Budapest Twilight

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new regime emerged in Hungary that bears striking re semblances to the long-gone one-party commu nist system. The return to power of Viktor Orbán, who became the champion of ultra-na tionalist populism, degraded the Hungarian institutions to the point of turning a young democracy into a thinly disguised autocratic regime. In this personal chronicle, Luis G. Prado, who began visiting Budapest more than two decades ago and, falling in love with the Hungarian capi tal, moved to live there with his family, asks himself whether the time has come to leave Hungary. Is the political evolution towards au thoritarianism in Hungary irreversible? Will the Orbán regime ever find its final form? How did it reach this point in a member state of the European Union, which is a club of democra cies, no less?