The past decade has witnessed the demolition and defacement of historical monuments in various contexts across the globe, reflecting shifting national struggles over memory and identity. In contrast, Hungary under Viktor Orbán has, since 2014, embarked on a mass monument-building campaign. In the past 10 years, more than 2000 memorials and statues have been erected or renovated across the country’s 3000 settlements in the framework of a semi-disguised political campaign funded by public money.

Fidesz has integrated the trite party slogan from 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” into its strategy for achieving its ultimate goal of retaining political power. During its 15-year rule, the right-wing populist party has utilised public memory to construct a new, politically motivated historical canon to underpin its party identity.  

This does not apply exclusively to monuments and statues. Fidesz has been systematically rewriting national history by focusing on one simplistic narrative: traumas occur when the nation loses its sovereignty to foreign oppressors. This transhistorical mantra serves to support and legitimise the government’s political stance both at home and internationally. The government and Prime Minister Orbán himself profess to be heirs to the national heroes who defied oppression to regain national freedom. He then extends this historical self-identification to the members of his voter base, which creates the centre of gravity of the Fidesz universe: the nation. 

The government and Prime Minister Orbán himself profess to be heirs to the national heroes who defied oppression.

The nation is the core that repels foreign interference, military occupation, and the imposition of international treaties. Today’s occupiers, according to this narrative, are, among others, the EU, asylum seekers, the independent press, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, young people attending festivals, NGOs, Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, and LGBTQIA+ people – as well as, more generally, opposition parties and their voters. 

This framing aims to construct a bipolar political environment. It is based on an exclusionary national(ist) identity, resulting in a permanent culture war waged by the “nation” – a supposedly peaceful and unified majority – against those whom the government identifies as an aggressive minority. This political goal does not require complex historical narratives to be publicly debated, challenged, and criticised; it only needs “experts” and the media to deliver the message of an integrative concept of national identity.

Memorial years

To support its narrative, Fidesz started by establishing a large-scale, pseudo-professional scholarly network. The government terminated respected state-funded research institutions and replaced them with newly founded organisations or those that had previously been marginalised professionally. Notable examples are the XX Century Institute and the XXI Century Institute, both led by Orbán’s former advisor and current Fidesz ideologist Mária Schmidt. She is also the director of the House of Terror Museum in Budapest – an institution widely criticised for its portrayal of Hungary as merely a victim of 20th-century totalitarian systems. Schmidt has led all three institutions for over 25 years, since their establishment during the first Fidesz government (1998-2002). On paper, these institutions conduct independent research and/or educational activities, but in practice, they act as historical propaganda factories for the government.

Once this network of mouthpieces was in place, Fidesz began to disseminate its simplified historical narrative through various platforms. The most spectacular examples of these efforts were the centrally organised, generously funded national memorial years marking the anniversaries of key historical events: the Holocaust (marked in 2014 at a cost of about 5 million euros), the First World War (2014–2019, at 7 million euros), the Gulag (2015, no data on the budget), the 1956 Revolution (2016, at a cost of 42 million euros), the 1989 transition to democracy (2019, 33.5 million euros), the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which led to Hungary losing two-thirds of its territory (2020, 28.9 million euros), and the bicentenary of the birth of poet Sándor Petőfi (2022-23, 25.2 million euros). In parallel, several locally organised memorial years were carried out by Fidesz-funded institutions, most often commemorating influential historical figures in Hungary, particularly military and religious leaders.

The combined cost of all the memorials held over the past decade has surpassed 150 million euros. This amount was disbursed under the supervision of Fidesz-appointed committees. Their members, such as Mária Schmidt, were selected from Fidesz-related institutions and politicians. They distributed these public funds among their research networks, exhibitions, publications, conferences, general communication, and to erect or renovate public memorials following a central government programme. In practice, this money actively supported Fidesz’s campaigning without being part of its budget (until 2025, Hungary had legal campaign spending limits of approximately 3 million euros per party per election).

Monument mania

The monument mania has its precedent in the first Fidesz government. In 2000, the government put forward a programme to celebrate the turn of the millennium: dozens of statues, murals, and plaques of founding father Saint Stephen, the “Holy Crown” worn by Hungarian kings, and other related monuments appeared throughout the country. The government created a demand and opportunity that did not exist in the first place and then quickly satisfied it from the centre of power. 

These public objects remained forever linked to those who commissioned them: local mayors and Viktor Orbán. Fidesz undertook this project without establishing expert committees or open spaces for civil, professional, and artistic deliberation, inaugurating a tactic of non-consultation that later became the norm during the memorial years. 

In 2012, Fidesz put an end to the autonomy of the Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts, which had been licensing and financing new public artworks and monuments to ensure a certain level of quality by professional measures. Experts in the field warned about the risks of both ideological influence and a decline in quality. Years later, these fears have proven to be justified.

Fidesz tried to establish central memorial sites in Budapest; however, in the rather liberal capital, many of these efforts resulted in public outrage and ridicule of the government. The most outstanding scandal followed the erection of the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation (at a cost of 416,000 euros) during the 2014 Holocaust memorial year. The monument was widely criticised for its low artistic quality and its message, which absolves Hungary of its collaboration with the Nazi regime and equates Hungarians with the victims of the Holocaust. Owing to fierce opposition from civil groups and Jewish organisations, the monument has never been officially inaugurated.

Another example is the Totem sculpture (which cost 615,000 euros) and the Golden Stag statue (513,000 euros), both erected in 2022 to commemorate the mythical origins of the Hungarian nation. They were met with near-unanimous public outrage for the enormous public spending and the wacky aesthetic. The works also damaged the reputation of their creator, party-favoured sculptor Gábor Miklós Szőke, whose studio was stuffed with state commissions worth millions of euros.

Outside of Budapest, Fidesz has exploited municipal or state monopolies over public spaces to advance its monument craze. For most memorial years, it opened tenders for local communities to erect or renovate monuments. The scale of this initiative is striking: the Holocaust memorial year resulted in more than 45 new monuments; the World War I commemorations led to 828 being produced or renovated; the Gulag memorial year added 269; and the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution another 473. In total, around 1615 new monuments were erected or renovated through the nationwide programmes, with approximately 470 more linked to smaller, locally organised memorial years – adding up to over 2000 in less than a decade.

The nature of the tenders determined the quality of the results. The extremely short deadlines for the applications did not give enough time for conceptualisation or discursive deliberation. The budget for monuments outside of the capital would not have been sufficient to cover such expenses anyway: local governments could have applied for between 1200 and 12,000 euros per project in total – a meagre sum compared to the hundreds of thousands of euros granted for central sites. Not surprisingly, most of the memorials are relatively small and lacking in any artistic value. Most of them are schematic material variations of already established relevant national symbols, simplistic figurative kitsch, and characterless portraiture.

The unifying elements of the erected monuments are amateurism and lack of aesthetic, artistic, and conceptual quality. The government values the existence of the memorials over their form, as they gain their meaning not from their concept or symbolism, but from their position in the symbolic political field. 

Along with media coverage, inauguration ceremonies hold great importance in the political exploitation of the memorials.

The open calls contained no guidelines on the construction of the monuments, but clearly demanded that Fidesz be credited for financing them. This shows that the monuments channel the government’s populist cultural propaganda not through symbolic signifiers but by their mere existence. In this sense, there is no difference between the new monuments and the appropriation of existing monuments by financing their renovation and integrating them into the same narrative context.

Representation and democratisation

Along with media coverage, inauguration ceremonies hold great importance in the political exploitation of the memorials. Party members, including regional representatives of Fidesz, MPs, and even ministers, frequently attended and spoke at these events. Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó, for example, inaugurated a 1956 memorial in Mindszentkálla, a village of 229 inhabitants. In another case, a Fidesz MP participated in five inauguration ceremonies in one day. The lack of opposition politicians is not surprising, considering the dominance across the country of mayors who are either Fidesz candidates or independents who collaborated with the ruling party to “beautify” their municipalities’ public spaces.  

The events served as performative acts to strengthen the public perception of Fidesz’s connection to the newly shaped collective memory and national/cultural identity. Considering that Hungary has approximately 3000 municipalities, the ceremonies provided a significant opportunity for the government to strengthen its presence throughout the country on a scale that no other party could. Organised around new, symbolic objects of inclusion, these events served to reward and further boost party loyalty in off-campaign periods.

By the beginning of the 2020s, Fidesz began to encounter small-scale local competition in the arena of monument construction.

The question of their quality, and lack thereof, is also key. Besides controlling memory, constructing a shared identity, and strengthening the local presence of the party, public monuments also reflect the taste of society. The formalistic schematism is not merely a side effect of the rapid occupation of public spaces but a conscious choice by Fidesz. The reliance on the taste and rushed decision-making of non-expert individuals and committees provided a sense of democratisation of the public space. The government trusted local communities and their representatives to commission and erect memorials that corresponded to their taste. Avoiding more innovative artistic concepts, such as abstract aesthetics that many people find harder to relate to, also aligns well with the anti-intellectual front of the Fidesz-led culture war.

Indeed, these monuments can positively contribute to the democratisation of memory. Memorials dedicated to nationally significant, primarily Budapest-related turning-point events in Hungarian history can play an important role in shaping a shared national identity across the country. However, in the current political context, these are not signifiers of national consensus but instead reinforce the narrow identification of the “nation” with the governing party’s voters.

A statue race

By the beginning of the 2020s, Fidesz began to encounter small-scale local competition in the arena of monument construction. Frustrated by their inability to influence the large, central historical narratives reinforced through the media and the education system, local mayors of the anti-Orbán opposition adopted Fidesz’s tactic. They began erecting their own counter-memorials in public spaces. 

At the right-wing populist end, parties even further to the right than Fidesz – such as Jobbik or Mi Hazánk – erected statues glorifying, for example, the anti-communist White Terror of the 1920s or celebrating Miklós Horthy, the interwar governor responsible for anti-Jewish laws and the beginning of deportations.

In contrast, the left-wing and liberal opposition, invoking feminist slogans, started erecting modest statues of historical female figures or attempting to reclaim national historical events that Fidesz has appropriated, with generally limited success.

While the historical narrative differs, the ethics and quality of the opposition’s monuments are comparable to those erected by the government. No political side sought to build an inclusive national consensus; instead, they presented topics that reflected the vision of their own voter base. In the same district of Budapest, you can find a Holocaust memorial that absolves the perpetrators located just a few meters from a statue of fascist regent Horthy. Meanwhile, opposition-led districts erect monuments for other figures, such as martyrs of the fascist regime. In each case, it does not matter what the statue depicts or how it looks – the only determining factor is what voters think about the relationship between the statue and the politician who commissioned it.

Rather than offering a cohesive narrative, such memorials demonstrate the fragmentation of the national image and stand as an enduring testament to shameless political opportunism.