On a blustery day in October 2016, a group of men wearing the traditional “Bocksai suits” popular in the interwar era gathered in the central square of sleepy Pomaz. The square had just been renamed “Trianon Square,” after a much-hated peace treaty that Hungary was forced to sign at the end of the 1914–18 conflict. With much ceremony, the men revealed a new monument: a map of greater Hungary as it was before its wartime defeat and division, thus highlighting the ethnic Hungarians who were left outside its present-day borders.

For the past ten years, the Hungarian government has been steadily rewriting the country’s national history — crafting another rooted in the “glory days” between the World Wars, when Hungary was ruled by right-wing autocrat (and ally of Hitler) Miklós Horthy. This was the Hungary that came after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and before the Soviet occupation, in a period marked by antisemitism, genocide, and mass executions. This era started with the defeat of a socialist revolution in 1919, and the subsequent White Terror — the organized killing of left-wing revolutionaries, journalists, and Jews — in the early 1920s. A period of antisemitism followed, propagated by Horthy’s regime, that culminated in the extermination of over half a million Hungarian Jews during World War II, mostly in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a time of horror that weighs heavily on Hungarians’ cultural memory — and yet today’s ruling party, Fidesz, is embracing it as the nation’s heyday.

Current autocrat Viktor Orbán and his regime are demonstrating a new form of authoritarianism that is spreading across Europe — and, indeed, around the globe. This authoritarianism bears many of the classic motives and logic of fascism — categorizing certain groups as not deserving basic rights or having humanity — but does so in a particularly contemporary way. This political form is not enacted through military rule or traditional force, but rather in puppet parliaments. And the people are not controlled through fear alone, but primarily through a shaping of the public discourse to suit authoritarian ends.