About Rubikon
In Short
Rubikon started as a project following and reporting on the Hungarian parliamentary elections of 2026.
I am an analyst based between London and Budapest, and a Hungarian ‘insider-outsider’, currently reporting on Hungary’s 2026 elections.
Due to Hungary’s ‘spoiler role’ in EU affairs, insurgent Magyar’s potential unseating of Orbán’s grip on power will have momentous consequences on Europe’s geopolitics. If elected, Magyar’s promise of increased co-operation with the EU and NATO could unify Europe as a coherent bloc with a single policy agenda. This would grant the continent greater bargaining powering in the emerging multipolar world order.
In Long
I was born in Budapest a few years before Hungary’s accession to the EU, to a Hungarian-American mother and an Italian father.
My upbringing in the country took place at a very peculiar moment. Hungary was a very young democracy, itching to be accepted into the West, but still far from a cosmopolitan exemplar. My father, an entrepeneur of sorts, claims there was “no Italian food in Hungary” when they arrived in the early 2000s — a scarcity he also claims to have corrected. Regardless, the country was on the slow but steady route to westernisation.
At one point, this trajectory reversed. The country, which had been under some sort of foreign occupation for around half of its millennium-long history, faced an identity crisis — or, depending on your perspective, had fabricated one. Like the invading Mongols, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Germans, and Soviets before them, a new external threat cast its spectre over the country by 2010: Brussels.
Despite its traumatic history, Hungarian identity has withstood the test of time. Although they are surrounded by them, Hungarians are not Slavs, nor is the Hungarian language Indo-European. Many aspects of the culture, traditions, language, and people can be traced back to nomadic, Central Asian roots. But since settling in the Carpathian Basin a thousand years ago, its eternal subjugation by foreign powers became a central part of the Hungarian identity. Hungary is the self-proclaimed ‘outsider’.
After abandoning Communism in the early 1990s, Hungary was — for the first time — ‘free’. For the subsequent twenty years, the country benefitted from being plugged into the world economy. They joined the EU in 2004, and with pro-West optimism at its peak, there was no better time in history to be a Hungarian. My parents were the embodiment of this ‘Hungarian dream’; a cosmopolitan, well-to-do pair, raising two young children in a young democracy.
There is another side to the story, however.
Hungarians were poor. Hungarians are still poor. In a story familiar to any Eastern European, the departure from Communism was a shock, with newly-privatised assets quickly snapped up by a new elite, and the gains from liberalisation slow when they were visible at all. The average voter could not afford to be patient, and after years of dubious governance, compounded by the 2008 global financial crisis, Hungarians elected Viktor Orbán.
Over the following years, the country’s optimism faded, and its relationship with Brussels became strenuous. Little was done to improve the average person’s situation, but at least while healthcare and education infrastructure crumbled around us, the country had rediscovered its identity. We were now the David to Brussels’ Goliath.
For better or for worse, Hungary’s direction underwent a serious change. Some — especially the country’s new government-adjacent oligarchy — benefitted. Others did not.
Insular as the country is, it was never a seamless experience to not be ‘pure Hungarian’ in the country. Much like Hungary’s own position internationally, I have always been an outsider from within.
The upcoming Hungarian parliamentary elections are of consequential importance to the Hungarian people, who have had a less-than-smooth experience as part of the West since 1990. It will also have regional implications, with Orbán having set the precendent for how a populist, illiberal model can operate in Central-Eastern Europe — and his lessons have travelled far past Slovakia and Poland, including to Brazil and the United States. If he is unseated, it will equally serve as a study of how this can be done.
But most of all, this election will have global implications. The world order is rapidly shifting, and with the turbulence of geopolitics, it is difficult to make predictions of how global power will look, even in the near future. If it is some form of multipolarity which emerges, its character will undoubtedly be determined by whether Europe is one of the poles. If this is to happen, a crucial determinant of the continent’s bargaining power will be whether it operates as a coherent bloc. For the past sixteen years, Hungary has been the impediment to that.