The Hungarian thaw: how a flood swept away the fear

Questo articolo fa parte della sperimentazione della versione in lingua inglese di Otto / This article is part of English-language beta version of Otto

"The Tisza River is Flooding. Let it Overflow." This was the slogan of the Tisza Party and its local communities, the so-called Tisza Islands, during the pre-election months in Hungary. It is an intriguing slogan. A flood is not just an image of free flow; it has a dangerous side as well. Reconstruction can and needs to follow a flood. Why did this slogan resonate so deeply with Hungarian collective mentality – enough to help bring an unprecedented turnout of almost 80% at the election that resulted in a regime change?

The answer lies in the link to what I have called frozen currents: layers of unprocessed collective historical traumas that block a society's capacity to move forward. Hungarian history has many such layers, because there was never time to process one before the next arrived. World War I, Trianon, World War II, the Holocaust, forced population exchanges, the communist dictatorship, the unfinished reckoning of 1989, the NER period (NER: the System of National Cooperation, the name of Hungary's political regime between 2010 and 2026) – collective traumas from the past hundred years. Frozen currents. Something is moving deep down; the surface is frozen; it needs to thaw.

The first in this list of unprocessed past traumas is the Trianon treaty. Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and population after World War I. The vocabulary that surrounded it from the start has been the language of a wounded body. The country was described as injured, maimed, bleeding, the wound festering. Posters from the 1920s show hands tearing the country apart, or a knife stabbing into the map. A century later similar images are still circulating on social media in their original meaning ranges, but also ironically: a picture of a slice of bread shaped like Greater Hungary with a red paprika stain (blood) in the shape of today’s Hungary at its centre. And the wounded body of the country has transferred onto the body in the form of tattoos in some images.

When studying the speeches of Péter Magyar and Viktor Orbán, I focused on the symbolism they use and the era of Hungarian history they draw on to mobilise collective memory. The Orbán regime was attracted to the post-Trianon era, activating remnants of that trauma. Orbán's hate-based rhetoric evoked feelings of unrest, hostility and frustration, dividing the society into perceived enemy groups. Past pain was appropriated for political purposes.

Péter Magyar and the Tisza movement, on the other hand, drew on the revolution of 15 March 1848, the spirit of change, the momentum of the March youth, which retain a strong appeal to the more dynamic side of Hungarian identity. The symbol of the Tisza River was also a perfect hit during the pre-election campaign. Hungarians associate it with Sándor Petőfi's 1847 poem, picturing the gentle and even meek Tisza which suddenly breaks through the dams and sweeps everything away – an iconic poem of the 1848 revolution. The name of the party, Tisza, is an abbreviation from the words tisztelet (respect) and szabadság (freedom). These are values that the traumatized Hungarian society desperately needs. In the film Spring Wind Magyar recalls his surreal moment of realising that a dormant party with this exact name existed, ready to be taken over and rebuilt, just in time to register it for the 2024 European Parliament elections.

The film Spring Wind – The Awakening is a documentary about Péter Magyar and the Tisza movement. It takes its title from a Hungarian folk song about spring winds bringing meltwater, the floods. The whole symbolic field is held together by the image of thawing, of breaking through, of water moving again.

The film itself became a public event of an unusual scale. Directed by Tamás Yvan Topolánszky and produced by Claudia Sümeghy, it follows Péter Magyar over the course of two years, from his first interview, when, following the pardon scandal that forced his ex-wife the minister of justice Judit Varga to resign alongside the head of state Katalin Novák, he came forward. As his first public act, he posted on social media about resigning from his positions, urging people to break with the regime, using his slogan “Don't be afraid”. The film follows the formation of the Tisza Party until it became the strongest opposition force. Nearly 150,000 people watched it in cinemas in a country of fewer than ten million; 3.3 million viewed it on YouTube within days of its free release over the Easter weekend and is now on HBO. The film will be screened at the Riviera International Film Festival in Sestri Levante on May 5.

Spring Wind is not simply propaganda. It is an energetic, choreographed, intensely engaging documentary that uses the full repertoire of the genre: footage of Magyar's year, interviews with experts and political analysts whose commentary makes the story unfold. And yet, released as part of the campaign, it functioned as a campaign film – first-class propaganda in that context. The two roles do not exclude each other; their overlap is interesting. I am very curious how non-Hungarian audiences will read it. From a trauma processing perspective, the film matters for several reasons. Firstly, it created a shared viewing space and reminded people of not only the past two years but the time of NER that the Tisza movement reacted to. Secondly, there is also a cultural pattern at work. Magyar Péter's figure is framed as a folk-tale hero, and not only in this film. The youngest son who challenges the powerful and wins – not by force, but through persistence and clarity. The Hungarian cultural memory recognises this structure. Ludas Matyi, the trickster peasant who pays back the cruel landlord Döbrögi three times over, is one of its most beloved figures. And at one point Magyar said: “We are the people of Ludas Matyi”– sharing the role with the community. The whole setup, the founding story, true to the folk-tale tradition itself, remains markedly masculine – not to be confused with the political aspect, where there is real emphasis on placing women in visible, important positions.

The most striking moment of the film was Magyar's encounter with Orbán at the European Parliament. He approached Orbán, who was sitting, looked up, and reluctantly shook Magyar’s hand, and Magyar said: “We both know it's over.” This is folk-tale language. The young challenger meets the old ruler. Against a politics that had defined sixteen years based on the memory of fear, on reactivated historical traumas – a vocabulary of enemies, threats, defensive walls – Magyar's message was: “Don't be afraid.”

The digital era provides new tools for trauma processing. New connections and networks are created on social media platforms, dissolving the silence that has surrounded historical traumas. The victory of the Tisza Party is also a story of social media: people were mobilised on these platforms. The flooding Tisza dissolved isolation and brought together the Tisza Islands in political imagination.

But when the flood recedes, the river must be regulated and channelled; dams, boats, bridges and roads are needed so that the new system of connections stabilises. If institutions and society strengthen, apathy and learned helplessness – the characteristics of traumatized societies, that prevailed in Hungary for so long – can be resolved, and new layers of trauma will be prevented from forming. For the first time in many years, it seems that the conditions for that work can be in place.