In 1969, Bela and Gabriella Bollobas fled their native Hungary, escaping Communism. They landed in Britain, where Bela went on to become a world-renown mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge. Their son Mark was born there in 19–, and raised both in Britain and in the United States, where his father did occasional stints in American universities. Young Mark Bollobas enjoyed freedoms that his parents dreamed of growing up in a Communist dictatorship.
And yet, in 2010, the younger Bollobas gave it all up, and moved to Hungary, his parents’ homeland, where he had citizenship owing to his ancestry. He settled in Budapest, married, and is now raising a family there. With his native Britain shaking from domestic unrest, amid an atmosphere of general national decline, Bollobas, 52, reflects on how happy he is that he reversed his mother and father’s migratory path. I spoke with him last weekend in Budapest.
When you watch online the race riots happening now in your native country, what do you think?
I am sad, but I’m not surprised. It’s becoming more and more clear that the average person in the UK is no longer confident that the government has their best interests at heart. And after years of being let down, of having their views ignored, they’ve decided to take actions into their own hands. It’s not the best way, but this is human nature.
They voted for Brexit to stop the immigrant wave. Nothing happened there, and the blame for crimes committed by immigrants—or their kids, and working in London I met a bunch of first-generations who hate the UK — lies entire with the spineless political class. Rightly, citizens see the way immigrants get preferential treatment with the taxes they pay, and are furious. I expect temperatures to rise as [PM Keir] Starmer will not fix any part of this problem.
What made you make the call to relocate to Budapest?
In short, quite simply I was looking for two things: a safe place to raise a family, as well as a country with a high standard of living. On both counts Hungary far exceeds the UK. I also wanted to be in a place where there was a feeling of society. I have lived in Finsbury Park in London, so passed the mosque most days. The streets around reminded me of Cairo; only men standing around smoking, with the occasional veiled woman. They were not pleasant. But this is but one example of an atomized ghetto in the city.
I had been living in the United States and had the choice of coming back to Europe. The States didn’t work out for me because I realized it would never be a place I could call home. Americans have a very weak sense of history and everything seems very temporary. From the cities, which basically seem to come and go, to the people, who never seem to have strong roots. Americans think nothing of picking up and moving a thousand miles away and setting up shop somewhere else. I just couldn’t find my place there. Looking around it didn’t seem like the friendships I made were close in any way. I just felt like an outsider all the time.
So why not the UK, where I’m from? I had enough of an experience in London from before, from the years I spent there studying and working, to know that it’s again a place I really probably couldn’t live as good a life as I can live here in Budapest. That includes everything: safety, public transport, religion, the feeling of culture, a sense of pride in your nation, these are things that have been eroded. So if we look now at the United States, people are not happy with the way America is. If we look at how things are in the UK, there is massive disillusionment, especially among the youth, people looking towards the future going, “Well, how am I going to survive? I just don’t know how to.”
When I was looking, more and more I began to think of Hungary. I thought of Hungary not only because I could go there, as the son of Hungarian immigrants, but also because it’s a nice place, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a kind place. And there are values there that are still important—family values. It was 2010 [the year Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister], and I knew a huge change was coming to Hungary. And I got here before it arrived. For me most of all it was a feeling of coming home, which is strange because I wasn’t born here.
It’s difficult to describe because I wasn’t brought up here, but I always felt at home here. And here, unlike in the UK, where I was always asked where I was from, here in Hungary—well, I’m obviously not from here, and I have a thick accent in Hungarian, but I’m Hungarian. I fit in and I’ve been accepted. I felt then that the U.S. was burning out while I knew in Hungary the best years were ahead of us.
Last but not least, I wanted to get married and start a family, a family based of the values and traditions I hold dear. And for that I knew I needed a Hungarian woman, whom I’m lucky enough to have found.
It is striking to me that you migrated to your ancestral homeland not looking for economic opportunity, but rather for a place that felt like home. This seems to be something that both liberal and conservative elites all over the West cannot comprehend. Why not?
Most people don’t agree with my decision because they are wearing blinders. These blinders, made in the Cold War, tell them that everything east of the former Iron Curtain is terrible, and everything west of it is wonderful. The world is nowhere near like that anymore.
I still find it strange that is a white Christian male who speaks English with a British accent that I was not welcomed into UK society. But now, having lived outside of the borders for a few years, I realize that this is the case with everyone. Either you’re a white European and you go there as a guest worker, or you go there as a person of color from a Middle Eastern country or African country, and you end up living in an atomized community or a ghetto made up of only your countrymen, paid for by the state.
I think when it comes to the sense of home and how important it is, the West has forgotten that what made the West great was its culture and its traditions. And they came to this from a position of power and wealth and success. They didn’t really need to fight to protect any of these things, because the power that came from economic power did it for them.
But as the world changed and other countries became more wealthy, and in many ways England became more poor, the UK became more poor, this skill of protecting your nation, your culture, your history, taking pride in yourself, it never came back. It never came back. I don’t know whether it’s from the schools, or whether it’s definitely in colleges, because academia is—well, it’s not very pro-British culture in any way. But even among the people it sort of disappeared. The sense of community sort of disappeared. It became much more important to make money, to be a success, to be the person you want to be. To be an individual.
Those are very, very important things to do when you’re in your twenties and thirties. But then you get to a point where you have your career, but you need a family, because family is what life is all about. After you have children, that is your droving force. And we’re now at this appalling stage where we have lots of individual success stories of people who’ve forgotten, and don’t know how, to make time for having a family. Worse yet, they’ve been educated to believe that having a family isn’t important, that you can get as much joy out of work. And that’s just not the case.
This is a really, really, really big problem. I have too many friends aged 35 to 45 who are single and lonely, who want a family, yet don’t have the skills needed to create one. Yet professionally they are all success stories. Worse yet, so many people tie materialism to happiness that when the money gets low—and globally we are all about to experience a recession—this means more and more people will become desperately unhappy as their wallets become lighter, and life becomes harder.
I’m not sure whether Hungarians know something different, I think they didn’t twenty years ago. But through a combination of luck, as well as solid political leadership, we have kept family as the most important goal in life. That’s a huge plus for us. In the early Eighties, Hungary led the world in suicides and alcoholism. And although there was Communism, almost everyone had a side hustle. Or two or three. But that has changed, those times are behind us. Now when I think of the nation that is doing terribly in similar categories, namely drug overdoses and suicides, while pushing a culture of relentless side hustles, the U.S. comes to mind.
How would you compare life in Budapest to life in London today—especially as someone raising a young family.
I think the difference is a night and day. It’s clear to anyone who visits Budapest and Hungary that family is very important. Just look at the amazing playgrounds we have! If I had to compare the two, I just simply don’t believe that if we lived in London, we could have the standard of living and be as happy there as we are here in Hungary. It’s just not possible. It is wonderful here, the best place to be in Europe right now, hands down.
What do you mean by “standard of living”?
I came from Memphis in the U.S., which isn’t a very pretty place. When I first arrived in Budapest, one of the first things I did was I went down to the Danube every single night, every single evening, just to look at the city, because Budapest is beautiful. It’s truly one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. It’s fantastic, and I could feel the joy returning to me from the beauty that was surrounding me. Just walking in the streets of Budapest, I could feel better, because I’d look around and I’d see these beautiful buildings, which are created with mastery and love. And I didn’t feel that anywhere in Memphis.
Another thing that of course is very important is where is a place where I could actually make roots, put down roots and live, and become accepted. And there’s no question that Hungary is the only place that I could have done that.
Also with standard of living, I’m talking about the quality of the housing, the price that you pay, the value you get for your money here. True, Hungarians earn less than their Western counterparts, but the price of other things are less also. So the price of accommodation, it’s less than in London, compared to Budapest. If I compare the quality of the produce, I love going to markets in Hungary. Why? Because it’s a farmer’s market. I buy at a farmer’s market. It’s not the pretentious American version of a farmer’s market where you go and things are more expensive. It’s a true farmer’s market, where things are cheaper than in the supermarket, or at least the same price. So the quality of the food that I eat is better. The quality of the food that I give my children is way better.
And now, as a parent, with two young boys aged five and eight, I’m very lucky to be here, because I don’t have to worry about there being any conversation about sex, or gender, or these nonsense ideologies that have popped up in rich Western countries. I don’t need my children propagandized into thinking about things that they would never contemplate otherwise. So that’s a huge, huge plus. When I see the issues that my American friends have in the schools that they send their children to, and compare it to what we have, I feel blessed that my children are here, because not having to deal with that is a huge, huge weight off my chest.
When it comes to looking at our history, a thing that has changed since Communism is that, again, while Communism spent forty years teaching Hungarians to take no pride in their nation, and in fact to destroy their feeling of nationhood as much as possible, in the last fifteen years here, there’s been a big change, and you can feel it. Hungarians, we deserve to take pride in our nation. It’s not a huge nation, but it’s a very successful one, it’s a very pretty one, it’s got very interesting people, and this rebirth in national pride has been a wonderful thing to behold, because we should be allowed to be proud of ourselves. We have good reason.
It never fails to astonish me how many British people, and others from Western Europe, have this idea that Hungary is a quasi-fascist hellhole. Then they arrive here, and inevitably say it reminds them of what their own cities were like twenty or thirty years ago, but no longer are.
What can I say? Propaganda works. I was in the south of France two years ago with my family, and we struck up conversation with an elderly Jewish couple from New York. When they asked me where we were from, I said “Hungary.” They literally said, “I’m so sorry. “
When I tried to tell them how good life was here, about the standard of living here, about the safety here, about the crime here — they simply couldn’t believe it. I repeated myself over and over and over again, and it was as if they hadn’t heard me. Of course, they were proud CNN viewers so perhaps that’s it.
I think most people are so brainwashed that they hear the word “Orbán” or “Hungary” that they imagine stormtroopers running around the city, and that we live in a police state. Of course, America is far greater police state than Hungary is. Even the UK, it is descending into a place where the government has too much control. But Hungary is great. And Hungarians make Hungary great.
Why?
The Hungarian is the man that goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front of you, or so the saying goes.
Hungarians have an incredible energy and fervor. We live in a civilized society that needs little supervision. Count how many police you spot on the streets in Budapest. It’s not many. Unlike Germans, we don’t feel bound by rules completely, but we do have the internal sense of discipline that any law-and-order country needs. And we have a strong ability to work smart.
I think it helps that we don’t have ludicrous visions of grandeur. Which ties in to general common sense—a sober peasant mind, in Hungarian. And we have a sense of history, of cultural memory. We suffered through Communism, which turned Hungary into a prison. And when we got our freedom back it was ingrained in a Hungarians in some way that we don’t want to be anyone’s cattle again.
The UK has so many more problems than Hungary. The societal dissonance is starting to resonate more strongly. Hungary had the huge advantage of homogeneity when it was at its lowest ebb in late Eighties and early Nineties. There is a sense of social cohesion here, of society, that the UK no longer does. And it’s getting worse there.
It’s interesting to see that majorities in all Western democracies, including the U.S., have always been against mass migration—but both left-wing and right-wing governments keep failing to give them what they want. Viktor Orban does for his people—and is denounced as somehow a threat to democracy. How do you explain that?
As effectively the sole outlier when it comes to immigration policy in Europe, Orbán is reviled because the other leaders are terrified he might be right. He might be right in that immigration is bad. He might be right in that unchecked immigration is terrible. He might be right in that letting in random people into your country does a disservice to your citizens. Every day that goes by that Hungary continues to thrive under the leadership of Viktor Orbán is another day another day of proof that the policies pursued by the new liberals in the west of Europe are failing policies.
He pushed for peace [between Russia and Ukraine], and now they hate him even more, that’s another failed policy. He also actually asked the population for their views on immigration. The other countries don’t ask. Why is that? It’s because they don’t want to hear the answer because if they hear the answer, then they have to actually do something.
Borders only work if they are enforced. If we just look at the UK, they just elected a new Labour government. This Labour government will do nothing for the working-class people, except put them under more pressure. Just look at what’s happened over the last few days. Three little girls who were killed by someone that the government says needs to be protected, because he is black. The local population complain that this isn’t right. Now the police are going to clamp down on the people complaining that it isn’t right.
This doesn’t get rid of the problem. It just sweeps it temporarily under the rug by shining a light on the wrong section of the population as being bad.
On the other hand, Hungary has problems too. Polls show that there is significant discontent among the populace. What are the biggest challenges to life here, and how do you compare them to the problems faced by people like you in the UK?
Yes, I read in the foreign media that there is significant discontent here, but I don’t see it. I don’t see protests in the streets. I don’t see angry people nonstop everywhere complaining about how life is here. I don’t overhear furious conversation about the Hungarian state of affairs. Through my eyes, life is pretty good. The biggest challenges here are the same as the biggest challenges everywhere, like creating a life for yourself that you enjoy and like. I know that I’ve been lucky enough to create a much better life here than I would’ve been able to make for myself in the UK.
The biggest challenge is definitely inflation. I know this is a global problem, but the inflation and the prices that keep going up make life very difficult. We are now paying at least double for food as we were paying a year ago, if not more. Having returned from a trip to Italy, I would love to understand how higher quality products there are three times more expensive here. That seems like massive price gouging, which the government should address.
In the UK, I would have far more problems with things like rent, or living in a neighborhood that is nice. Also, if I was in the UK, probably the chance of owning our own home would be zero. Prices here, of course are much cheaper for property, which makes it possible to put our feet on the rungs of the ladder.
But then also depressingly enough if I was in the UK, I would have to deal with knife crime, machete crime, lots of feral young men running around the streets, looting and violence, inadequate policing, and a society that doesn’t really feel like a society at all. And amid all of that, feeling as though the government is taxing me to oblivion and making protests against its policies criminal.
If you were living in Britain now, what would you do? Is it too late to turn things around?
As a parent and citizen, the only thing I would be able do in Britain is to put my head down and work harder. Perhaps also I could think about another place to move to in Europe.
But for leaders? The country is in such a bad place that it needs someone to take a firm grip. That means zero tolerance for knife crime, zero tolerance for crime, zero tolerance for antisocial behavior, and to clamp down on people behaving badly.
At the same time, you have to stop all the boats coming, rescind all welfare to anyone coming, and perhaps bring the Hungarian policy that says to so-called refugees, OK you are leaving a war zone but if you’re leaving a war zone, why didn’t you stop at the first country where you would be safe?
I would also get rid of birthright citizenship, and introduce some sort of golden period of maybe 10 years of being in the UK before you can get benefits — and even that would depend on having absolutely no criminal record whatsoever. For immigrants I would say any crime, including jaywalking, gets you and your dependents deported. And unless you pass a serious English language test, you don’t even qualify.
But let’s be serious: no one’s going to do that. The politicians are too fearful of being called racist to actually stand up for the people they’re supposed to defend, so nothing will happen. Just look at all the grooming gangs in the UK. All are Muslim. All rape and traffic white English girls. Thousands of them. It’s been happening to more than a decade now, yet the government doesn’t even dare ask the question, “Why are all these rapists Muslim?”
Things will get worse, much worse, and people will get angrier, much angrier. A war journalist Jake Hanrahan, who lives in the north of England, says that things will crater from here—and I believe him.
The conservative opinion journalist Peter Hitchens has advised young Britons to leave, saying there is no future for most of them in the UK. Do you agree?
I think British young people have an impossible task on their hands. They have no political power. Leaving isn’t easy but I fear with so little agency at home, it might become a popular option with many.
But where to go? With Brexit done, European options are slim. Last I checked Australia was hard to get into. New Zealand also.
I’m not even sure where they can go. It’s so grim. I’m so happy I’m here instead.
