Balázs Hankó is a member of the Hungarian Parliament, a pharmacist, a professor and a former vice-rector of Semmelweis University. Between July 2024 and May 2026 he was Minister for Culture and Innovation in Viktor Orbán’s government. His portfolio took in the family policy behind the so-called “Hungarian miracle”, the demographic turnaround thanks to which you still see more babies than dogs in Budapest and which, in figures, lifted the fertility rate from 1.23 children per woman to 1.59, doubled marriages from 35,520 to more than 72,000, and sent abortions tumbling from 40,449 to fewer than 22,000.
As the current prime minister, Péter Magyar, had forecast months ago —“his place is in prison”— Hankó was arrested on Monday night. Officers from the intervention unit of the Hungarian tax authority detained him at about nine o’clock at a building on Huszti Street in Budapest, where he had gone after being summoned by the prosecution service. Hours earlier, Parliament had lifted his immunity at an extraordinary sitting so that he could be investigated for misappropriation at the head of the National Cultural Fund. He appeared in the chamber alongside his wife and their four children to announce that he would wait there for them to come for him: “I am not going to run or hide.”
On Tuesday the Bács-Kiskun County Chief Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that it had questioned him as a formal suspect over an offence of misappropriation. It maintains that between September 2025 and March 2026 the Fund’s assets were systematically diverted from the purposes laid down in law across 1,079 grants, causing 17.3 billion forints in damage. Hankó has appealed against both his arrest and the charge. On Wednesday the prosecution asked for him to be remanded in custody, citing the gravity of the offence and the risk that he would abscond or interfere with the investigation; the investigating judge in Kecskemét rules on Thursday.
The “minister for everyday patriotism” gave this interview shortly before his arrest, at a point when he was already taking it for granted. “The prosecution service will ask Parliament to lift my immunity. And of course Parliament will lift it.” Aware for months that his arrest was only a matter of time —“the new government has made it crystal clear that it wants us arrested”— he maintains that the National Cultural Fund case is “revenge” against the cultural policy of Orbán’s governments.
It is several months now since Péter Magyar came to power. What has changed in Hungary?
Everything. The new government’s slogan is that this is “the country of love”, but the opposite is the case. The former ministers, state secretaries and senior officials of the previous administration are treated as political enemies, and not only by the government but by a large part of Hungarian society. The new government has made it crystal clear that it wants us arrested, that it wants us in jail.
In Viktor Orbán’s last government you were Minister for Culture and Innovation.
I was. My portfolio covered higher education and vocational education, innovation and science, family and youth policy, and culture. All of them areas of government that are fundamental to sovereignty.
The “ministry of everyday patriotism”, you used to call it.
I am very proud of that. These are absolutely essential matters for a patriotic nation: family and youth policy, respect for a national culture with Christian roots, and higher education, innovation and science.
Why all three under the one ministry?
They are the three pillars of patriotism. Family and youth, because the family and young people are the nation’s future. Culture, because for a patriot there is something elementary at stake: respect for other cultures and the demand for respect for your own, as against a single global culture that is identical everywhere. And knowledge, intelligence and talent, because a nation needs bright young people.
Does having run culture and family policy in Orbán’s last government make you one of the current government’s main targets? Big game, so to speak?
Without a doubt. They say they want to continue the sovereignty policy we pursued, but, to look no further, in the cultural world the new leaders come not merely from the left but from the far left.
When I came into the ministry, in the summer of 2024, the first serious clash with those circles came because I suspended the financing of certain theatres and programmes that ran against Hungary’s Fundamental Law or against the child protection law. Our constitution states with absolute clarity that the state must defend Christian values and the culture that respects those values.
Your party, Fidesz, has called the new Tisza government tyrannical. Yet Magyar’s party sits with the European People’s Party, whose leaders spent years denouncing Orbán, and Brussels has had little to say about his methods. Is it a tyrannical regime?
Our government’s overriding interest was our nation. We did not promote migration, or sexual propaganda, or LGBTI activism, nor did we fund cultural activists. We were against the war and we defended a normal way of family life. We supported families and Hungarian companies financially, because that is what serves the interest of a nation.
The prime minister, the culture minister, the state secretary for culture and any number of influencers keep saying they want to see me in prison. There is political pressure on the whole system to use my case as a form of political revenge. They want to apply the same methodology that was used in Poland.
Magyar himself has said that your place is in prison.
Yes. That shows how far the supposed independence of the prosecution service has been called into question. The prime minister exerts a direct influence on the prosecutors. The prosecution service will ask Parliament to lift my immunity. And of course Parliament will lift it, because the political wish —and it is more than a wish— is absolutely obvious.
The current prime minister came to power on a promise that he would not change Orbán’s main policies, and barely three weeks into the job Von der Leyen announced the release of 16.4 billion euros. Is he being backed from outside simply because he is not Orbán?
Although Magyar uses the same symbols, at bottom, in heart and in mind, he is entirely different from Orbán. He does not act in the name of our nation but in the name of globalism.
As an example of normality, we were an affront to the whole European continent and to certain multinational and cultural players. That example had to be destroyed, and it was destroyed by Hungarians and by foreigners who backed Péter Magyar through Brussels, through the European People’s Party and through other economic actors.
Does the new government still hold the support it won at the election?
Its support is falling away. They had twelve or thirteen big commitments they meant to deliver when they came to power and, in many cases, nothing has been done so far. There are even conflicts within Tisza. Although I would almost say there is no Tisza party as such, because it has very few members. It is more a large phenomenon organised through social media.
They promised that the Erasmus programme would be available to students again this academic year. They have transformed the university system completely and destroyed the model of public-interest trust foundations, and nothing has changed. They even pushed out of the system the foundation linked to Ferenc Krausz, the Hungarian Nobel laureate.
During your time in government, Brussels excluded from the Erasmus programme the Hungarian universities run by public-interest trust foundations.
When the European Commission decided to suspend Erasmus, we amended the higher education legislation on the conflict-of-interest points exactly as the Commission had asked us to. Time and again the signals were positive: change the law in that way and you will get Erasmus back. But it is still suspended.
Six Hungarian universities went to the European courts over the Erasmus and Horizon Europe cases. The hearing was held last September and there is still no ruling. My reading is that this may be because the court wants to rule against the European Commission and in favour of the Hungarian universities.
What might the dismantling of the higher education system and of the foundation-run universities mean for Hungary, culturally and from the point of view of its sovereignty?
That model was one of the pillars of our cultural, academic and scientific sovereignty, and of our innovation policy. The public-interest trust model covered 21 universities, with roughly two-thirds of Hungarian students in them.
What is more, because of the precedent the European case would set, a favourable ruling would benefit not only those six universities but potentially all of them. The compensation that could be claimed from Brussels would run to many billions of euros, not only for the exclusion from Erasmus and Horizon Europe but also for the reputational damage.
What is the National Cultural Fund, the NKA?
It is an institution created in 1993 to finance cultural programmes of various kinds. The president of the National Cultural Fund is the culture minister, and its vice-president is someone who comes from the cultural field.
Within the Fund there are various panels for the different cultural sectors, and temporary ones can also be set up. Behind all of that there is a management office responsible for the financing mechanisms, for the control systems and for the legal framework of every grant awarded.
With you in charge, the Fund stopped financing work that ran against Hungary’s sovereignty or its cultural values.
Naturally, where there was a legal obligation nothing could be done: if the law laid down that a theatre or a programme was entitled to a given amount of funding, it had to be honoured. But wherever we had room for decision, we cut it or dropped it altogether.
The government had also decided to allocate, in 2025 and 2026, a total of 17 billion forints — some 46 million euros — to popular culture programmes across the country. When we analysed the cultural funding system we also found enormous differences between Budapest and rural areas. It mattered to us that the distribution should be planned so as to reach every region of Hungary in a roughly balanced way.
How was that new, decentralised distribution carried out?
Within the National Cultural Fund there are three funding formats: open calls, invitation-only calls and individual awards. The Fund decided to assign that money to a temporary panel of experts and to use the individual-award formula, because that was the mechanism that allowed the government’s decision to be carried out.
Péter Magyar has announced that assets could be seized from anyone who “benefited” from National Cultural Fund grants under Orbán’s government.
This is not merely cultural revenge. They intend to transform Hungarian civil society completely. They want to replace a civil society grounded in principles with a system of Soros-funded NGOs.
There are artists the Fund decided not to support, for reasons that were plain enough given what they were doing, and who are now out to get you. How important is the relationship between them and the new government?
I am a pharmacist, so when I use figures and speak of exact data I try to do it with a pharmacist’s cast of mind: one hundred per cent. One of the leading figures from those far-left artistic circles is very close to the state secretary for culture. The minister’s wife and her family are fully bound up with that world.
The former head of the theatre whose funding we suspended over its conflict with the constitution and with the child protection law is now vice-president of the National Cultural Fund. And one of the new members of the Fund’s panel comes from a media outlet that was among the new government’s strongest supporters.
Seven people have been arrested in connection with the case, among them several of your former colleagues.
Two have been in prison for more than three months. The other five are out, although they cannot leave their homes. The argument for not releasing them is that there is a risk that they would offend again.
How were they to repeat the acts they are accused of?
That is exactly my question, and the lawyers’ question. There is a new government. They hold no public office any more. What they want is to put pressure on them to say something that fits the political narrative of the case they have prepared.
Do you reckon you will be arrested?
Yes.
Is there any formal charge against you? What are you accused of?
There is none. I will know when the prosecution service asks for my immunity to be lifted. Then I will see exactly what case they are building against me. They say the grants from my ministry were used not for cultural purposes but as a form of political support. Yet immediately after the election I commissioned an interim report on the more than a thousand programmes that had received funding, and the new government stopped that process.
Three months later, in mid-July, they asked those in charge of the thousand-odd programmes to submit interim reports. Those documents are still not available. Even so, seven people have been arrested and the whole case against me is being built without a single piece of data showing that this money was used for anything other than cultural purposes.
How are you getting on, day to day? And your family?
My wife and I marked our silver wedding anniversary recently. I told her it is possible that, after twenty-five years of marriage, I will end up in prison. There is that old joke that marriage is a bit like being in jail… We try to make light of it, as you can imagine. But the situation is serious.
We have four children, and it is not easy to talk to them, or to our friends, about what will happen if I am arrested and end up in prison. Nor is it easy to sit down with the eldest and talk about how he will have to take on the role of head of the family, or to explain to him what his responsibility will be. But I have faith. We have faith. We truly trust that this faith will carry us through all of it.
Do you notice any shift among your own people? Are they beginning to understand what is happening to people like you?
In general terms there is still no change in the trend, even if Magyar no longer has the same support. When I walk down the street in Budapest, there are people who shout at me, “we hate you, you stole the money”, and the like. It happens to me even when I am with my family. Our children get very negative comments in their daily lives, at university, at school or in the street. Our surname is not a common one, so it is easy to identify them and connect them with me.
There are, on the other hand, some people who are beginning to see clearly what is going on. A country cannot be built on political revenge as fierce as this, revenge capable of overriding every criterion of rationality.
What will be left of Orbán’s Hungary in four years’ time?
It is not easy to answer. I do not know what will be left. They are destroying the cultural system. They have begun to dismantle family support and they want to transform the economic system completely, turning a patriotic economy into a globalist one. They are also turning education into an ideological instrument.
But I still hope that normality, and a clear sense of what it means, will return soon. Then again, Hungary’s main mission over the last sixteen years was to be an island of sovereignty, patriotism and normality. Thanks to us, the ideas of patriotism and sovereignty, and our Christian cultural roots, were able to survive. There are others now, in Europe and in North America, who keep that idea alive and carry it into everyday life.
