Three days after winning a constitutional majority in April 2026, Hungary’s incoming prime minister Péter Magyar visited President Tamás Sulyok at the Sándor Palace on Buda Castle Hill. From its terrace, he spotted Viktor Orbán on the balcony of the neighboring Carmelite monastery, the outgoing prime minister’s office. Magyar framed the scene with his hands like a film director and declared: “absolute cinema.” The phrase, borrowed from a meme of Martin Scorsese and circulating in Hungary in the deliberately clunky translation abszolút filmszínház, has become a shorthand for Magyar’s rule among supporters and opponents alike. For the former, it celebrates a theatrical tour de force; for the latter, it names a politics of surface. Sulyok has since been removed by constitutional amendment, but the show goes on. The spectacle merits serious attention, not least for the cultural conditions that produce it, and what it conceals.

The Aesthetics of Magyarism

It would be tempting to read this as a new wave of media-centred politics, and Magyar has been compared to Donald Trump in this sense. But theatrical politics also has a longer history in Hungary and across Eastern Europe, a region shaped by its subordinate position in global capitalism. That position produces not only economic inequality but also a particular state of mind Giovanni Arrighi called the “developmentalist illusion”: the belief that catching up with the West is a matter of true commitment, rather than a structural feature of the exploitative relationship between core and periphery. Theatricality, as Andrew C. Janos argued, is a defining feature of this dynamic; grandiosity becomes a symbolic means of compensating for material peripherality. It is no accident that two of Europe’s largest parliament buildings stand in Budapest and Bucharest.

Today we are witnessing a new resurgence of developmentalist illusion in Hungary. Its benchmark is no longer only the West but also the country’s neighbors, which have achieved faster economic growth than Hungary over the past decade. Yet the underlying belief is the old one: that the country’s impoverishment was rooted solely in Orbán’s crony politics. Magyar promises a “New Deal,” but the aesthetics of this new politics remains uncertain. Jan-Werner Müller compared Magyar’s campaign persona to the noble politicians of the nineteenth century, who appealed to national symbols while promising social justice (a social class that ultimately betrayed the peasantry it had promised to liberate). The comparison also shows how durable the social imaginary built by Orbán’s cultural apparatus has proven, even though Orbán himself has failed: photographs show Magyar marching through the Hungarian countryside in folk costume, carrying a bouquet of national flags, in a long tradition of middle- and ruling-class appropriation of peasant culture.

Folk culture is only one part of Magyar’s personal cultural politics; he draws just as readily on popular culture, past and present. His inauguration on 9 May, Europe Day, opened in Parliament with a children’s tambura orchestra performing the Roma anthem and the folk song Tavaszi szél. For a moment, the scene seemed to realize the old liberal promise of reconciling national pride with minority emancipation. Outside, the Hungarian flag was raised with military honors on Kossuth Square, followed by a street party with DJs, at which the new prime minister himself took to the decks and played Az éjjel soha nem érhet véget (“The Night Can Never End”). The 1990s eurodance hit had become an unofficial patriotic anthem in 2016, when Hungary played its first European Championship in more than four decades and fans celebrated in the streets singing it. The team’s success lent legitimacy to Orbán’s lavish spending on football and stadiums, and the song became the soundtrack of that moment. In playing it, Magyar was taking over one of the most popular symbols of the Orbán era.