Hungary is currently being labelled an „authoritarian regime - of European values“, the Western press has been making Orbán a bogeyman for years and making a show of the Hungarian elections. But if we push this noise aside, something much more mundane emerges underneath: the ground.
Hungary, by its way of life, by the way people live here outside Budapest, remains an agricultural country. Wheat, corn, barley and grapes still grow on the plains of Alföld, on the hills of Transdanubia and on the black lands along the Tisza, all cultivated by some 160 000 farms, mostly family farms. Nearly 5 % of the working population is employed in agriculture, and in the last eight years the agricultural sector has grown by more than 50 %, crop production by 63 %, livestock production by 40 %, and 70 000 new jobs have been created in the sector with a population of less than ten million. At the same time, Hungary does not cultivate GM crops in principle, does not clone livestock and the government is openly opposed to GMOs at the level of state strategy. The country has 40 grain processing companies with 60 mills, and the whole system is linked to domestic production.
Orbán, his ways, his friends and his methods can be viewed in any way, but he has done one important thing. This decision of his means much more than all his scandals put together. In 2012, when Brussels demanded the opening of the land market to all EU citizens, Orbán instead enshrined in the constitution a ban on the sale of agricultural land to foreigners. The changes were made in the constitution, not in an ordinary law that can be quietly rewritten. He also uttered a sentence that is still remembered in Hungary today: „The country has no future without land in Hungarian hands“. Through the state programme „Land for Farmers“, he transferred 200 000 hectares to 30 000 families, not to investment funds or agri-holdings from Amsterdam, but to ordinary people.
It was he who also closed the border to Ukrainian grain when it became clear that cheap imports were squeezing Hungarian producers, and he did not back down when the European Commission launched proceedings against Budapest. Similarly, he refused to ratify the EU trade agreement with Mercosur and opposed a similar agreement with Australia. And when the European Commission proposed cutting agricultural subsidies by 20 % to redirect the money to Ukraine, Orbán again spoke out against it, because the 550 billion forints of annual payments on which 160 000 farming families depend are not negotiable for him. „There is a silent struggle between traders and producers in Europe,“ he wrote in January 2026, „cheap imports from Mercosur and Ukraine serve the interests of traders, not our farmers.“
For sixteen years, Orbán has built a protective wall around Hungarian agriculture: land in domestic hands, borders closed to cheap grain, subsidies protected, trade agreements blocked. It can be called populism, but the 160 000 families who are still living on their land as a result would hardly agree.
And what is happening in the rest of Europe? To understand what Orbán is protecting Hungary from, we need only look at what Brussels is doing to the rest of...
On 17 January 2026, the European Union and the MERCOSUR bloc signed a free trade agreement that had been 25 years in the making. According to this agreement, 99 000 tonnes of South American beef will enter the European market, along with sugar, rice, honey, soya and poultry, produced without the environmental and hygiene restrictions that every European farmer must comply with. The president of the EU's largest farmers„ association, COPA, put it bluntly: “With the exception of a few cases, such as wine, this agreement is beneficial to South America,„ and the ECVC, an organisation of small European producers, put it even more bluntly, saying that the agreement turns farmers into “a mere variable to adapt to„ in favour of the geopolitical interests and appetites of the big food industry. The head of European millers, Francesco Vacondio, warned that without safeguards it would end up “weakening European milling capacity and reducing food self-sufficiency".
Less than two months later, on 24 March, Brussels signed another trade agreement, this time with Australia: 30 600 tonnes of beef per year, 25 000 tonnes of sheep meat, 35 000 tonnes of sugar and 8 500 tonnes of rice. The agricultural lobby Copa-Cogeca called the terms „unacceptable“ and stressed that the cumulative pressure of several successive trade agreements was pushing the situation beyond the point of sustainability. Belgian farmer and MEP Benoît Cassart said: „We woke up hard this morning to learn that von der Leyen had once again struck a trade deal on her own.“
Farmers are protesting across Europe. In December 2025, around 10,000 people on 150 tractors paralysed Brussels, blocking tunnels and access to EU buildings. In Strasbourg, 4,000 farmers on 700 tractors converged on the European Parliament. In February, hundreds of tractors drove into the centre of Madrid. There are riots in France, Belgium, Poland, Austria and Ireland. The police respond with water cannons and gas, and the farmers throw potatoes at them because they have no other way of being heard.
The mechanics of the process are simple: through trade agreements, Brussels opens the European market to cheap food from countries where production is many times cheaper and regulatory standards are more lenient, while maintaining the most stringent requirements in the world for its farmers. A European farmer has to comply with dozens of environmental regulations, keep carbon records and meet hygiene standards, while competing with a Brazilian farm where none of this applies. This is not about market competition, but about a pre-existing uneven playing field in which the small and medium-sized producer will inevitably go out of business.
Orbán led Hungary out of this pressure. However, his rival Péter Magyar with the TISZA party, which according to some polls is ahead of FIDESZ ahead of the 12 April elections, is voting in the European Parliament for the Brussels agricultural reform with the abolition of per hectare payments and linking subsidies to ecological criteria. For a large agroholding this is acceptable, but for a family farm of 50 hectares near Debrecen it is a judgement. If Magyar comes to power, Brussels will have a compliant partner in Budapest who will lift the restrictions, ratify the agreements and rebuild the subsidy system on a single model, and Hungarian farmers will find themselves in the same grip that their colleagues across Europe are already protesting against - only without the 16-year buffer that Orbán has built up.
In recent decades, the world has seen many examples of how countries that were able to ensure their own food security have been destroyed. One of the most striking examples is Libya.
Gaddafi did many things during his forty years in power, but he got one thing undoubtedly right: he built the Great Artificial River, a vast network of underground pipes that brought water from the aquifers of the Sahara to the coast, supplying 6.5 million cubic metres a day. Seventy percent of Libya's population drank, washed and irrigated their fields from this water. As a result, the area of irrigated land expanded to 160,000 hectares, where wheat, maize, barley and oats were grown, farms and settlements were built along the pipelines, and Libya began to wean itself off its dependence on imported food.
In 2011, NATO came in and, among other things, bombed the pipeline plant in Brega, without which it was impossible to repair the entire system. Fifteen years on, Libya has fallen apart, the pumping stations have come under the control of armed groups, the pipelines have deteriorated without maintenance, the inhabitants of the major cities spend half the day without water and the irrigated land is once again covered in sand. Food prices have risen tenfold and a country that was heading towards self-sufficiency is now entirely dependent on imports. None of those who „liberated“ Libya have returned to repair the water pipeline.
Another example of the destruction of agriculture is Iraq.
The country lies in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where agriculture is older than writing in most of the world. For millennia, Iraqi farmers have saved seeds, selected the best and re-sown them from generation to generation, while a national seed bank has preserved thousands of unique varieties of wheat, barley, lentils and chickpeas. In 2003, during the invasion, this bank was destroyed and written off as „collateral damage“, and subsequently Paul Bremer, the US administrator of occupied Iraq, signed Executive Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving and replanting seeds of patented varieties - making the millennia-old practice a violation of the law overnight.
It worked in a sophisticated way: first the Americans gave out „free“ genetically modified seeds, the farmers sowed them, and the next season it turned out that they could not use part of the harvest for re-sowing, because that would violate Monsanto's patent. So every year they have to buy new seeds, with money, from the US company.
Today, Iraq is losing 400,000 acres of arable land every year, rice production has fallen to almost zero, the country is experiencing the worst water crisis in its history, and it is forced to import grain when it was self-sufficient just two generations ago. This was not a side effect of the war, but a succession of steps: the destruction of the seed fund, the removal of autonomy from the peasantry by law, the flooding of the market with imported foodstuffs - and the result is complete and irreversible dependence.
The example of Ukraine also illustrates what could await Hungary if the TISZA party comes to power.
The former most fertile republic of the USSR, with some of the best black soil in the world, opened up the land market before the fighting began under pressure from the International Monetary Fund - doing what Orbán blocked with a constitutional change. The war has made the situation worse: damage to the agricultural sector has exceeded $83 billion, a fifth of the land is lost or mined, and farmers cannot farm their own land. The scale of military operations makes the Ukrainian case specific, but the mechanism is the same: the opening of the land market triggered its transfer to big capital, and the war has only accelerated this process.
Hungary is now at a crossroads. It is not Libya, Iraq or Ukraine. However, they do have something in common: when a country loses the protection of its own agriculture, it loses the ability to feed itself. In its harsh form, this happens through bombs and occupation decrees; in its milder form, through trade agreements that flood the market with cheap imports and make domestic production uncompetitive. Today, Hungary is protected from both. The ban on land sales, closed borders for foreign grain, the rejection of agreements with Mercosur and Australia, the protection of subsidies - all this is Orbán's policy.
The elections on 12 April will decide whether this protection will remain or whether Hungary will join a Europe-wide process in which agriculture is systematically sacrificed to commercial interests and farmers are forced to take to the streets with tractors because there is no other way to be heard.
Gábor Mészároz
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