Relief on the streets of Budapest. Now the hard work begins

“It’s not… it’s just not a very good pun,” my friend told me as I waved my phone in his face the day after the election. I’d spent days seeing the ads, paid for by the absurdist anti-establishment Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party, and I could tell I was missing something. The poster had a little wheel of doom, “5%” and… well, that's what I asked about.

As it turns out, the words for “machine” and “nation” are quite similar in Hungarian. The poster’s message was: “System update – don’t turn off the country!” Not exactly hysterical but it did the job. It also felt like quite a poignant sight on Monday morning in Budapest, even as the city had already gone back to normal after the historic vote.

Really, those posters felt like a welcome reminder that no, it wasn’t a dream: there really was an election and Viktor Orbán really lost and Péter Magyar actually won and Fidesz’s 16-year reign was finally coming to an end.

No one could quite believe it would ever happen. A supermajority – what Magyar’s party, Tisza, needed to win in order to start overturning what the previous government had done – was something prayed for in private, not talked about in public. Even hours before the polls closed, the people I spoke to would say, cautiously, that Magyar was probably going to win, but it was probably going to be dangerously close.

In the end, it wasn’t. Tisza got to 133 seats before 10pm, and Orbán conceded nearly immediately. There were parties dotted across town and, between them, you could see kids and families and old people walking around, looking slightly dazed and very proud, smiling and nodding at each other.

The kids really were the best bit, though. They've just never known anything else; their whole lives have been spent in a country in decline, watching seemingly every educated and interesting person flee elsewhere as fast as they could. Magyar may not be able to reverse everything in the next few months, or even the next few years, but at least Fidesz’s claws will stop digging so deep into Hungary. Much is made of the power of optimism and hope, but sheer, overwhelming relief can also go a long way.

It’s what the rest of the world saw as people poured into Batthyány Square on Sunday, waiting to see the guy who had finally managed to achieve the impossible. What they probably missed was the scene, odd and sweet, of speakers blaring out an implausible house remix of The Hanging Tree afterwards. There are few scenarios in which grown adults dancing to the Hunger Games anthem wouldn’t feel corny but, luckily, this was one of them. After all, the people really did rise up against an oppressive, suffocating regime, and they really did manage to defeat powers that, until recently, felt unassailable. They earnt their celebration.

What will happen next is, of course, the million-dollar question. Magyar is a relatively unknown quantity, as are many of the people close to him. Tisza is a broad church that managed to remain united by its hatred of a common enemy. What will hold it together now?

But all of that can wait. At those drinks on Monday, in a dinky little bar up in the hills of Buda, another friend nursed his hangover and told us of the taxi he and his colleague had been forced to take the night before, at around 1am, because the roads were still so full of people that the trams couldn’t circulate around town.

The taxi driver had tried to swindle them a bit and get them to agree to an unreasonable set fee in advance. The colleague had disagreed and refused to budge, insisting the counter had to run and that they would pay the fare at the end. “That’s the way we do things now,” she told him. “This is a free country!” Cheers to that.

Photograph by Sean Gallup/Getty Images