Hajnalka Somogyi was a 36-year-old curator in Budapest in 2014 when she made a nearly impossible gamble: founding a contemporary art exhibition without a cent of state support, in a country where the government is virtually the only patron.
It wasn’t a decision she made lightly. By that time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had been in power for four years — long enough to begin cracking down on civil society, from the cultural sphere to media.
Artistic freedom was under threat, according to Somogyi. Seasoned curators were steadily being replaced at major cultural institutions by less qualified political loyalists. Artists increasingly found themselves forced to scrub their artwork of any references to migrant or LGBTQ+ rights, if they wanted to have a shot at securing state funding.
At a time when most major artistic institutions in Hungary had aligned themselves with Orbán’s national conservative worldview — one rooted in so-called traditional family values — “a lot of people felt that all the doors had been closed,” Somogyi told The Parliament. To break that paralysis, she founded the OFF-Biennale, an independent contemporary art fair whose funding mostly comes from international sources.
Over a decade later, what began as a self-described “garage exhibition” has grown into Hungary’s largest contemporary art event and one of the few remaining havens for artistic freedom in a country that the European Parliament no longer regards as a full-fledged democracy.
Art as a memory battleground
Orbán’s assault on the arts has lent a blueprint to far-right and populist governments across Europe and the United States.
A year after being elected, in 2023, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appointed Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — a journalist with far-right affiliations and limited experience in the cultural sector — as head of the Venice Biennale, one of the world's most prestigious art exhibitions. Meloni and her right-wing Brothers of Italy — a party with roots in the country’s post-war neo-fascist movement — have long accused the left of maintaining a decades-long hegemony over Italy’s cultural sector.
“I want to liberate Italian culture from a system in which you can only work if you are from a certain political camp,” she reportedly told a political rally in Sicily in 2023.
"There’s an effort to change the narratives," said Michele Dantini, an art history professor at the University for Foreigners in Perugia and the author of the book Art and Politics in Italy. "The attempt," he explained, "is to counter one form of cultural hegemony — typically left-leaning — with another, by rediscovering national myths and traditions that can prompt a broader revision of collective memory."
In 2023, Meloni visited the first ever exhibition dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, the world-famous author of The Lord of the Rings, at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. The show, organised by Gennaro Sangiuliano — a hardcore Meloni loyalist who was serving as the country’s culture minister — was an homage to the Italian far right, which has long viewed Tolkien’s epic as an allegory for its battle to defend the nation’s culture against corrupting external forces, including migration and EU regulations.
The Parliament reached out to the Italian culture ministry for comment, but had not yet heard back at the time of publication.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump — an ideological ally of Meloni — has moved swiftly to attack cultural institutions that he accuses of portraying “American and Western values as inherently harmful or oppressive” through an executive order he signed in March.
Since returning to office in January, Trump took over programming at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, targeted the Smithsonian Institution, and dismissed the long-serving director of the National Portrait Gallery, reportedly over her support for diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Artistic restoration not revolution
The notion that the arts can serve as a powerful tool for shaping values is hardly new. In 1930s Italy, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime found an ideological ally in Futurism, an artistic movement that celebrated speed, aggression and virility — concepts undergirding the case for an expansionist nation state. Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, Socialist Realism became the official artistic doctrine, portraying idealised images of heroic workers and cheerful peasants.
Today, right-wing European leaders like Meloni and Orbán are less interested in artistic experimentation to serve their political ideologies, said Charles Esche, who until recently served as director of the Eindhoven Museum for Modern Art. Instead, he said, they often recycle watered-down versions of 1930s figurative art, while leaning on folkish themes that reduce life’s messiness to the simplicity of an idealised household.
Their cultural policy “feels much more like a sort of restoration of some imagined golden era,” Esche said.
The remaking of Budapest’s city centre is a prime example. Since 2010, Orbán has undertaken a vast urban renovation project to erase the memory of the Communist era and amplify nationalist pride, in a style some observers have called ‘Hungarian kitsch.’
“There is no greater public expression of ideology, culture, or society than the architecture that we live with and see daily,” Stephen Sholl, an American conservative who moved to Hungary in the early 2010s to help Orbán realise his vision, wrote in 2021. “Unlike modern architecture… classical architecture proudly asserts the identity and pride of the people it represents,” added Scholl, who now heads the communications arm of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) think tank.
The problem, as Esche sees it, is that the idea of restoration is "bogus” — “The 19th century that Orbán is trying to create in Budapest never existed.”
But to Somogy, who has lived through the clampdown, striving to interpret Orbán’s cultural production from an aesthetic perspective misses the bigger picture. “The point is always to control people, to control the conversation, instil fear and insecurity.”
Across the Atlantic, Trump issued an executive order in January to promote the construction of “beautiful” federal buildings that “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage.”
How to murder a European public institution
The populist playbook often follows a familiar script: dismantling existing power structures to replace them with party loyalists. Few European countries, however, have gone as far as Slovakia in replicating Hungary’s crackdown on the arts.
Since Robert Fico, a pro-Kremlin leftist whose views more often align with that of the far right, returned to power in October 2023, his government has steadily veered towards autocracy, growing increasingly hostile to civil liberties and freedom of expression. That the cultural sector would become one of its casualties became clear when the government — an uneasy alliance with the centre-left Hlas party and the far right Slovak National Party — handed the Ministry of Culture to Martina Šimkovičová, a former TV presenter known for her xenophobic views.
"The culture of the Slovaks should be Slovak — Slovak and none else," Šimkovičová said in one speech shortly after taking office.
By appointing Šimkovičová, the government “sacrificed culture” for the sake of a “stable government,” according to Ilona Németh, an artist and professor at the Slovak University of Technology, referring to how ministerial portfolios were divided among coalition partners to secure a governing majority. Németh was among the artists who joined an online petition calling for Šimkovičová to be dismissed, which ended up gathering over 180,000 signatures. The government didn’t budge.
Instead, barely a few months in office, Fico signed a law that barred the LGBTQI+ community from accessing arts funding and performance opportunities, a move soon followed by an assault on some of the country’s most respected public institutions.
The dismissal of Alexandra Kusá from her position as director of the Slovak National Gallery and that of Matej Drlička from the Slovak National Theatre, where he had served as director since 2021, sent shockwaves through the Slovak and broader European cultural community. Hundreds of employees at Slovakia’s cultural institutions resigned in solidarity.
Still, Németh said that Slovakia was not at the point of needing to set up a parallel art institution in the same vein as Somogyi’s OFF Biennale. “We [Slovakians] still hope to get our institutions back…we’re at a different stage” than Hungary,” she said.
If you can’t kill a museum, bankrupt it
Beyond stacking institutions with loyalists and demanding ideological purity, there’s another — arguably more effective — way for governments to dominate cultural centres: cut off their funding.
Nearly 90% of a selection of 150 museums across 31 European countries cited political interference in their funding at a national level, according to a 2024 survey conducted by the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO).
“We are concerned about the degradation of museums’ autonomy in all of Europe,” Petra Havu, NEMO’s chairperson and CEO of the Finnish Museums Association, told The Parliament in a written interview. She noted that the pressure is especially acute because “traditionally, museums in Europe are quite dependent on public funding.”
For over a decade, Orbán’s Hungary has served as a case study for populist governments looking to weaponise public funding in a bid to silence political dissent. The latest attack on freedom of expression came in May, when Orbán tabled a new bill, that would give the country’s Sovereignty Protection Office wide latitude to punish organisations that receive foreign funding without prior permission.
“No one knows how sweeping the listing will be,” said Somogyi, the Hungarian curator. She said she was unsure whether her OFF exhibition would be targeted, but added that the proposed legislation was already having an “incredibly chilling effect” across civil society.
Meanwhile, Slovakia last year approved changes to the way two of the country’s main institutions greenlight funding for the arts and culture sector, effectively making such decisions dependent on political loyalty, rather than artistic merit.
Polish exceptionalism?
As a right-wing parties make gains across the EU, one country has been charting a different course — Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk has slowly been attempting to restore the rule of law after years of populist repression.
The rise to power of the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) in 2015 ushered in an illiberal transformation of the country that saw a crackdown on the judiciary, media, corporations and cultural institutions. “It was eight years of curators and cultural workers of all kinds who didn’t have a chance to be properly employed,” recalled Joanna Mytkowska, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
As in Hungary and Slovakia, for nearly a decade Polish cultural workers were barred from senior roles at major institutions, with top posts reserved for party loyalists. Poland’s most prominent national museums showcased exclusively conservative programmes.
That was a fate only narrowly escaped by the Museum of Modern Art, which switched its designation from a national to a city museum, a sort of a voluntary demotion intended to preserve its autonomy. “We’re now operating at a lower level, but we have greater confidence in our programming autonomy,” Mytkowska said.
When Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform made a comeback in 2023, the country’s artists and cultural workers alike breathed a sigh of relief. The international art scene took notice, too, after the government replaced the artwork that was originally designated for the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale with a piece about Russia’s war in Ukraine. The original selection by Ignacy Czwartos, an artist who depicts scenes of Polish military history, was apparently considered a mismatch with the theme of last year’s Biennale: “Foreigners Everywhere.”
Even so, the victory of right-wing nationalist Karol Nawrocki in the country’s presidential election last month demonstrates the ongoing push and pull between illiberal and democratic forces in Poland — and Europe.
That’s why Mytkowska has remained cautious. After all, she said, “institutions are very fragile.”
“There’s not much you can do if the state is against you.”
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