Viktor Orbán’s bigoted vision leaves me ashamed to be Hungarian

At the moment, I don’t much like being Hungarian. In recent years I’ve started feeling that my nationality resembles a nasty skin disease that I want to scrub off. When I’m abroad, I hide my accent and I call myself a “world citizen”. I’ve vowed never to have a Hungarian boyfriend, or even to settle down in my own country. I hate the fact that much of the world now believes Hungarians to be intolerant and longing for authoritarianism. Not that long ago we were barely ever mentioned in the international media. Now, we’re a primary example of illiberalism in Europe.

Perhaps what I hate most is the way the Hungarian government tries to define what a “real” Hungarian should be. Orsolya Lehotai, an activist blogger and a high-school friend of mine, puts it this way: the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has tried to force on us – the younger generation – a vision in which being Hungarian means “white, heterosexual, Christian or at least non-Muslim”. Orsolya likes to say she only comes from Hungary but isn’t Hungarian, because the word has been hijacked. I’ve started doing much the same.

It’s an irony that the government flirts with white nationalism, but then celebrates our Hungarian-Asian roots as a way of demonstrating ethnic uniqueness. “When we go to Brussels we do not have any relatives there. But when we come to Kazakhstan, we have close people here,” Orbán said on a 2015 visit to central Asia. The government has also allotted 300m forint (£850,000) to the Kurultáj festival, held every other summer to celebrate a “tribal assembly of Hun-Turkic nations”, with participants from 27 ethnic groups.

Source: theguardian