It's devastating, and I'm so glad I managed to get away from the country. It's such a toxic environment where people hate everything and everyone. All minorities, all other countries, all other religions, all other viewpoints, all other sports teams. Everyone hates everything, and it's no surprise the alt-right managed to dominate a decade abusing this.
People love to think of our historic kingdom, of the pre-WW1 richness, of how we fought in '56, and take all chances to remind the world that they were unfairly treated every single time. It's one of the countries where people hate minorities the most, where they despite the EU most (despite also being the country that took most money from it compared to the country's numbers), and the government plays exactly into this. It's a country that overplays anything that is Hungarian. You see the national TV buying the rights for uninteresting and unknown sports they never even mentioned in the decade prior just because suddenly there's a Hungarian good result that they can use to fuel the nationalism. No joke, the national TV's news will report a cooking contest in Iceland or some shit if a Hungarian dude did well. It's such a distorted nationalism, trying to catalyze into the few things where Hungary seems to excel, ignoring all things where they don't. Makes people think Hungary is a country of geniuses, full of extremely influential people, and yet it's quite irrelevant in the grand scheme of the global politics.
It's one of the reasons I hate going back to my parents for dinner or lunch. They are literally unable to bring this kind of shit up. Last time I talked to my dad he spent 10 minutes praising Orban's excellent measures against this virus, how it's the only country that got it right, how other leftist countries like Italy got it wrong. It's tiring, it's just depressing to think that people live their lives like these, trying to look at the whole world as if it were out to destroy Hungary, and try to explain all global happenings into "Hungary was right". Not gonna lie, the big upside to this virus is that I have an excuse to visit them less. I love them, mind, but they are so deep into this propaganda that they can't go 15 minutes of talking without circling back to this rhetoric. And I'm long past the point where I laugh about it or I'm angry about it. It just causes me to ignore them because I spent years trying to make them reason but it's not possible when they spend all day swimming in such fake news and propaganda.
People like this are forever lost. The extent of this propaganda, the age, the length of such a government means they won't become sane if such a government falls down. At best, they fall for another narrative down the line, but they won't suddenly learn how to consume news, media and sources. And this is Orban's biggest crime, not the money stolen or the institutions destroyed. The complete brainwashing that millions of people received, people who will never become capable members of the society, able to elaborate information or take responsible choices without a strong leader or propaganda piece telling them how they should think.
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