Celebrity Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

‘But he has nothing on at all!’ Underground videos

targeting Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s celebrity
politician

Anna Szemere

To cite this article: Anna Szemere (2020): ‘But he has nothing on at all!’ Underground
videos targeting Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s celebrity politician, Celebrity Studies, DOI:
10.1080/19392397.2020.1800668

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2020.1800668

Published online: 05 Aug 2020.

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CELEBRITY STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2020.1800668

‘But he has nothing on at all!’ Underground videos targeting

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s celebrity politician
Anna Szemere
Independent Scholar

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article argues that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has Received 22 November 2018
established a monarch-like celebrity status and exploited it to Accepted xx xxx xxxx
systematically dismantle the checks and balances of democratic KEYWORDS
polity. Drawing on nationalist mythology, local traditions of person­ Celebrity; politics; populism;
ality cult, and media techniques to personalise the politics, Orbán Hungary; Orbán; popular
has fashioned himself as Hungary’s crownless king. In the absence culture
of effective political contestation, a significant pocket of resistance
has been politicised art and popular culture: a culture that this
article maps out and interrogates.

Introduction
The convergence of celebrity culture, populism, and social media has inspired a plethora
of new inquiries into the effects of non-conventional political engagements on democ­
racy. Utilising decentralised and interactive communicational technologies, an increasing
number of politicians are repositioning themselves as media stars, thus personalising and
dramatising the political process. In a wide range of geopolitical contexts millions of
citizens, estranged from conventional party politics, become incensed or enthused by
media spectacles (Kellner 2005, 2012, 2016). Several theorists have expressed serious
concern about the impact of celebrity culture on public life (Boorstin 1992, Turner 2004,
Kellner 2005, Couldry and Markham 2007); while Gamson (1994), Street (2012), and Van
Zoonen (2005) have challenged such arguments. More recent studies (Wheeler 2013,
Alvares and Dahlgren 2016) focus on the right-wing re-appropriations of populist techni­
ques – for example, the utilisation of social media-based networks made notorious by
Donald Trump’s Twitter use.
A shortcoming of theories of celebrity culture and organised politics is, first, that they focus
on established western democracies (Hesmondhalgh, cited by Street 2012). Post-socialist
societies in Europe or developing countries, lacking decades-long traditions of civic activism
and liberal values, are more vulnerable than western ones to the gutting of democratic
institutions, especially in conjunction with media spectacles and a cult of personality. Viktor
Orbán’s Hungary (1998–2002; 2010 to present) exemplifies this combination of spectacle and
political savviness. In fact, Orbán’s Hungary has been portrayed by the international media as
a forerunner of Trump’s America and post-Brexit United Kingdom. He has established

CONTACT Anna Szemere anna.szemere@gmail.com

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. SZEMERE

a monarch-like celebrity status and exploited it to systematically dismantle the checks and
balances of democratic polity. Drawing on nationalist mythology, local traditions of person­
ality cult, and media techniques to personalise the politics, Orbán has fashioned himself as
Hungary’s crownless king.
Another shortcoming of the literature on the celebritisation of politics is its insufficient
attention to the various forms of resistance to the celebritisation of politics. Within the
framework of celebrity studies critics have addressed how negative affect一rage, scha­
denfreude, or envy一 is intrinsic to the public’s relationship to the celebrity (Connor 2005).
Drawing on psychoanalysis and cultural studies, this approach scrutinises the collective
unconscious channelled and shaped by the media (Kaite 2014). With regard to celebrity
politicians, I will argue, popular hostility is not an amorphous undercurrent of public
adoration. Instead it is articulated as political dissent either within the institutionalised
regime of politics or via various genres of pop culture including jokes, viral videos and
memes, and various hybrid media texts (Orkibi 2016, Lampland and Nadkarny 2016,
Glózer 2016). Straddling celebrity and resistance studies as well as media critique, this
paper maps out Orbán’s trajectory as a politician and the measures he has taken to veer
away from liberal democracy utilising his cult of celebrity. Subsequently, I proceed to
discuss how this phenomenon engendered public hostility and became articulated,
besides organised opposition, in satirical videos. Through a close reading of the under­
ground animation artist Attila Huszár’s work, I will demonstrate the inimical underbelly of
Orbán’s popularity with its counternarrative revolving around the prime minister as
a national anti-hero.

From Victor to ‘Victator’

The pun ‘Victator’ refers to the prime minister’s controversial career spanning three
decades from the irreverent young liberal leader of Fidesz to right-wing populist.
Orbán’s breakthrough transpired during the 1989 transition with his revolutionary speech
at the re-burial of the martyr prime minister of 1956, Imre Nagy. A few years later his
autocratic tendencies grew evident when he single-handedly fired the co-founders of the
party for disagreeing with his strategies. From the mid-1990s Fidesz moved from liberal­
ism to a centre-right nationalist anti-communist position and won the 1998 elections.
During this first mandate, Orbán managed to concentrate power, not abstaining from
dishonourable methods to deal with his political enemies. After losing the 2002 elections
to the socialist liberal coalition, new party statutes within Fidesz turned it into a model of
totalitarianism by stipulating not only that the first leader cannot be removed but also his
freedom to appoint and dismiss his officers (Kende 2012). Between 2002 and Fidesz’s
landslide victory in 2010, Orbán built up a veritable media empire and conducted vicious
campaigns against the Socialist Party, already emaciated by internal splits and the 2008
economic meltdown.
Orbán’s international notoriety derives from being the first head of state in the enlarged
European Union to proclaim a shift towards illiberal democracy (Magyar 2013, Kornai 2015,
Péteri 2014). His divisive personality and style of ruling have spawned abundant academic
and journalistic commentary (Kende 2012, Széky 2014, Tóth 2014, Szilágyi and Bozóki 2015).
Christopher Adam (2016) offers a succinct description of the system:
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 3

The populist Orbán regime is not based on any coherent ideology. It cannot be described
as conservative, nor is it based on free market principles. It is “Christian Democrat” only in
name and, of course, it is not social democratic in any way. Mr. Orbán’s regime is based
purely on its ability to satisfy the worldly needs of a very large nomenclature that has been
built around it. Its survival is based on instilling loyalty through fear–-threats of loss of
employment, making life difficult for politically wayward businesses through punitive
action or character assassination–-and once loyalty is achieved, it is rewarded by gifts
and a stable existence.

According to Alvares and Dahlgren (2016) populism is a ‘slippery signifier’ lacking

a political colour independent of its discursive context. The lack of coherence in the
Fidesz’s ideology, too, derives from what Péter Krekó (2014) calls its chameleonic
nature, ‘with an ability to adapt to changing social and political circumstances and to
new popular demands very quickly.’ Bálint Magyar (2016) explains that ‘[it] relies on
ideological templates of various sorts’ such as ‘God’, ‘homeland’, ‘family’, ‘work-based
society’ deployed according to the demands of various political situations (230–234).
Magyar’s scheme is centred on the metaphor of the ‘mafia’ to characterise Fidesz’s
ruling: an autocratic, loyalty-based, and polyp-like oligarchy whose organising princi­
ple is self-interest and corruption. Every facet of the system – from the judiciary to
culture and education, from civil organisations to banking and taxing – is colonised
by the Orbán clan (the ‘adopted family’) expropriating public and EU. funds to
maximise their private wealth. Instead of violating the laws and Constitution, they
rewrite them (Vörös 2016). A left-wing economist, Erzsébet Szalai (2014), argues that
Magyar’s theory of the mafia state is a ‘journalistic exaggeration’ and the Fidesz
governments merely wrenched power away from the socialist and liberal elites. Yet
no one questions Kende’s claim (Kende 2012) that Orbán’s leadership and transfor­
mative charisma is the decisive element of Hungary’s autocratic turn.

Orbán’s oratorical skills and the populist spectacle

Szilágyi and Bozóki (2015) have studied Orbán’s rhetorical performance starting with
his first emblematic pro-government speech at the Imre Nagy reburial ceremony in
1989 and state that this speech was a model for all of them over the next two
decades. In 1989 the country stood at the threshold of a major transformation from
communism to multiparty democracy. Yet even in 2002, after a lost election, Orbán
continued to speak as a revolutionary persuading his audience that the country was
just about to experience a ‘genuine regime change’. Fidesz fulfilled its leader’s vision
and carried out drastic antidemocratic moves. Crucially, Orbán was orating on behalf
of the ‘nation’ rather than his own party, consistently using the first-person plural ‘we’
as agents of change. But whereas in 1989 the pronoun ‘we’ signified a pro-democracy
majority, in 2002 Orbán’s use of ‘we’ no longer referred to a unified citizenry euphori­
cally shaking off 40 years of state socialism; this time the country was deeply divided
along party lines. The rhetorical tools presenting him as the leader of ‘all Hungarians’
(including the 5 million beyond the borders!), however, excluded the opposition as
‘alien-hearted’: including socialists, liberals, and all other dissenters from the national
community. The antisemitic connotations of his language were also difficult to miss.
4 A. SZEMERE

Orbán and the Holy Crown

‘What is Orbán’s mania of royalty about? Does he fancy becoming a king indeed?’, asked
a user of ‘Gyakorikerdesek.hu’ (), a website offering answers to questions that ‘you did not
dare to ask anywhere else.’ ‘But who’d wish the royalty back?’, they continued, followed
by a comparison between Stephen the First, Hungary’s first king ‘decimating his own
Hungarians’ and Orbán’s erasure of the ‘republic’ from Hungary’s name in the revised
constitution.1 Finally, the poster asks in bewilderment if a rumour about the government’s
plan to relocate into the [Royal] Castle was credible: one that has since materialised.
Orbán’s restoration of the monarchy has been predicted, disputed, ridiculed, fantasised,
complained, and worried about ever since the first Fidesz government. Part of his regal
aspiration is rooted in his desire to eliminate what he termed a ‘dual field of power.’ In
2010 he predicted that “in the upcoming fifteen to twenty years [. . .] Hungarian politics
may not be determined by a political arena fraught by ‘ceaseless petty debates based on
differing values’, but by “a large hegemonic party evolving over time, a central field of
power that would set the national agenda in a natural manner.2
Autocrats do not necessarily act like monarchs. Orbán, however, reaches back to the
cult of the Holy Crown, which led to its incorporation into the country’s coat of arms after
the end of communism, and historically signifies the marriage of Christianity with ruling
Hungary via the concept of ‘a thousand years of statehood’: the backbone of Miklós
Horthy’s irredentist, regime in the interwar era.3 Horthy, championing an ethno-
nationalist Christian ideology, defied the Trianon Treaty rectifying the disintegration of
the (Austro-) Hungarian Monarchy. He was the first to fashion himself as the crownless
king of ‘St Stephen’s lands’ awaiting better times. The ethos of Greater (pre-Trianon)
Hungary was thus bound up with a monarchy whose legitimacy was rooted in Christian
dogma. Territorial revisionism subterraneously persisted during socialism only to erupt
and mobilise the right wing after 1989.4 Orbán has adhered to the tradition by memor­
ialising the architects of the Horthy-era.
When Hungary commemorated its 1000th anniversary in 2000, “[t]ens of thousands of
Hungarians lined the streets to see the Holy Crown, the Orb, the Sword and the Sceptre
being taken to Parliament’’ from the National Museum (Nemes 2000). The Crown was re-
inaugurated as a national emblem, whose interpretation ranged from purely symbolic,
through substantive, to sacred. The Cult of the Holy Crown has forcefully shaped
Hungary’s post-socialist politics. First, it eroded the separation between state and
church (Gábor 2013) enabling the right to stigmatise religious, cultural, and sexual
minorities. Second, in legitimising the claim for pre-Trianon territories, it destabilised
political relations with Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Third, since the European
migrant crisis of 2015 the Holy Crown has provided ideological grounding for Orbán
to step up as a protector of a white Christian Hungary, and even white Christian Europe.
Given this ultraconservative ideological, political, and legal framework, the prime min­
ister could effortlessly vindicate the right to follow in Horthy’s footsteps and take
possession of the Royal Castle. Reinventing himself as a postliberal Eurosceptic mon­
arch, Orbán offers a disturbing case of the celebritisation of politics whereby he
rekindled popular nationalist sentiments related to Hungary’s long, unprocessed trauma
of frustrated nationhood (Feischmidt et al. 2014). Orbán’s power as the crownless king
of Hungary, however, is not uncontested.
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 5

Celebrity cult and political resistance

Celebrity cult cloaked in the mythicisation of national history, Christianity, and the politics
of grievance served as a potent tool for Orbán to build up his image as the nation’s hero. It
begs the question how effectively political celebritization can work for a politically divided
citizenry (Szilágyi and Bozóki 2015) afflicted with widening social inequities, massive
poverty, and a host of other unresolved social problems (see, e.g. Krémer 2013, Orosz
and Kollányi 2014, Böröcz 2019)? Celebrity cult is both a technology and an effect of ruling
(Goscilo 2013, Povedák 2014), yet it can turn back on itself.5 I argue that the celebritization
of politics is a polarising technology. While fostering citizen-fans’ adulation or loyalty, it
alienates and provokes animosity among the sceptics and the oppositional. Orbán’s
celebrity cult has been entangled with a set of well-orchestrated legislative, juridical,
and policy measures resulting in the monopolisation of the media market, the shuttering
of NGOs, the disabling of the independent juridical system, and the rigging of the
electoral system. (Meanwhile, of course, these policies further alienated or mobilised
the dissenters.) In addition, his celebrity cult is shored up with such time-honoured tactics
of autocratic ruling such as scapegoating and the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
While it is impossible to disentangle how much disgruntlement about the regime consists
of the ‘celebrity component’, it is safe to contend that, for large groups in society, such
techniques produce the opposite reaction than intended. The personalisation and dra­
matisation of populist politics have created its mirror image in the personalisation of
organised and cultural resistance.

Civic resistance in Orbánia6

Orbán’s ‘kingdom’ has been provoking an almost continuous wave of protests, although
observers dispute their potency and magnitude.7 Despite the fourth re-election of Fidesz
in 2018, its adversaries on the left and the right of the political spectrum outnumber its
supporters. In the interim elections of 2019, Budapest and several other cities voted for
oppositional mayors, demonstrating the efficacy of collaboration across an ideologically
and politically colourful resistance to the ruling party.
Early on, Fidesz attempted to lure away votes from the extreme right Jobbik party
via symbolic gestures to ultranationalist causes by setting up a monument in central
Budapest in memory of the ‘victims of the German invasion in 1944’, thus white­
washing Hungary’s complicity with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and the Roma
(see András 2014).8 Street names referencing the communist era were removed and
replaced by names of Horthy-era notorieties. Fidesz also kowtowed to nativists by
granting a major national award to the ultra-right rock group Kárpátia (444 2016) and
memorialising József Nyírő, a writer, and fascist sympathiser (Kirchik 2012). In 2016,
the government awarded a premier national honour to Zsolt Bayer – co-founder of
Fidesz and Orbán’s close friend – infamous for his offensive invectives against mino­
rities like the Roma and the Jews.9 Only the intervention of foreign diplomats could
prevent the erection of a statue in the mid-size city of Székesfehérvár, of yet another
WW2-era politician associated with antisemitic legislation, Bálint Hóman.10 Bayer’s
award caused such offence that more than hundred previous awardees – scientists,
writers, artists, musicians, civic leaders – returned their badges. Furthermore, since its
6 A. SZEMERE

inauguration, the Szabadság tér monument has been decried by ongoing protests and
a spontaneously created exhibit of Holocaust-related documents to demonstrate the
falsehood of the statue’s intended message.
A large array of social and political issues have been on civil dissenters’ agenda.
Between 2010 and 2014, a movement called ‘One Million for the Freedom of Hungarian
Press’ (Milla) held numerous mass rallies to take a stand against the revamped media law
curtailing the freedom of press and civil organisations. Another movement, ‘The City Is for
Everyone’, has been fighting to abolish the 2013 ruling that criminalised homelessness.
And in 2014, a planned tax on internet use provoked such a massive protest march in
Budapest that the measure had to be rescinded. The movement ‘I Want to Teach’
(Tanítanék) mobilised thousands of educators, students, and parents against the govern­
ment’s overreach into educational matters. Meanwhile, healthcare workers have been
organising, although less successfully, against disgraceful work conditions and salaries
that have sunk below subsistence levels (Nők Lapja Café, 2016). The Defenders of the Liget
(Ligetvédők) resorted to civil disobedience to rebel against the mammoth project to move
government offices into the Royal Castle, while relocating the National Library and
National Gallery, formerly hosted in the Castle, to the ‘Liget’, Budapest’s equivalent of
Central Park. Undoubtedly, the outrage about the Liget project was fuelled by Orbán’s
‘regal’ aspirations.
Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the US, the Fidesz government has
been more brazenly reinforcing its ‘central field of power’. The most high-profile populist
campaigns involved scapegoating the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros for
the migrant crisis of Europe. Soros’s two landmark institutions originally housed in
Budapest – the Open Society Foundations and the Central European University – found
their activities directly jeopardised as a result. The OSF moved its headquarters to Berlin,
while the CEU has relocated to Vienna. In response, a number of solidarity demonstrations
took place in several European cities including Budapest itself. While the most visible form
of anti-government resistance has been street demonstrations and carnival-like public
gatherings, subterranean forms of protest have been thriving as well. The remainder of
this article will focus on dissent created and circulated by internet-based media.

Participatory culture, DIY, and dissent

‘Patterns of media consumption’, according to Henry Jenkins (2006), ‘have been pro­
foundly altered by a succession of new media technologies which enable average citizens
to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recircula­
tion of media content.’ (p.554) The emergence of ‘participatory culture’ dates back to the
photocopier, used to powerful effect in the dissemination of samizdats: illegal pamphlets
that circumvented censorship in communist societies that promoted alternative political
philosophies. Magnitizdat, the pop cultural cousin of the samizdat, was particularly wide­
spread in Russia, propagating via cassette tapes a repertoire of singer-songwriters banned
in official media. Self-produced and spontaneously circulated cassette tapes of under­
ground rock bands formed the backbone of a resistant Hungarian subculture throughout
the 1980s (Szemere 2001).
Digital cameras and audio sampling were the first technologies allowing consumers to
play with mass cultural texts and create their own versions by ‘cutting and pasting’
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 7

techniques or adding original parts. These days, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) cultural producers
need but a laptop and internet access to enter the media marketplace. DIY culture is often
charged with countercultural impulses as exemplified by punk rock, underground or early
hip hop, and culture jamming rooted in the traditions of Situationism. Political culture
jamming operates in a similar manner: its activists de- and re-contextualise hegemonic
texts to knock off political ideas and concepts propagated by mainstream media.
Eithan Orkibi (2016) examined the online movement of insults triggered by the former
French prime minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, to conclude that the pop culturisation of dissent
can connect the elite with the vox populi, creating a genuine public sphere and promoting
change. Political humour, however, can serve a variety of causes and ideologies. István
Povedák (2014) has collected and analysed jokes, anecdotes, pre-election rhymes and
postmodern ‘folktales’, created and transmitted by Orbán’s ardent supporters. Most
artefacts portray him lovingly as a hero and a saviour, while the satires target his political
enemies. Alternatively, memes poking fun at Orbán and Fidesz reveal diverse political
motives and stances. I acknowledge but refrain here from analysing humour attacking the
prime minister for his alleged Roma (Gypsy) origins as if it would explain the corruption
and inhumanity of his governance. I am only concerned with pop cultural dissent that
lampoons Orbán and top Fidesz officials for their policies and ethical conduct tied up with
the prime minister’s celebrity status.
Pop cultural political dissent mobilises affect – anger, frustration, disdain – rather than
utilising rational discourse to make a point. In this regard, it is the inverse of the jokes,
anecdotes, and rhymes that praise and idolise a politician. And to the extent that the latter
represents the folklorisation of celebrity cult, the satires and parodies poking fun at
a celebrity politician turn the cult inside out: The nation’s hero reappears as its oppressor
and tormentor, an anti-hero; his charisma and idealised bodily features become reversed
as ‘he’ resurfaces in variously grotesque, repulsive bodies inciting ridicule and disgust,
instead of admiration and adulation.

‘The deforms are working’: the Huszas Videos

A producer of 3D animated commercials and Hungarianised software, Attila Huszár is the
prolific creator of the satiric Huszas Videos on YouTube, targeting Orbán and his cabinet
members.11 Largely ignored by the mainstream media, his so-called ‘trash videos’, of
which the Orbán-themed number several hundred and boast hundreds of thousands of
views, some even half a million. Some critics dismiss Huszár’s work as a waste of talent
because of his obsessive re-telling of fundamentally the same story in dozens of variants.
(See, for example, Acs 2014.) Despite the uneven quality of his output, Huszár’s cartoons
display an imaginative and clever mind. His single-minded focus on Orbán is not simply
a personal dislike: it represents popular anger conveyed in similar tone in daily exchanges
on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.12 Not only do Huszár’s videos rehearse the
oppositional elite’s discourse; they speak on behalf of the voiceless, the poor, and the
disenfranchised, too.
Rita Glózer (2014) argues that memes represent the folklore of the late modern digital
age. Their primary function is symbolic and therapeutic in that the anti-heroes are
annihilated and humiliated, while the anti-heroes’ victims are granted visibility. Huszár’s
videos operate similarly being as they are counternarratives of Orbán’s celebrity
8 A. SZEMERE

monarchy, pointing out how the regime’s slogans of serving and protecting the nation are
in blatant contradiction to the reality of non-functioning public institutions and poverty
resultant of inhumane policies, cronyism, and duplicity. Many videos portray the prime
minister interacting with other prominent Fidesz politicians, family members, and citizens.
The latter stand for an idealised notion of ‘the people’ comprising all the righteous men
and women victimised and angered by the system. Some stories examine controversial
rulings such as the nationalisation of private pensions, exploitative public work for the
unemployed (közmunka), the punishingly high taxation of non-governmental media
advertisers, or government commissions granted to cronies circumventing competition
(The slang word for this practice is ‘mutyi’). Other stories chronicle scandals and satirise
power struggles within Fidesz and the Orbán family. Taking for granted viewer familiarity
with daily news in ‘Orbánia’, Huszár couches the pilloried act or issue in a fantastic,
grotesque, or absurd plot.
Borrowing the intro sequence from a well-known television series of animated Hungarian
folk tales, a subset of videos called ‘Orbán folk tales’ [Orbán népmesék] directly lampoon the
leader’s royalistic posturing. Besides alluding to his feudal style of granting privileges to his
sycophants, the narrative creates a stylised depiction of unified, massive discontent and fury
against an oppressor of mythical proportions. Like those of the spoofed folk tales, the
Hungarian people appear to be poor, overworked, and degraded, yet capable of acting on
their grievances. The Manichaean ethic of these fables implies re-imagining solidarity and
revolt. As opposed to hegemonic fixation on ethnicity, typically, these narratives suggest
a shared sense of dispossession and humiliation as the basis of solidarity.
The video titled ‘Orbán’s daughter is getting married’ [Orbán lánya férjhez megy] is
a humorous inversion of the real-life, highly mediatised event. King Orbán, proclaimed to
be the only honest man in the royal court, seeks another honest man for his daughter.
None of the cabinet members of Fidesz, lined up as suitors, qualifies. The single honest
one turns out to be an unemployed man on public work. The story ends with the king
blessing the wedding, but the humble young couple refuses to accept the wealth (‘half of
which is stolen’, as the viewer is informed) offered to them. Instead, they decide to live or,
actually, die of hunger as public workers. Other folk narratives picture Orbán as the evil
ruler defeated – beaten up, shamed, imprisoned in a mental asylum, or murdered – by his
enraged subjects. Huszár’s retelling of H. C. Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Suit’ (‘The
Dwarf’s New Suit’ [A törpe új ruhája] leaves the original plot intact except for being
interspersed with political actualities and derisory nicknames for the ‘courtiers’ (E.g.
‘Tony the half-witted’ stands for Antal Rogán, Orbán’s Chief of Staff).
Soundtracks are integral to the comic effect. Huszár’s musical choices encompass pop,
techno, hip hop, reggae, Hungarian, and Roma folk and ‘wedding rock’ (lakodalmas rock).13
Some of the most effective cartoons use Hungarian ‘oldies’ with changed lyrics and voices. ‘The
Telephone is Crying’ [Sír a telefon] is a 1970s tearjerker featuring a phone conversation
between a lovesick man and the young daughter of the woman whose heart he wants to
win back. Animated videos often resort to mixing heads and voices of their characters for
comic effect (Glózer, ibid.). In this video, too, on one end of the phone we see the little girl
speaking in Huszár’s mutated voice and montaged together with his face. At the other end is
Orbán sitting in his office demanding to speak to the girl’s mother. In contrast to the lovesick
character’s gentle voice in the original pop song, the prime minister’s tone is intimidating or
manipulative as he alternates commands (‘Wake her up!’), with threats (‘Let me speak to her, or
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 9

I’ll take her pension away – again!’) and propagandistic statements (‘Believe me, we are living
better than four years ago!’). As to this claim, the girl’s pseudo-naïve responses indicate
otherwise. From these exchanges, the viewer learns about a number of major social anomalies
such as the clericalization of public education, the mass emigration of physicians, poor public
morale (‘our neighbours complain too’), the prime minister’s preoccupation with soccer, and
widespread rumours about his mental health.
In one of the several pieces entitled ‘Orbania’, Huszár uses a ballad, ‘If I Were a Rose’ [Ha
én rózsa volnék], banned by the communist regime for lamenting the Soviet crackdown
on the Czechoslovak reform movement.14 Itself adapted to an old folk song, the ballad is
a moving statement against tyranny. After the regime change, it was revived as
a singalong ‘anthem’ at rock concerts, a collective celebration of the new democracy.
Huszár’s re-written lyrics subvert the solemnity of the song in recounting, with vicious
sarcasm, three scandalous events: former Hungarian president Pál Schmidt’s removal for
allegedly plagiarising his 1992 doctoral theses; the nationalisation of private pensions,
one of the first acts marking the ‘Orbán regime’s U-turn from democracy’ (Kornai ibid); and
the dramatic price hikes and tax cuts in 2010. Harsher humour is conveyed through the
sequence of photoshopped images including a portrait of Orbán with two of his ministers
fashioned as three little girls in folk costume followed by a tacepao-style propaganda
report to reassure the leader that all is wonderful in Orbánia!
This piece displays a complexity unusual in the genre of ‘trash videos’, with its choice of
a ballad about the loss of, and desire for, political freedom. It mixes melancholy with
vitriolic verbal and visual discourse, not merely by reiterating the analogy between János
Kádár’s Hungary and ‘Orbánia’ but by inviting viewers to associate the song with hope in
the wake of regime change and remind them how such hopes became thwarted. Huszár’s
satire effectively pops out the celebrity bubble by pointing out multiple layers of
inauthenticity in the regime’s day-to-day operations. First, the stories referring to corrup­
tion and pedestrian-style cheating suggest a total lack of integrity among the Fidesz
leadership. Second, the nationalisation of pensions tells a story tacitly likening the regime
to Kádár’s in that an overbearing state brazenly relocates the savings of citizens without
seeking their consent. The inauthenticity of this move is exacerbated by the professed
anticommunism of Fidesz with its repeated claims to have been the legitimate regime
changers as opposed to their socialist/liberal predecessors., the alleged heirs and bene­
ficiaries of communism. Finally, the third facet of inauthenticity is shown in the govern­
ment’s exploitation of folklore in the service nationalist demagoguery, as suggested by
portraying male politicians as village girls in traditional costume.
The grotesque manner in which the head of state and his staff are rendered adds
pungency. Whether appearing as the king of a folktale or a contemporary politician,
Orbán is caricatured as ridiculously short. Titles like ‘The Dwarf of Felcsút’15 [A felcsúti
törpe]; ‘The Dwarf’s New Suit’ [A törpe új ruhája], or the spoof of ‘Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs’ [Hófehérke és a hét törpe] where he stars as the single dwarf surrounded by
seven Snow Whites (his cabinet members), render him ludicrous, foolish, and insignificant.
His exaggerated shortness signifies moral smallness. Like the above analysed Orbania,
numerous cartoons infantilise Orbán by portraying him immature, even wearing a diaper,
or with a baby bottle of milk on his desk, suggesting ineptitude for the office he
occupies.16 In addition, Orbán’s physical smallness expresses the artist’s desire to see
10 A. SZEMERE

him powerless, turned into the opposite of Hungary’s invincible leader. Storylines where
popular exasperation puts a brutal end to his reign underscores this interpretation.
Besides reduced to toddler-size, Orbán, a handsome man by conventional standards, is
re-imagined as physically repulsive with a large potbelly and a bizarrely shapeless build.
His cronies, though depicted either as taller (in order to make Orbán’s dwarfishness
visible) or reduced to childish proportions are no less attractive in their cheap, shabby
clothes and weak bodies. Again, Huszár resorts to comic reversal in his caricature of the
Fidesz elite routinely attacked in the oppositional media for their lavish lifestyle.
Gender bending and cross-dressing are a time-honoured source of humour in western
comedic culture, from Shakespearian comedies to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and from
Hollywood movies like Some Like It Hot to Tootsie, owing to its destabilising of essentialised
gender constructs and heteronormativity (Butler 1990, Garber 1992, Morris 2007). Evidently,
the humorous effect (or lack thereof) of transvestitism is bound up with the broader cultural
and historical context of which it forms a part. The more rigid the gender constructs and the
more anxiously male-female boundaries are policed in a particular social milieu, the more
potent is the subversive and comic effect of cross-dressing.17 In Huszár’s Orbán parodies,
male characters are frequently cross-dressed, while female bodies often carry a male head.
In ‘Orbán’s Daughter Is Getting Married’ the shapely blonde witch, personified as Gabriella
Selmeczi, a Fidesz MP, is the one to violently demand sexual favours from the prospective
suitor rather than tempting him; the bride, Ráhel Orbán, appears not as a meek young lady
but as a belly dancer wearing her father face, an allusion to the regime’s nepotism. The
feminisation of men, especially, tears at the regime’s haughty machismo and appeals to
rekindled anxieties about the erosion of male privilege and heteronormativity.18
The cartoons’ favoured setting is the party or the ball where the Fidesz politicians are
dancing awkwardly to the sounds of low-brow pop music. (E.g. ‘On the Thieves’ Ball of
Felcsút’ [A felcsúti tolvajbálon], ‘8 Hours of Public Work’ [8 óra közmunka]). Aside from
being a source of further ridicule, dancing stands as a metaphor for the politicians’
decadence funded by the ‘mutyis’: that is, stealing and wasting the country’s assets.
Other recurrent settings include the jail and the hospital as desired or divined sites of
punishment and penitence meted out by the righteous people triumphing over their evil
rulers. In the hospital where Orbán lands after beaten up by his enraged subjects, he has
to face, as an additional revenge, the repercussions of a severely underfunded health care
system: a sign informs the visitors that all the doctors left the country and the service is
terminated. On the bed next to the injured Orbán lies a skeleton.
Even in videos where the setting is nondescript, there is no mistaking the country, thanks
to the numerous emblems associated with government institutions and propaganda. The
logo of the National Tobacco Store stands for Orbán’s re-organisation of the domestic retail
of cigarettes occasioned by the takeover from multinationals by a monopoly with close ties
to the government.19 Government billboards flooding Hungary’s public spaces fill the
symbolic world of Orbánia, with inverted meaning.20 Linguistic humour is deployed to
subvert the slogan ‘Hungarian Reforms Are Working’ where the word ‘reforms’ in the above-
cited claim is deformed by substituting the letter ‘d’ for the letter ‘r’ to state: ‘Hungarian
deforms are working’ (‘The bleary-eyed public worker’ [A csipásszemű közmunkás]). On
another defaced billboard the same slogan portrays a worker with his own comment:
‘Only in Hungary do working people starve to death.’ Billboards about the reforms or
immigration are used as a template in multiple videos, adding satiric commentary loosely
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 11

related to the main narrative. A ubiquitous billboard announcing ‘Hungary is performing

better’ is altered to claim that ‘Viktor Orbán is performing crappily’. Thus, a positive state­
ment is upended; and the blame for Hungary’s implied poor performance is shifted to the
head of state, offering a mirror image to the personalisation and celebrity cult in the
dominant political discourse. Other signs function similarly. A ‘folk tale’ whose young hero
sets off to kill the wicked ruler includes a real estate storefront inviting clients with an image
of the current cabinet member Antal Rogán’s disembodied head with a sign: ‘Real Estate
Sham. For ass-kissers and buddies’. Rogán, former mayor of Budapest’s elegant fifth district,
gained notoriety for having sold several dozen real estate between 2007 and 2010 to high-
positioned ‘clients’ well below market value, squandering an estimated ten billion Forints.21
The funniest storefront carries a sign in Arabic letters: a sarcastic projection of the future
for a country whose leaders were the first and loudest voice in the European Union to fight
the immigration of Muslims. Related to this crack is a scene where public workers are forced
to offer a morning prayer for Orbán. The murmurs include Arabic voices worshipping Allah.
Upon hearing it, the foreman rebukes the Muslims. In yet another video, a group of people is
standing on a square listening to Orbán’s address. Among them is a dark-skinned man in
traditional Arab outfit. In mixing Muslim individuals and Arabic store signs in his ‘landscape’,
Huszár does not simply suggest that the Orbán government’s harsh resistance to the EU’s
migrant quota will prove eventually unsuccessful; he envisions a multicultural country
where Muslims would be natural allies of the ill-treated Hungarian population.

Conclusion
Political celebrities in contemporary society are not only revered, obeyed, or eulogised,
but criticised, confronted, and ridiculed. Viktor Orbán, similarly to Donald Trump or
Vladimir Putin, is no exception to the rule. Since 2010, however, spaces for critical
discourse in Hungary have shrunk dramatically. Through governmental control over
education, art, and the media, Fidesz’s narrative is close to reigning supreme. In
a political culture where autocracy and the cult of personality have deep historical
roots, symbolism and rituals tend to enjoy pride of place over rational discourse and
deliberation. Pro-democratic forces as well have resort to symbolism and rituals (such as
street demonstrations, individual gestures of protest, obstruction of official festivities22)
but also to humour and satire circulated on- and off-line. The cartoons analysed in this
essay may be considered heirs to the everyday practice of telling political jokes, a form of
resistance prevalent in state socialist societies (see Lampland and Nadkarny, 2016). The
contribution of either telling jokes or circulating satirical cartoons to social change is
impossible to assess. Their significance, besides their obvious therapeutic and entertain­
ment value, lies in uncovering, on a day-to-day basis, the multiple facets of inauthenticity
and the Debordian spectacle (2006) intrinsic to celebrity cults surrounding populist and
autocratic politicians. The likes of Huszár’s cartoons offer biting and clever counter-
narratives to contest those constructed by Orbán’s propaganda and image-making
apparatus.

Notes
1. See Magyarország Alaptörvénye [Hungary’s Fundamental Law] 25 April 2011. p. 2.
12 A. SZEMERE

2. Viktor Orbán ‘Retaining the Hungarian Qualities of Living’ A kötcsei beszéd. [‘Megőrizni
a létezés magyar minőségét’ The Speech at Kötcse]. Available from: http://www.fidesz.hu/
hirek/2010-02-17/meg337rizni-a-letezes-magyar-min337seget/.
3. According to a legend, St. Stephen, Hungary’s first ruler, famed for imposing Christianity on
the country in 1000, had no offspring to whom to bequeath his throne. He dedicated his
crown and, symbolically, his country, to Virgin Mary. Regnum Marianum (Mary’s Land) was an
early name for Hungary.
4. Following the Berlin Wall’s fall, József Antall, head of the first postsocialist government, raised
eyebrows by declaring himself leader of ‘15 million Hungarians’, only about 10 million of
whom lived within the borders. He primarily referred to the ethnic Hungarians of the
neighbouring Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Serbia-Montenegro and, secondarily, the émigré
diaspora worldwide. Orbán’s regime took this ethnonationalist concept of citizenship further
in 2011 when granting dual citizenship to all extraterritorial non-resident Hungarians in the
name of national reunification beyond the borders.
5. Studying Donald Trump’s election campaign and presidency suggests that his superstar
celebrity gimmicks, mixed with his narcissistic personality traits, have provided popular
culture with an inexhaustible source of subversive humour, possibly more than any other
aspects of his presidency (Lichter and Farnsworth 2020).
6. The name is a sarcastic reference to Orbán’s Hungary, widespread in oppositional and social
media.
7. In a televised debate, Miklós Gáspár Tamás expressed concern that the Hungarian intelligen­
tsia as a group failed to react with outrage to what he called ‘the elimination of Hungarian
culture, traditionally centrd around journals and book publishers’, most of which the govern­
ment forced out of business. In contradistinction, Péter Hamvay stated that the intelligentsia
‘has been doing nothing but protesting during the six years of Orbán’s rule [since 2010].’ See
„De hát ez hazugság!” – TGM kiborult az ATV-ben. 21 May 2016. Online. http://www.atv.hu/
belfold/20160521-de-hat-ez-hazugsag-tgm-kiborult-az-atv-ben/(Last accessed 11/20/2018).
8. Before the elections of 2018, Jobbik shifted its politics from ultraright to moderate conser­
vatism, denouncing its racist and antisemitic roots, while Fidesz has assumed a more extreme
right position expressed, primarily, by its fervently anti-immigration policies.
9. In order to mitigate international allegations of antisemitism, the Orbán government granted
the Order of St Stephen of Hungary to Imre Kertész, twelve years after he had won the Literary
Nobel Prize. Likewise, the makers of the Holocaust-themed Son of Saul received three
Kossuth prizes (the highest national award) following the film’s winning top awards at film
festivals including Cannes, Toronto, and Hollywood’s Academy Awards.
10. ‘US joins Hungary protest over pro-Nazi Homan statue’, BBC, 14 December 2015.http://www.
bbc.com/news/world-europe-35091071.
11. https://www.youtube.com/user/huszas.
12. Numerous Hungarian-language Facebook groups are dedicated to railing against Orbán,
such as: ‘I’m ashamed that Viktor Orbán is Hungary’s prime minister’; ‘My Message to Viktor
Orbán!’; ‘Viktor Orbán shouldn’t be Hungary’s prime minister!’ ‘Does Viktor Orbán Lie?’,
‘Orbán! Hungary is not yours!’ and others.
13. For a depiction of wedding rock, see Lange (1996).
14. At the time of submitting the last version of this paper, I found that the video ‘Orbania’ had
been remade, satirising more recent news stories with fitting imagery.
15. Felcsút is Orbán’s native village.
16. Ridiculing dictators by likening them to babies is not uncommon as exemplified by
a caricature of Kim Jong-un with his nuclear ‘toys’ by Anita Kunz on the New Yorker’s cover,
18 January 2016. The metaphor recalls the adage attributed to Mark Twain: ‘Politicians and
diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.’
17. Drawing on Freud’s theory of jokes (2003), I consider the pleasures of humour as an effect of
satisfying unconscious desires. In a repressive environment, therefore, sharing jokes consti­
tutes a small act of subversion.
 CELEBRITY STUDIES 13

18. After the 2018 re-election, Orbán added one token woman, Andrea Bártfai-Mager to his
previously all-male cabinet. Of the 199 active representatives of the unicameral Parliament,
only 13% are women (up from 7%). The dismal gender distribution is most incriminating for
the ruling party: of the 117 member Fidesz faction less than 10% are women. In the same year
the government, taking advantage of its newly instituted control over academia, cracked on
feminism by shutting down the country’s two degree programmes in gender studies. For
a discussion on the relationship between populism and the conservative assault on gender as
‘ideology’, see Kováts (2018).
19. A former shop owner sued Hungary at the European Court of Human Rights for losing his
livelihood as a result of the government’s taking away his concession. The Court ruled in favour
of him. For details, see http://www.freehungary.hu/index.php/56-hirek/3528-the-european-
court-of-human-rights-rules-against-hungary-in-tobacco-gate [Accessed: 16 October 2016].
20. Similarly, months prior to the ‘quota referendum’ in the offline world of street art, numerous
dissident billboards appeared. Using the same template as the official ones, starting with the
ubiquitous question ‘Did you know?’ (‘Tudta?’), these signs put out by the Kétfarkú Kutyapárt
(Two-Tailed Dog Party) dedicating its activity to public political satire, ridiculed the official anti-
migration signs by overt antigovernment propaganda (such as ‘Did You Know? Most crimes of
corruption are committed by politicians.’) or covert one by undermining an official statement
with nonsensical humour (‘Did you know? 70 weasels can clog an average size drain.’).
21. See Antonia Rádi’s investigative article where the entire network of ‘politicians, godfathers,
widows’ is mapped. Available from: https://atlatszo.hu/2015/01/09/belvarosi-ingatlanmutyi
-a-rogan-habony-pinter-tengely/[Accessed 2 September 2016].
22. In commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution, the Prime Minister’s speech in
front of the Parliament building was obstructed by dissident noise makers, a few of whom
continued their activity even after being physically attacked by individuals in the crowd
(Bayer 2016).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Anna Szemere studied at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and the University of California, San
Diego where she obtained her PhD in Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include
popular culture, the sociology of music, youth, gender, and communist/postcommunist societies.
Along with numerous articles and book chapters in English, Hungarian and German, she has
authored the book Up from the Underground. The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary
(2001). She has taught university courses in the United States, Canada, and Hungary. She is editor of
the multimedia journal Bloomsbury Popular Music. Currently she divides her time between
Portland, Oregon (USA) and Budapest.

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