On October 2, Hungary held a referendum on European migrant quotas, asking whether its citizens agreed or not “that the EU decides to allocate quotas of migrants among its member states, without first consulting national governments and parliaments?” Though an overwhelming majority of the voters (98 percent), rejected EU-imposed migrant quotas, the turnout (44 percent) was too low to make the referendum valid, thus pointing to a potential crack in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian and xenophobic government, which has led the country since 2010.

In order to better understand what happened in Hungary, Mattia Gallo from Global Project spoke with Adam Fabry, a historian, political economist, and activist with Hungarian origins. Currently, Adam lives in Argentina, where he holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Córdoba (CIECS-CONICET), researching the political economy of neoliberalism in Latin America and Eastern Europe and the history and politics of the far right in Hungary.