Not yet a new history: Hungary between liminality and counterfactuality

In April I published an essay called “Violent Innocence and the Fragility of Democratic Transition”. It was about what happened when Hungary removed, through an election, a government that had spent sixteen years dismantling the institutions meant to constrain it. I was commenting on an article by Dr Zsolt Unoka, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, who drew on Christopher Bollas's concept of “violent innocence” to examine whether the victors could resist the same psychological patterns that had shaped the regime they replaced.

I ended that essay with an ambition: that Hungary's contribution this time could be different. Not a warning. A model.

Since April I have been developing the project I described in that essay. I have invited historians, journalists, academics and civil society figures to observe with me, over the months and years ahead. The group will look at what takes place, what becomes of the promises that were made, and the impact the changes have on the country. It will also look at whether those in command are willing to sit with the questions their decisions raise.

That work has raised a question I keep returning to. It is not whether I have the right to do this and the issue of legitimacy. Instead, it is what position am I speaking from, and what does that position allow me to see or not see?

I was born in Budapest. We moved to Switzerland when I was two. My father asked for political asylum when I was ten. I lost the right to call myself Hungarian. I grew up in Geneva, in a dysfunctional family shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust and the early death of my brother. By the time I was eighteen, the family unit had exploded. What I carried of Hungary was the language, but a limited command of it, the vocabulary of a child. Not the culture, not the weight of 1989, not the hope of the post-communist years, not its deceptions, and not the slow damage of the Orbán years.

Hungarian friends have not asked about my legitimacy. They have asked something more direct. They beg me not to come and tell them the right way to do things. Because they know I don't know. I don't know what hardship they went through, nor the price they paid. I don't know what it is like to live with a mentality shaped by decades of learning to be afraid to speak out. That has never been my case, even if it has sometimes caused me problems. They beg me not to think that a few months in Hungary will allow me to understand.

I feel the need to reassure those who think I might. I don't. I know I don't.

What other experiences in life have taught me is that understanding is optional. What is imperative is to be open to learn, to observe, to listen, and to accept that things are different in ways I might never fully understand.

And when I am asked why I invite contributors who were not born in Hungary, who grew up elsewhere, who left thirty or forty years ago, the answer is connected. What I believe is that

Hungarian heritage, however incomplete, connects us to the country in a way that is not patriotic in the sense Orbán gave that word. It is quieter than that. Deeper. The country is not only a place. It is a reference point that shapes you even when the transmission was broken.

But there is another reason. What is happening in Hungary is not only a Hungarian story.

It is whether a democracy can restore itself after systematic dismantling. Whether institutions can be rebuilt once they have been hollowed out. Whether a society can recover the capacity to imagine something different after years of being told there is nothing to imagine. These are not Hungarian questions. They are the questions of this moment, in many places at once. Contributors who bring other references, other experiences of democratic fragility, see things that proximity alone cannot reveal.

The more I have worked on this project, the more I believe that a model is possible. But there will be no ready-made answers. These are not problems in search of solutions, but probably attempts at solutions that will themselves raise new problems. Because the situation is unique, it raises questions that are unique.

As I work on this project, I keep returning to the perspectives of two thinkers who seem destined to work together on what Hungary is facing today.

Árpád Szakolczai is a Hungarian political anthropologist who has spent his career thinking about liminality: the condition of being suspended between what was and what has not yet arrived. Societies in transition are not moving from one order to another. They are stuck at the threshold. Hungary has arguably been there since 1989.

Mark Hunyadi is a philosopher born in Geneva to Hungarian parents who fled. His central concept is “counterfactuality”: the capacity to perceive the gap between what is and what could be, what should be, and what is hoped for. It is, for Hunyadi, the core of what makes us moral beings. Without it, we cannot critique the present. We cannot imagine an alternative. And if we cannot imagine an alternative, we cannot build one.

I need them both in my project. Maybe they need each other too.

What they share, beyond the obvious, is a destination. Szakolczai's liminality is not meant to be permanent. It is a threshold you are supposed to cross, emerging into something more conscious and more solid. Hunyadi's counterfactuality is not meant to be endless. It is supposed to lead to concrete action, not permanent doubt. The point of both, the threshold and the imagination, is not to stay in them but to come through them.

That is also what both, independently, warn against. When liminality becomes permanent, when counterfactual imagination never leads to decidable action, a society does not collapse. Instead, it loses its soul. It stays at the threshold, imagining endlessly but never arriving.

Over the past 37 years, Hungary mutated. But not quite in the direction people hoped after what 1989 had promised. With Orbán, one could almost say the mutation went into reverse. Counterfactuality is what, despite everything, kept alive the hope of completion.

Orbán's move was to offer a false exit. We have arrived. Stop dreaming, we are here! In a way, liminality was suspended. He imposed his change without being willing to do the necessary work with the country.

Now, after April 12th, Hungary's liminality is reanimated. The promises have been made. The long-hoped-for mutation must begin, and the nation wants to believe that this time, it will be complete. And counterfactuality has to do something it has not had to do before. It is no longer imagining that change is possible. It has to imagine what the change should look like.

That is what this project is trying to observe. Not just institutional repair. Something harder and longer. The reconstruction of a society's ability to imagine what it wants to become, and then to actually become it.

No government can accomplish that alone. No election produces it. It is slow, cultural, uncertain. It may also be the only thing that matters in the end.

Gabor Farkas hosts the podcast inSUBSTANTIA. He is beginning a documentary, podcast series and book on Hungary after the 2026 election, and is relocating to Budapest in August 2026.