"It is one of the happiest days of my life": euphoria floods Hungary

Special correspondent to BudapestNot a single piece of paper on the ground. Budapest's cleaning crews had a colossal job to clean up the consequences of the euphoria unleashed this Sunday night after the victory of the opposition party Tisza. The streets of the Hungarian capital filled with spontaneous parties, national flags (some from the European Union) and thousands of exultant young people celebrating the fall of Viktor Orbán's government.

"Arad a Tisza!", they chanted tirelessly, accompanied by car horns that kept the rhythm. This has been one of the most chanted slogans in recent days in support of the opposition. The expression can be translated as "The Tisza has overflowed" and it is a play on words: the name of the party of the future Prime Minister of Hungary, Péter Magyar, is both an abbreviation of "respect and freedom" and the name of one of Central Europe's main rivers. The Tisza movement has overflowed and has swept Fidesz away.

The general exaltation intensified in the metro stations, where the two other celebrated slogans resonated even more strongly: "Mocskos Fidesz!" ("Dirty Fidesz!", referring to the corruption of Orbán's party) and "Ruszkik haza!" ("Russians, go home!"). Hours later, the city center is extremely quiet; there are only a few tourists taking advantage of the morning calm after the overflow.

"I feel incredibly good. It is one of the happiest days of my life, and I think many people in Hungary feel the same. We have been waiting for this moment for a long time," says Bence, leaving one of the faculties of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). "Simply, it is incredibly great to be back in Europe," he celebrates. He explains that in the previous parliamentary elections he voted for the left-wing opposition, which has now also been devastated by Tisza's momentum and has disappeared from Parliament. "But those parties only thought about their own interests and not about the people of Hungary. And I think this new opposition, the new government, thinks about Hungarians." "How strange it is to talk about Tisza as the new government... but it's great," he concludes with enthusiasm and still some disbelief.

"I don't know of a similar example where a protest party has created, from scratch, in two years, a movement like this," political scientist Tibor Dessewffy tells ARA. "Magyar is very good with his speeches, but above all he has been very good at creating a national-scale organization without resources, without foreign aid. It is a truly enormous milestone. And this organization and he himself have also been able to capture the imagination of Hungarians and represent hope for them, something that has totally destroyed the opposition."

"It's over"

In the streets furthest from the center, there are still some Fidesz electoral posters and those of the Democratic Coalition (the left-wing party that was the main opposition party until now) on the ground. Hours earlier, the sidewalks had been filled with electoral propaganda, trampled and torn. On some Fidesz posters that still hang on the lampposts, slogans such as "It's over" or "Propaganda" can be read.

Dessewffy highlights the importance of Viktor Orbán publicly accepting defeat very early on election night: "There was some fear that Fidesz supporters would not accept it and that chaos and violence would ensue. Therefore, the type of message Orbán delivered was very important, so that the situation would not escalate. It was surprisingly very democratic on his part."

Awaiting the new government

"We are extremely happy," says a woman smoking with a colleague. They look at each other and hesitate. "It's difficult for us to speak with a journalist... we work in an NGO and the civil sector has been under a lot of pressure in recent years," she explains. "Until now we couldn't talk to journalists, say what we thought..." she adds. Both say they have "a lot of hope," that this will now change. That is what Péter Magyar has promised: to restore press freedom, academic freedom, and end pressure on civil society.

"We hope that, finally, we can do our work as we should, because the last sixteen years for organizations like ours have been very hard," says one of the two women, who ask for anonymity. "Only now are we waking up... and we ask ourselves: and now what will happen? What will it be like to work in a different way? Really, we don't know, because we have always worked under this constant pressure from the government."