms of officialdom. But, he added, “every parallel between this play about the 1950s and our contemporary reality ended with the election.”
Discussion about this post