An uneasy evening at the Danube Institute. Two days after the Hungarian elections and the decisive defeat of the fifth Orbán government, the attendees’ poise is rather strained. The auditorium — usually packed to the brim — is half-empty, and the otherwise excellent James Allen’s speech on populism and democratic representation seems almost ill-timed. There is good reason Allen’s aperçus do not quite land: A presentation titled “Elections Have Consequences” strikes the wrong chord with an audience wary of political turnover, and Allen himself does not quite know what to make of the situation. One gets the feeling that he expected a different result, and one suspects he was not alone. The Danube Institute, ensconced in the scenic Buda Hills, is one of several outposts founded during the Orbán era, when Hungary became something of a last redoubt in Europe for conservative heavyweights. The Euroskeptical circuit famously includes institutions like the state-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the tech-friendly Brain Bar, and the annually organized CPAC Hungary, but also lower-profile forums like the MCC-operated Scruton cafés, which, incidentally, serve excellent if brutally overpriced beverages. Besides Rod Dreher, John O’Sullivan, and Gladden Pappin, several fellow travelers broadly in the conservative orbit have also decided to make Hungary their new base of operations, including the more hard-right — or, if you prefer, dissident right-leaning — Mark Granza, chief editor of IM-1776. At the center stood Viktor Orbán and his inner circle. While not all of these spaces were directly government-funded, as has been claimed — more discernment in making such observations is warranted, particularly where the Danube Institute is concerned — they are in fact admirers of the now-outgoing Orbán regime, and have undoubtedly benefited from its imprimatur. This was not a one-way transaction. The prime minister’s patronage allowed him to present himself as intellectually open and worldly, a man of his time facing the flood of DEI-fueled globalism rather than the provincial leader of a semi-peripheral country, a persistent thrust of his politics since he regained power in 2010. With Orbán gone, this golden age of conservative collaboration appears to be coming to an end. At least this is what one would expect from what its major players have to say: Dreher has already announced that he would leave Hungary, curtly wishing its people all the best; Eva Vlaardingerbroek, only recently hosted at CPAC Hungary, pronounced the result catastrophic and is unlikely to further contribute to the Hungarian scene; while philosopher-cum-programmer Curtis Yarvin, who was likewise welcomed at the Danube Institute last fall, warned the “Budapest emigré crowd” that “they would be the new regime’s first targets.” Whether this really was a golden age is, in retrospect, less clear. The intellectual force behind the Budapest venture is undeniable. Brain Bar brought questions of generational health, longevity, de-extinction, and the like into a milieu they might otherwise have passed by; Hungarian Conservative publishes distinctive, often colorful pieces on everything under the sun, including art therapy and metaphysical realism, without being dragged into local media trench warfare. Danube, and the fellows invited by O’Sullivan, tended to adopt a harder, statecraft-oriented register with lectures on state neutrality and geopolitics. Unaffiliated Budapesters, like yours truly, were often welcomed at these events free of charge, and without the characteristic condescension sometimes dismissed as a beguiling Anglo-American mannerism but so galling to a continental audience. Did this network adequately use its resources to reflect on the reality of Orbán’s government or adjust its image to the Hungarian context? Mostly not. Clamorous and heavily performative events like CPAC Hungary were perceived as American goods with practically no concession to local taste. The public, despite knowing little about U.S. politics, intuitively recognized them as alien and thus suspect. The Scrutopia — pardon — of independent cafés sits somewhat awkwardly in the local landscape, and is more likely to be frequented by distinguished foreign guests. Contrast this with the homegrown Drei Raben, whose mission of reintroducing coffeehouse culture draws on late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian tradition. The bigger mistake is this scene’s misreading of Orbán’s regime and its peculiar East European characteristics. The circle praised the architectural renaissance launched to restore the capital’s historical heritage, which included remaking the Castle District according to its late Habsburg appearance. Orbán’s pronatalist policies, like tax allowances and loans to large families, were admiringly contrasted with the Western consensus thought to promote demographic decline. The main draw was Orbán’s hard line on immigration, which maps neatly onto the heroic Spenglerian image of a last stand, not to dwell on the government’s rather less exalted, and actually quite coarse and cynical, blue billboards of invading migrant hordes. There is indeed much to love in Budapest’s new clothes, and Scruton’s points on beauty and the modern world are well taken. Yet there is something unsettling in the attempt to recover an architectural style without the form of life it once conveyed. Public architecture is, or should be, the mediated expression of a community’s aspirations and anxieties. It is simply not possible to lay a 19th-century grammar over a contemporary order without it looking contrived and vacuous, especially in a country marred by constant upheaval. As for the pronatalist regime, the jury is still very much out on whether exemptions or housing subsidies actually reverse demographic decline. The evidence is, at best, contentious; and if the U.K. Spectator’s Travis Aaroe is correct in describing today’s Hungary as a languid, “tired sort of place,” as I think he is, it is difficult to imagine the malaise being overturned by fiscal sweeteners. Meanwhile, the migrant threat was used, along with COVID-19 and the Ukraine war, to sustain a permanent state of emergency at odds with the constitutional conservatism embraced by Orbán’s foreign sympathizers. The most sobering fact, however, is that the emigrés paid no heed to a degree of corruption unseen in the Visegrád countries since the ’90s transition from communism. Practically all social strata were affected. Universities were moved into politically insulated foundations, hospitals remained chronically underfunded, and companies operated by Orbán’s friends and family, including his son-in-law and former neighbor, kept turning up among the winners of Hungary’s public procurement system. A recent Financial Times investigation found that 13 businessmen linked to Orbán won about 28 billion euros in government tenders between 2010 and 2025, including 12 billion euros in EU-funded contracts. Once the regime stabilized, nepotism came to be increasingly regarded as a constitutive feature of what András Lánczi called illiberal democracy — not that Orbánism needed much theoretical justification with no credible internal opposition. All this remained, to my knowledge, unchallenged by the Budapest-based think tank circuit determined to believe, despite it all, in a Hungary-led revival of the West. Happily enough, they may also be slightly off about what the coming Magyar government has to offer. The new cabinet certainly appears more EU-friendly and better disposed toward the Atlanticist establishment than the old guard; it is also somewhat partial to familiar faces, considering the nomination of Melléthei-Barna, Magyar’s brother-in-law, as justice minister (Melléthei-Barna eventually withdrew amid criticism). It is nevertheless a far cry from the rainbow-flag-waving liberal takeover Vlaardingerbroek and others imagined. Magyar and co. seem to be committed to much the same anti-immigration measures as Orbán, and have repeatedly appealed to Hungary’s Christian heritage — an interesting move in a country more secular than advertised, though jubilant Budapesters are willing to let it pass for now. Doubtless, the emigré network will not come through unscathed. MCC’s funding will, at the very least, be sharply reduced, and some turnover is to be expected among the political appointees who sustained this sphere. But perhaps it is not yet time to strike the tents. Post-Orbán Hungary may not be as hostile to traditionalist sentiment as Yarvin prophesied. It may well accommodate an organic conservatism free of parti pris and more unapologetically rooted in Hungarian life. Joshua Bence Kun is a Hungarian former associate professor of philosophy, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Research Fellow, and current policy researcher.