BUDAPEST -- On a chilly Friday night in February, the Hungarian capital's iconic Heroes Square was so crowded that protesters had to climb onto statues. People in the crowd were so far away from the action that, instead of slogans or demands, they shouted "We can't hear you," a desperate appeal for the speakers to turn it up.
Budapest has seen its fair share of protests before, but this might have been the first organized by social media influencers. The thousands of people who took to the streets on February 16 were protesting the recent pardoning of a man complicit in the sexual abuse of children, in a case that has roiled Hungary and already claimed the scalps of the country's president and former justice minister.
There had been protests the week before, organized by the left-wing opposition Momentum Movement, after independent media revealed that President Katalin Novak had given a presidential pardon to the deputy director of a state-run children's home who had been jailed for trying to hush up allegations of sexual abuse against the director.
But this protest was different. Many of those who braved the cold to join the demonstration, which was organized by some of the country's most popular online personalities, were young and not usually interested in politics. That will likely concern right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party ahead of European Parliament and local elections in June.
People take part in a demonstration after the resignation of the country's President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga in Budapest on February 16.
"Most of the world isn't black and white. But the safety of children and violence against children is black and white," Judit Banyai, an organizer of the February 16 Monsters Walk Outside protest, told RFE/RL in a video call. "Pedophilia is black and white," Banyai said. "There is no political or ideological side that considers it acceptable."
The pardoned man -- the deputy director of a children's home in Bicske, a town close to the capital, who is known in the media as Endre K. -- had been sentenced to more than three years in prison in 2018 for pressuring the victims to retract their claims of sexual abuse. The director of the institution was sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing at least 10 children between 2004 and 2016.
Banyai, who is 26 years old and has two children, became well-known as a contributor to Nemakarokbeleszolni, an Instagram account that posts funny videos about parenting. She has over 50,000 followers on the Meta-owned social media platform, while her co-hosts and the main account have another 300,000 combined.
The social media stars from Nemakarokbeleszolni -- which loosely translates as "I don't want to tell you what to do, but…," an admonishment often heard by new mothers -- joined forces with Marton Gulyas, the host of independent YouTube channel Partizan, and a number of other popular comedians, YouTubers, and musicians.
Their followers are mostly young and liberal in their views and, unlike the youth wing of the Momentum Movement, tend not to closely follow the news. "It's unprecedented that influencers, who are popular especially among young people, are the organizers of and speakers at a protest," Peter Kreko, director of the Budapest-based think tank Political Capital, told RFE/RL following the February 16 protest.
The protest was embraced by political parties of varying ideological stripes. In a video message, Peter Marki-Zay, Orban's last challenger as prime minister, endorsed the event, calling on his supporters to attend and canceling his own gathering planned for the next day. Both the left-wing Momentum and the far-right Jobbik party -- never the comfiest of bedfellows -- announced the date and time of the protest on their Facebook pages.
Banyai, who was in charge of the designing the graphics for the protest, said they asked members of political parties not to bring their flags so that the protest could remain nonpartizan. Instead, many people at the protest turned up holding Hungarian flags.
It is the very absence of politics that makes the demonstration attractive to many Hungarians, says Kreko. "All the research shows that young Hungarians stay away from party politics, and they are a lot less likely to attend a protest that has the mark of a political party." Generally, in Hungary, young people are more likely to join a protest if it concerns social, environmental, or educational issues, rather than straight politics.
According to a recent survey, 60 percent of Hungary's under-30s -- a generation that have spent their entire adult lives under Orban -- are unhappy with the current state of democracy; 43 percent don't support any political party. In another study, less than a third of those polled said they would vote in general elections.
"The whole thing blew up like crazy. Especially considering how many people shared it on their own pages," Banyai says, referring to Facebook and Instagram, the two most popular social media sites in Hungary.
First-time protester Gergely Horvath
On Heroes Square, first-time protester Gergely Horvath, 32, says he had considered going to anti-government protests before. "But my friends [were never interested]," he said. "So I just never went." He follows most of the organizers on social media and felt that "this was not something I could watch from my armchair."
The case has touched a nerve for many Hungarians: a volatile blend of revulsion toward the abusers of children and a widely held sense of injustice that people with friends in high places can get away with anything.
The Tip Of The Iceberg
There are over 20,000 children in the care of the Hungarian state, approximately one-third of them in children's homes. Many of these institutions struggle with severe staff shortages and dwindling budgets, which in some cases have led to inadequate care and abuse. Many of the protesters are concerned that what happened at Bicske might be the tip of the iceberg.
While Novak, the former president and a close ally of Orban, never gave a reason for the pardon, opposition politicians and reports in independent media have claimed Endre K. had multiple ties in the government and with the brother of the Hungarian prime minister.
"I find it disgusting that someone who has done something like this can get away with it if they have the right friends," says 26-year-old Barbara Krcmarova, an ethnic Hungarian from Slovakia.
Barbara Krcmarova and Gyorgyi Abelovska
Along with her friend, 25-year-old Gyorgyi Abelovska, Krcmarova is at a protest for the first time after moving to the Hungarian capital a few years ago. "We were curious to see a protest in Budapest," says Abelovska, who works as a bartender in a hotel. They don't care about politics, they say, and they don't really follow current affairs.
"It's about time the skeletons fall out of the closet," says 53-year-old Tamas Cseh. Unlike many others, he is a seasoned protester and showed up with a combined flag of Hungary and the ethnic Hungarians of Romania's Transylvania region.
Wearing a makeshift crown and a Guy Fawkes mask on the back of his head, Cseh talked about various conspiracy theories involving the 1920 Trianon Treaty, which secured the loss of two-thirds of Hungarian territory, international child trafficking, and COVID-19. "The government will kill itself with this," he said. "Politically, they scored an own goal."
Seasoned protester Tamas Cseh
It's unclear if the protests will fizzle out or if they will have a lasting effect on Orban's increasingly illiberal government, which has been in power since 2010 and promotes itself as the protector of children and "traditional family values." While the Instagram page created after the protest has gained over 80,000 followers, the organizers have not announced another event.
The scandal comes at an awkward time for Orban, who has been under fire in Brussels for initially opposing aid to Ukraine and criticized for blocking Sweden's NATO accession. At home, he faces dissent over an enduring cost-of-living crisis.
At his annual state of the nation address on February 17, his first public appearance since the president resigned, the prime minister showed little regret. "Good people sometimes make bad decisions," Orban said in his speech, held in front of friends, party members, and journalists from government-affiliated media. Independent and foreign journalists were kept outside.
The protest was embraced by political parties of varying ideological stripes.
In the aftermath of the protest, the organizers collected over 2 million forints ($5,575) in donations to help a homeless victim of the sexual abuse case. With the donations exceeding their target, Partizan announced that the remaining money would be used to help others who used to be in children's homes and are now living on the streets.
"The fact that so many people participated and…[donated] points to the fact that…there is an incredibly large part of the country that is very unhappy with Fidesz's politics," said Kreko from Political Capital.
The biggest question now, he said, is whether this newly engaged group of Hungarians will remain politically active and vote in the June European and local elections.
"This is the first time in a long time that Hungarian politicians have resigned, and this in itself will have a positive affect on civil society, protesters, those who are dissatisfied with the government. And journalists, who can feel like their reporting has political consequences."