After the political earthquake in Hungary, Orbán’s Fidesz now only has a stable majority at the top of the state institutions. After the election, Péter Magyar called on the president, the top public prosecutor and other system-relevant party soldiers to resign, otherwise he would remove them by virtue of his two-thirds majority. If you believe the cultural industry’s concentrated Facebook anger during the Corona lockdowns, culture is also systemically relevant. In a country that identifies itself so much through literature and theater, it actually is.
This was also clear to Orbán, who filled all important positions with loyalists. For example with Szilveszter Ókovács, who has directed the Budapest State Opera since 2011. After the election, Ókovács didn’t even try to hide whose team he belonged to and with his first statement gave a perfect example of the kind of people who made careers under Orbán: “I was a founding member of Fidesz in 1988 and have never denied my community since then,” said the opera director, who also immediately made it clear that he wanted to stay at the State Opera until 2028: “It is neither in the advertisement nor in my contract that my term of office only applies until the change of government.”
When his contract was last extended in 2023, the Ministry of Culture’s commission voted with a large majority in favor of the application of the first bandmaster Gergely Kesselyák. The minister still chose Ókovács, who then promptly fired Kesselyák. The personnel is particularly explosive because star soprano Andrea Rost also applied for the position three years ago.
Rost had a major international career that began in the 1990s at the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival. Riccardo Muti brought her to La Scala in Milan in 1994, after which she was one of the leading international sopranos for years and sang widely at the MET in New York, including with Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. After Ókovács was confirmed in office, Rost withdrew from the opera and switched to politics. She appeared alongside Péter Magyar early on, won a direct mandate and is now considered Minister of Culture.
Actor Ervin Nagy can also have hopes for the office of Minister of Culture. He also stood by Magyar’s side from the very beginning and now entered parliament. After the election, Nagy attacked a second all-powerful Fidesz man in the cultural sector: Attila Vidnyánszky is director of the National Theater, has over a dozen other positions and is listed as the pope of Hungarian theater. Nagy described him as Orbán’s ideological henchman and said he had no place in the cultural scene.
Vidnyánszky countered that he would of course stay until 2028. He referred to his predecessor, the progressive Róbert Alföldi, who served until 2013; However, from Orbán’s first two-thirds majority in 2010, it faced strong headwinds. Vidnyánszky’s first statements after the election are also telling contemporary documents about the Orbán system: He postponed the presentation of the schedule shortly after the election on the grounds that he lacked guidance from the government and thus indirectly admitted that he had previously worked closely with the government on artistic issues.
The third all-powerful Fidesz man in the cultural sector was Csaba Káel, the head of the MüPa concert hall and ministerial representative for film. As such, he was partly responsible for the fact that filmmakers critical of the government such as Gábor Reisz (his most recent film “Explanation for Everything” won in Venice and was the opening film at the Viennale) were effectively excluded from government funding. The outgoing Minister of Culture, Balázs Hankó, confirmed in an interview for the “Presse” when asked about this shortly before the election that they would consciously support films that would make Hungarians “proud, smiling” and cited a film by Káel himself as an example.
If the new government consistently implements its program, the ideologically and party-politically motivated cultural policy should now come to an end. Tisza promised to fill boards of trustees and offices on a professional basis and to award funding without politics and transparently. The next few years will show what this will look like in concrete terms. In any case, there is hope that the days of all-powerful party soldiers at the top of the most important institutions are numbered.
