At Most, Magyar Péter Arrives as a Guest Where Hungarians Are at Home

Translation of an article originally published in Hungarian by Magyar Jelen on May 24, 2025 by Tamás Lipták.

Nagyvárad was founded by Saint Ladislaus, an 11th-century Hungarian king revered as a national hero and later canonized as a saint. This sentence alone sufficiently conveys the extraordinary place this settlement holds in Hungarian history—a city that today belongs to Romania due to a peace treaty imposed upon us after World War I.

The legend of our Árpád dynasty king, though his brilliance has perhaps dimmed somewhat over the past thousand years, has still not faded and remains one of the brightest guiding lights of our identity. The legend of the knight-king still captivates children's imagination, and his heroic deeds live vividly in Hungarian public consciousness throughout the Carpathian Basin.

Perhaps this is precisely why it proves so symbolic that the deceptive mask of Magyar Péter's (a contemporary Hungarian left-liberal opposition politician) pseudo-nationalism finally fell off while heading to this ancient Hungarian city.

A forgotten national anthem, a hidden Hungarian flag, a visit to "Romanian soil"—these manifestations marked the million steps Magyar Péter took toward Nagyvárad, though he could just as easily have gone all the way to Brussels with this attitude.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that Magyar Péter called Nagyvárad "Romanian soil" and put away Hungarian national symbols at the border crossing, bringing all this baggage with him from Fidesz, where he not only grew up politically but spent nearly two decades being socialized. Magyar Péter represents not only a kind of parody of Fidesz but also its greatest indictment of what passes for "right-wing politics" in those circles.

The request "Don't bring flags or other Hungarian national symbols" slaps in the face the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who proudly display our national colors in territories separated from Hungary after World War I, who raise Hungarian or Székely flags on their homes. Those who survived as Hungarians through four decades of the wildest Romanian chauvinist communist system. Those whose doors were knocked on at dawn by masked authorities in a chauvinistic dictatorship masquerading as democracy, simply because they stood up for their Hungarian identity in word and deed, yet persevered.

Unlike this Tisza Party (Magyar Péter's left-liberal opposition political party) politician, they are not merely visiting guests but live their daily lives on their ancestral homeland, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did, and their ancestors before them. Not as guests, but at home, speaking Hungarian.