Transcribed from audio
In writing I stated that it’s fine, sure.
Okay, perfect, you consented. As I mentioned, this is a European-wide project involving several countries and institutions. The overall coordination is led by The City University in London, and the research is organised country by country: Spain, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria, the UK, and also Tunisia, which is the only non-European country involved.
The project is about interfaces. Interfaces as an analytical category, but also as something politicised: the interfaces between activism, civil society, and public life, especially in the post-pandemic period, but also during Covid itself. Covid marks an important moment for us, because a great deal happened during that time in terms of public life, political change, civil society, and engagement more broadly.
We are trying to understand these interfaces better and also to compare them across countries. Our part of the project is more ethnographic. We do event ethnography and digital ethnography. We also have a platform where people can engage, but which we also use analytically, including for coding, so it is multifunctional. We are conducting interviews and participant observation, and there are also research fellows involved who are trying to bring more civil society voices into the project.
To begin, and we can just talk and see how long it goes, I’d like to start with a warm-up question, something like a trip down memory lane: what is your earliest memory of politics?
That is a very good question. I would say I have some indirect memories that I only later understood as political. The earliest probably go back to the late 1980s. I was born in 1981, and that was around the time when the worst period of the Ceaușescu dictatorship began.
I remember being five or six years old, still in kindergarten, not yet in school, and my parents together with my great-grandmother, who lived with us, were very systematic in telling me that I was not supposed to talk about certain things. I had to stay silent.
Two small examples come to mind. The first is that my great-grandmother consistently referred to Ceaușescu as “the horse thief,” which in that context meant something like a scoundrel or a criminal, with a very negative connotation. I remember asking, who is this man you keep calling “the horse thief”?
The second thing was that my father was involved in various not entirely legal activities, like distilling pálinka or brandy. Once a neighbour asked me where my father was, and I said that he was in the garden doing that. Again, I was immediately told to shut up and that I was not supposed to talk about such things. At the time I did not understand why. Only later did I understand what that silence was about.
That is a really great story, thank you. Besides voting, what else comes to mind when you hear the word politics?
Well, I assume you know Carl Schmitt. What comes to mind for me is his concept of the political. In that sense, basically anything can become part of the political domain, anything that can be framed through the dichotomy of us and them, friend and foe.
So politics can potentially be anywhere. I am a political scientist, and sometimes that is a bit unfortunate, because I have the feeling that politics comes to mind even when it should not. I project political meaning onto things, onto parts of life where maybe I should not.
I that sense, politics is everywhere, or at least you see it everywhere, in everyday life and daily practice?
Yes. It is a terrible habit I have. I just cannot keep myself away from social media, Facebook, for example. Even today, before talking to you, I woke up maybe two hours ago, had breakfast, read the news, and checked what was going on on Facebook.
And 90 percent of what comes from there… maybe 90 not, but 70 or 80 percent of what comes up there for me is politically related content.
I imagine that is especially true in Hungary right now, with the coming elections. That is one of those topics you cannot really avoid at the moment, right?
Exactly, you cannot escape it. Right now it is mostly about Hungary. But only a few months ago, less than a year ago, we had the presidential election in Romania, which was itself a repeated election, after the previous one had been cancelled or annulled. So there is always something going on.
And then, probably in a few months, we will all be paying attention to the US midterm elections, and so on. Germany is perhaps even more complicated, because with all the elections in the Länder, there is always some election you are supposed to be following.
Yes, and I’m Swiss, so I also have to vote quite often. We have this system of direct democracy, and sometimes we end up voting on things that, in my view, perhaps should not always be put to a vote. With all the referendums and petitions, it becomes a whole political culture in itself.
And what is this referendum now about, if I may ask?
There are several. One is not happening yet, but one current issue is about individual taxation for married couples. At the moment, if you are married, you are taxed jointly rather than individually. People often talk about this as a kind of marriage penalty or marriage gap, and it is one of the reasons some people decide not to marry.
At the same time, even in 2026, marriage still has important legal advantages, especially for women with children, because it offers a certain degree of legal protection. So it is one of those issues where taxation, family policy, and gender all come together.
And then there is another issue, not yet on the ballot, about introducing a population limit in Switzerland. The idea is that they want to cap the number of inhabitants — they do not want…
Oh, I heard about it, yeah. Limiting to 10 million people.
Yes, and we even have to vote on that. It is interesting, because in Germany people often idealise direct democracy. They say, “Direct democracy, direct democracy”, as if it were automatically a good thing, and as if that is what Switzerland is practising so well.
But I sometimes have to tell them that it is not always so straightforward. For example, with petitions, once you collect more than 100,000 signatures, the issue can be brought to a public vote. But that also means money. It raises the question of who can actually afford the political campaigning needed to bring a topic that far.
Since I’ve been old enough to vote, we’ve had to vote on some very strange things. And sometimes I feel that not everything should be decided directly by the public. Of course public opinion matters a lot, but it can also be used strategically. The right and wealthy actors can often afford to push these issues much more easily.
So, coming back to the word politics: what would you say are the most important political issues or topics for you?
Lately, I would say the most important one is probably freedom. And I say “lately” because I think the content of that concern, or at least its focus, has changed quite a bit over the past few years.
To explain that, you need to know something about me. My area of research, and more broadly my political interests, were for a long time focused on ethnic politics. That was the subject of my BA thesis, my MA thesis, my PhD thesis, and most of my publications. And this developed for a simple reason: I am a member of the Hungarian minority in Romania.
So when I speak about my political socialisation, I mean the period that came after those early memories of politics I mentioned before, that is, the time after the regime change in Romania, the 1990s and then the 2000s. I came of age politically in the late 1990s, when I was in high school. That was a period of democratisation and liberalisation, full of hope. There was a widespread sense that the country would finally develop in a good direction, that we would live in freedom, in prosperity, in a democratic system, and that the situation of Hungarians and other minorities would also be settled in a fairer way.
The late 1980s had been marked by severe repression and the curtailment of minority rights, and of course not only minority rights, but many other fundamental things as well. So I grew up in that context.
I actually ended up studying political science more or less by chance. I had not necessarily planned to become a political scientist. But then, right before Romania’s accession to the EU, I got a new impulse. At that time everything still seemed hopeful. I thought things would improve, that perhaps I could make a contribution, and that the country would become better.
But first and foremost, I was preoccupied by the situation of the Hungarian minority, because it seemed deeply unfair to me in many respects, there was discrimination and many other problems. Looking back, I can see that some of my views were quite naive. I would also say that I was more nationalistic then than I am now.
Over time, though, those concerns slowly shifted. My focus became more and more universalistic. What had started as a rather particularistic agenda, one that, as a young man, I hoped I might contribute to, gradually broadened.
That does not mean I no longer care about the situation of Hungarians in Romania. I still do. My children attend Hungarian-language schools, and it is very important to me that this can continue, that our rights are not rolled back, and that there is no backsliding in that area.
But in the meantime, the broader experience of democratic backsliding, not only in Romania, though that too, but especially in Hungary, began to push me away from a narrower minority focus and made me much more sensitive to universal issues.
That is why I say freedom. In the end, I think that is what the whole paradigm of rights, human rights, and also minority rights as a subfield, boils down to.
There is, of course, another major issue, and that is equality. You mentioned Lilian, and we often have very interesting debates about which is more important: freedom or equality. He, as a sociologist, tends to say that equality is more important. I, as a political scientist, am more inclined to say that freedom is more important. At least subjectively, for me, freedom comes first.
That said, I also agree that the structural inequalities in our country, and in other countries that I know at least a little about, are not only annoying, but deeply worrying. And I do not think they are decreasing. On the contrary, they seem to be increasing, and that is not good.
You already touched on this, and thank you also for that memory lane of becoming political through youth, engagement, and the reasons why you ended up, intentionally or not, in political science. How would you describe your own involvement in politics over the course of your life? Was it a steady path, or did it happen in phases? And what shaped those changes?
Of course it happened in phases. The reason I am laughing is that for a very long time I thought that I was not, and did not want to be, directly involved in politics.
During my MA and PhD in Budapest, at CEU, so not at a Hungarian state university, the general attitude was that you were supposed to be primarily a scientist. After all, it is called political science. I am not saying it was strictly positivist, but the idea was that you were being trained to become a political scientist, someone who would live and work in academia. Of course, that did not mean you could not have any impact. You could still make a difference through research, publications, lectures, and those softer, indirect ways of influencing politics.
That was the role I imagined for myself: to stay relatively neutral, away from parties, and perhaps become a kind of political analyst who explains things to the press. So first academia, and second a kind of public involvement that still kept some distance from direct politics.
But of course it did not end up like that. I taught at the university, but I was not able to get a tenured position there. Then Covid more or less blew that path away, or at least I decided to leave it. I got a job at the Research Institute on National Minorities, which is basically a research institute but still belongs to the government. So it is not exactly a political institution, but it is also not one hundred percent research. It has some politics to it.
I did not really need to get directly involved with politics there. I was not censored either. Once or twice there were suggestions like, “perhaps you should reformulate this, maybe this is too…” stuff, but nothing more serious. I have been there for eighteen years now.
What changed was the political field itself. It underwent a radical transformation. Right now, I feel that almost no one really cares anymore about academia in politics, or very few people still think it matters. Everything has become much rougher and much more dependent on political power itself.
So when it comes to minority rights enforcement, or the hope of contributing in that field, I am now almost completely convinced that the ten or twenty papers I have written, alone or with co-authors, have not made much difference. I wrote them, yes, but probably in vain, because the current logic of politics is embedded in a much larger context: a changing world order, and tendencies that have accelerated in recent years, especially after Covid, and even more after the war in Ukraine.
So right now I am in a phase where I am seriously thinking about leaving this field and trying to get away from anything that has to do with the political, not only politics in the party sense, but perhaps even political science and the social sciences more broadly.
But I should add one more thing. Since 2019, I have had a secondary job that is much more closely tied to politics. I work for the mayor of one of the bigger towns, not exactly a city, but an important town, in the Székelyföld region, the compact Hungarian-populated area of Romania. He is an important politician in the RMDSZ, the Hungarian party.
What I do there is not necessarily political all the time. A lot of it is more administrative than political. But it is still political. And when this man appears publicly in political settings, for example in relation to what is happening in Hungary now, or Hungarian party politics, there are moments when I think: can I really work for such a person? As a person, he is actually quite okay. But can I stay in this position? The honest answer is that I do it for the money, of course, but still the question remains.
Just so I understand your position more clearly: you are working, in effect, as an expert or researcher for the mayor, supporting him on administrative and research-related matters?
Yes, I would say I work as an expert for him. There is a small team of five or six people, and I am supposed to be the coordinator, the research coordinator of that team.
That means the others do most of the data collection, while I usually come up with how to process the data and with the research plan or proposal. Sometimes I also do the data processing myself, especially when it involves methods that require more specialised expertise. I am not the only one trained in social science, but I am the only one with a PhD. Some of the others may have MAs, I am not entirely sure.