Play the Ball, not the Man: Cancel Culture’s Attempt To Capture Hungarian Academia

For the past five years, I have been part of a small band of ‘guerilla academics’ composed mainly of disillusioned liberals, gender-critical feminists, and conservatives seeking to change British Law. We lobbied, cajoled, and helped shape the debates that led to the Academic Freedom Act. One of the first actions the new Socialist government took when it came to power in the summer was to seek to abolish the act. The fight continues! 

This experience compels me to address what is happening to Balázs Orbán in Hungary. What has happened to him is part of the same global trend and must be resisted.

Voltaire’s famous declaration, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” captures the essence of what is under threat. True freedom involves hearing views we may disagree with, yet modern academia seems increasingly unable to uphold this principle. Balázs Orbán, a leading European grand strategist, intellectual, political director, and doctoral candidate, has faced an attempt of academic cancellation for his PhD project—not for the content of his dissertation, The Constitutional Relationship Between the Free Mandate and National Sovereignty, but because of his political affiliations with Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party. This refusal to judge him on academic merits blatantly violates academic professionalism and is an authoritarian step backwards.

It is alarming that these measures, once characteristic of totalitarian regimes, are now being repackaged as morally justified actions under the guise of protecting institutions from perceived threats.

This is part of a broader global trend: the emergence of a worldwide censorship and cancel culture regime designed to contain dissent and police ideological boundaries and, thus, thought itself. This regime manifested through the weaponisation of mass media, social media platforms, and a pervasive politics of catastrophe—the idea that any deviation from the established progressive moral order would lead to disaster. We see it today, with hyperbolic meltdowns over Trump’s alleged ‘fascism’. On a lesser scale, the attempted cancellation of Balázs Orbán’s years of research was not based on the research’s quality but on the researcher’s identity. A form of pernicious anti-conservative identity politics!

Tamás Freund, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, rightly stated, “Equal opportunities should be ensured for all eligible researchers, regardless of political, ideological, religious, ethnic, or gender affiliation.” This principle must hold firm. Denying someone the right to academic advancement based on their political beliefs is not progress—it is authoritarianism.

Defending Balázs Orbán does not mean endorsing every action of the Fidesz government. Instead, it means upholding a standard that we must apply to everyone: academic institutions should not be places of exclusion based on ideology but spaces for open inquiry and debate. We must ensure that Hungary does not become the next battleground for cancel culture and that all voices—including those we may disagree with—are heard.

The response of Hungary’s academic community, with leaders standing up for equality and fairness, offers hope. But real intellectual diversity in Europe will only survive if we actively resist this progressive authoritarian drift. 

Play the ball, not the man. Defending Balázs Orbán is about far more than one person’s academic rights—it is about the future of intellectual freedom because it is precisely those values that protect all of us. In the interests of natural justice, I hope he will soon be Dr Orbán!