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The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna invites to its regular Transformative Salon on March 19, 2026 at 7:00 PM, this time with Péter Krekó (CEU Democracy Institute), Eszter Kováts (University of Vienna), Alexander Etkind (CEU). The Salon wil be moderated by János Mátyás Kovács (RECET).Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
After fifteen years of enjoying constitutional majority, Viktor Orbán's regime is bothered by meeting the challenge of a new adversary, the Tisza Party led by a charismatic politician Péter Magyar. He emerged from Orbán's vicinity and managed to build up an opposition force that has crowded out the former left-liberal parties and today – according to the opinion polls – is supported by about half of citizens. While in the campaign preceding the April elections Orbán's Fidesz Party emphasizes the decay of the European Union as well as the dangers of war, migration, and woke culture, Tisza focuses on economic and social crisis, corruption, the decline of the rule of law, and the country's unfortunate alienation from Europe.
The discussion in the Salon will give an insight in current debates in Hungary on whether the elections will result in a government or regime change, what this change might look like, or if – as with the previous four elections – Fidesz will defeat the opposition again. Be that as it may, the rise of Tisza has already raised plenty of questions to answer about the decomposition of illiberal regimes and the possibility of overcoming them by popular movement-based, allegedly non-ideological politics represented by a strong leader.
The talk will be followed by a public discussion.
Péter Krekó is a behavioral scientist and disinformation expert whose research explores the psychological drivers of belief in disinformation, its political-institutional impacts, state-sponsored disinformation, and effective counterstrategies. He holds a PhD from Eötvös Loránd University. He wrote his thesis on the psychological drivers of conspiracy theories. He is a Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute, an Engaging Central Europe Fellow at GMFUS, and a senior fellow at CEPA. He was previously a PopBack Fellow at the University of Cambridge, guest researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a Fellow at IasK Kőszeg, and an Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS Bologna. He has also served as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Indiana University. Krekó is the owner and director of Political Capital Institute and leads Hungary’s disinformation hub (HDMO-Lakmusz), supported by the European Commission under the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) at the European University Institute.
Eszter Kováts studied German and French Studies, sociology and political science in Pécs, Szeged and Budapest. From 2009 to 2019 she was responsible for the East-Central European gender program of the political foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Budapest. From 2016 to 2022 she did her PhD in Political Science at ELTE University, Budapest. From January to June 2020 she had a research grant at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In February 2022 she defended her dissertation with the title "Enemy image, hegemony and reflection – meaning and function of the concept of gender in the politics of the Orbán regime and the German radical right". Her dissertation was published as a book in Hungarian in September 2022 and was awarded the Kolnai prize, the prize for the best political science book of the year, by the Hungarian Political Science Association. From February 2023 until April 2024 she has been assistant professor in the research area Politics and Gender at the Institute of Political Science, afterwards a lecturer at the department. Since September 2024 she has been Marie Skodłowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna in the research area Political Theory with her research project ‚Social justice or cancel culture? Gender-just language and academic freedom in Germany‘.
Alexander Etkind teaches International Relations at Central European University, Vienna, and previously taught History and Russian Studies in Florence, Cambridge, and St Petersburg. His new book, Russia against Modernity, was released by Polity in May 2023.
János Mátyás Kovács graduated at the Karl Marx University of Economics, Budapest in 1973, and became a research fellow at the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1987, he moved to Vienna and worked as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) until 1990. Between 1991 and 2018, Kovacs acted as a permanent fellow of the IWM while remaining an external research fellow of the Institute of Economics until 2014. From 2009 to 2021, he taught history of economic thought at the Department of Economics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Meanwhile, he also gave courses as visiting professor at the Columbia University and the Central European University. Kovacs joined RECET in 2019 as its senior member.
FREE ENTRY! No registration required!
This event is organized in cooperation with The Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA) (https://ir.ceu.edu/ohpa).
More information on this event: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/hungary-facing-regime-change-or-not
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Event Venue
Café Restaurant Merkur, Florianigasse 18,Wien, Österreich, Austria
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