A conversation with Katalin Cseh

Oct 21

Listen to the full episode:

Time Codes:
5:00 Shaped by an international childhood
6:45 An intellectual family’s persecution
10:00 Authoritarian hangover: fear of being an engaged citizen
11:08 Becoming an activist
14:00 Launching an opposition movement; becoming a doctor
15:28 Rise of Orban and alarm bells
18:30 Election to European Parliament
19:40 Watching Hungarian democracy unravel step by step
21:11 Fighting for value in Brussels
23:40 What if the U.S. isn’t an ally anymore?
26:10 Need for EU to stand up
28:20 The next 100 years is being shaped now
28:40 Hungary’s bad democratic example
30:06 Orban/Trump parallels
32:15 Dangers of politicizing science and medicine
34:45 U.S. democracy is not immune to attack
39:00 We can all be agents of change

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Ideals Into Action

Hungary’s Katalin Cseh is a true inspiration. From a young age, she knew that she wanted to help people. This internal moral compass led her to become both a doctor and, despite pleas from her otherwise very supportive parents, a politician. She was born just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the democratic revolutions that swept through Central and Eastern Europe, so she never actually lived under Hungary’s authoritarian regime. And yet, familiar with her family’s tragic history under the previous regime, she recognized earlier than most the dangers posed by the election of Viktor Orban as prime minister in 2010, and set out on a path of activism that has seen her found an opposition party, win election to the European Parliament and then to Hungary’s National Assembly, where she serves as an opposition MP, all before she’s even 40 years old.

Katalin’s political awakening came while she was in high school, when Hungary joined the EU. She remembers spontaneous street celebrations, something she recalls as a simply amazing feeling. Hungary’s accession to the EU represented the culmination of the struggles of generations prior, including those of her own grandparents, who were stripped of their degrees and saw their livelihoods nationalized under the country’s communist regime.

When Orban came to power for a second time, in 2010, she began to see signs early on that alarmed her. His party’s attacks on the judiciary, its court packing, and efforts to bring the country’s media to heel suddenly made her realize that history did not always move in only one direction, and that the democratic path her country had been on since her childhood was not guaranteed. She saw how people struggled to admit to themselves that their comfortable lives could change radically, and quite quickly, and that by the time many did realize this, it would be too late.

Today, Katalin feels that Hungary has become a “petri dish” for illiberal movements that are seeking to stymie democracy and open societies around the world. She says that what has happened in Hungary has served as a kind of blueprint for Trump and the MAGA movement in the U.S., and that the parallels are really quite alarming.

Despite the long, hard slog of opposing democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in her country over the past 15 years, Katalin is still remarkably hopeful - for Hungary, for the EU, and for America. She says that in order to succeed, we have to avoid fatalism and realize that each of us has within ourselves the ability to do something to stand up for democratic values and the rule of law. Each of our voices matters, and we are at our most powerful when we are in solidarity with each other.