by Barbara Franz (posted on December 6, 2022)
There are many things that are surprising when living in an autocratic country. When I moved to Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to study and teach here for a semester as Fulbright Scholar, I expected to be living and working in a largely homogenous, traditional, and xenophobic, society. Within the first couple of weeks, it became clear to me that my stereotypes are largely unfounded and that life in Budapest is much more complex and diverse than expected.
Wandering around Budapest’s 7th district one September evening looking for dinner, we stumbled into one of the many Middle Eastern restaurants. This one also has a take-out option. The line was short, only one young woman, clearly an American—because only American tourists wear their masks indoors, is seems—was in line ahead of us. As we decided to order out and got in line behind her, I began to observe a number of oddities: One of the many food delivery guys had come in with us and waited politely to be addressed by one of the two restaurant workers hustling behind the counter. The food delivery business is huge in Budapest. As in many other cities, food delivery work is one of the most exploitive and precarious elements of the service economy and it has been booming since the Covid-19 pandemic in Hungary. Like in the U.S., Hungary’s labor market experienced a “flexibilization” of labor to allow the employer to use new technology in order to mainstream new organizational structures, such as subcontracting and outsourcing, to maximize profits (Nagy 2022). The food curriers work as individual entrepreneurs and lack legal labor protection; the labor costs and risks are individualized and borne by the riders alone.
Eventually one of the two restaurant workers saw the currier and addressed him. I was intrigued by the brief exchange in front of me because neither of the two workers spoke Hungarian. Or English. Instead, they communicated mostly by speaking in their respective languages, but by doing so extra loudly, apparently in order to make the other person “understand” them. After the exchange, the delivery guy left immediately—he apparently had asked whether he was at the correct place and was told “No”— only to return 2 minutes later— this time with his cell phone in his hand, pointing at it, loudly stating “Falafel Bar”?! It was obvious that the food currier was at the right place, attempting to pick up food ordered online from the restaurant. He might have been fresh from the boat from a country in Central Asia perhaps, most likely working one of his first shifts for the delivery company Wolt, with their signature super-large, baby-blue rectangular backpacks.
The food worker, who initially gave the currier misleading information, seemed to be a somewhat-bewildered young Middle Eastern man, which, I thought, was not surprising. He prepared food during the busiest time of the day behind the take-out counter and needed to juggle a lot of things at once. (Except he really didn’t. More on this later.)
However, both of these men somehow had made it to Hungary, a country whose government openly stands for homogeneity, and is rigidly anti-immigrant both in sentiment and in policy. Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orbán rejects all types of immigration and, according to some studies, the percentage of the Hungarians who hold xenophobic beliefs had topped 50 percent in 2018. Nevertheless Budapest is one of the biggest tourist hubs of the planet and there are hundreds of Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, and many other ethnic restaurants. Most of them serve excellent, exotic dishes to tourists and locals alike.
The currier’s ordered food was not ready. The currier moved out of the way, and stood in the back corner of the small restaurant, right next to me, patiently waiting for his delivery to be prepared. While speed is one quality of fast food restaurants all over the world, the food delivery business runs on seconds, and, I was wondering whether the currier would not be paid if his delivery was late. Many thousands of food curriers deliver food in Budapest on their bikes. It seems a majority of the food curriers are migrants. Their work includes long hours and minimal pay for often dangerous delivery rides with bikes through narrow streets filled with crazy car drivers. They make about HUF 500-750 (USD 1.29-1.93) per hour without tip. I looked at the stoic and patient face of the young man next to me, wondering what was going through his mind. He did not look like a person who came here to turn food delivery into his professional career. Perhaps he came to make money and send remittances home to his family. Or, perhaps he came to study at a place like Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).
ELTE is the last state-financed university in Budapest. The regime has “privatized” all other institutions of higher learning. What “privatizing” universities has really meant is to reorganize them and to place them under the control of newly established foundations, the boards of which are filled with Fidesz politicians. De facto, this move has brought under party control the last of the country’s free institutions that promoted critical thinking, after major media outlets and judiciary had already been coopted into the autocratic system. In the case of the universities, however, massive protests erupted; For example, the reorganization of the University of Theater and Film Arts, resulted in months of protests against the government’s education policy, but to no avail. That university was eventually privatized. But not so ELTE.
Established in 1635, ELTE is one the country’s oldest institutions of higher learning. It is also the largest university, with a massive bureaucratic arm, which might have saved it from reorganization thus far. ELTE has remained one of the last remaining intellectual hotbeds of critical thinking, resistance and defiance, perhaps because of its large social science center, the largest in the country. Many social science fields offer English-language tracks in their undergraduate and graduate degree programs which makes studying in Budapest very attractive for many young people from all over the world.
More than half of the students that I’ve taught this semester at ELTE, and specifically in the Political and International Studies Institute are international students. Many of them come from Mongolia, China, and South Korea, the Balkans and the Baltics, from Nigeria, and from many North African states. Some of my best students hailed from Brazil, Ecuador, and other Latin American countries. Perhaps, I speculated, the young delivery currier is planning on enrolling in ELTE.
His delivery finally was ready, he picked it up and quickly left.
We had been standing in line for some time, and I finally got to place my order. The older restaurant worker, a man in his late 50s or early 60s, possibly the owner of the establishment, asked me in Hungarian what I wanted. As always, I replied in English. The man immediately switched to perfect English asking me for my name, in order to identify my order. Once I responded, he looked at me and said: “Oh ‘Barbara,’ that’s such a beautiful name!” I was taken aback because I didn’t expect to find such a genuine and highly personable response of from a Hungarian restaurant worker. Many things seemed to be odd with this restaurant.
For one, things went really slowly. At this point we had been standing around for good 15 minutes and the line behind us had been growing. However, the young people in line were uncharacteristically patient. Also, the food prepping was done really slowly. I began to realize that the other worker behind the counter—the person that communicated with the food currier—was somewhat odd. He really didn’t do any work. Instead, he put a few Kovászos Uborka (fermented cucumbers) on the shawarma plate, carefully (and very slowly) rearranged the lamb patties on the Kufta plate, and took the falafel out of the frier too early. I realized that the older worker who had taken my order in reality did all the work, and in addition, he redressed the younger guy’s mistakes in a friendly manner without losing his temper. Once I saw this, I was totally at awe, feeling that this situation needs to be further investigated because, I myself (and many other humans, I know) would have lost it repeatedly in a stressful situation like that. However, the older food worker kept it calm, and his tranquility apparently had an effect on the entire room full of customers who all were standing there patiently waiting for their take out food. (At one point the younger worker turned around and I saw a big pink scar running down the back of his entire head—clearly a residue from some major accident.) I made of this, that the older worker had employed the younger guy not because for efficiency but for other, deeper, more humane reasons.
This and many similar acts of kindness, where migrants engage in back-breaking work, while being extremely professional, considering, and disciplined, take place every moment of every day in Budapest. At the same time, Victor Orbán has been scapegoating migrants for almost 10 years, claiming that there is an immigration onslaught on Hungary, which is threatening the ethnic Hungarian majority. Orbán very successfully influenced public opinion. The level of xenophobia and fear of foreigners in the Hungarian population shot through the roof (Simonovits 2020).
Without a doubt, migration is one of the defining issues of Hungarian politics. The 2015-16 migration crisis shook the European Union and gave rise to an entirely new situation in Hungarian politics. Orbán, with his wholesale rejection of all types of immigration, effectively monopolized the issue in the Hungarian domestic context in a period that was fully dominated by the topic of migration. With his anti-immigration propaganda, he managed to rescue his party Fidesz and set it on a rising trajectory in the polls again (Juhász, Molnár, and Zgut 2017). The level of xenophobia and fear of foreigners among the Hungarian population shot through the roof (Simonovits 2020). Today Hungary ranks as one of the most xenophobic countries in Europe.
However, Hungary and Budapest are major tourist centers. Prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, 4.4 million tourists visited Budapest alone in 2019. Tourism directly accounted in 2017 for over 418 000 jobs, or 9.6% of total employment in the country. The contribution of tourism to GDP reached 13.2% in 2019 and the growth rate of the tourism sector exceeded both the EU and worldwide average, according to a government report. For Budapest, these numbers are much higher. Curiously, migrants comprise the backbone that supports much of Budapest’s tourism industry, and without the professional, extremely kind and friendly migrant work, many of the millions of tourists moving through this city might find the restaurants, coffee shops, fast food joints, hotels, and bars that make them feel at home not so welcoming.
The incongruity between life in an autocratic state with xenophobic anti-foreigner legislation (Majtényi 2022) and daily life in its multicultural capital, for me, was niftily expressed through this snapshot in the Falafel Bar —where a number of tourists found themselves waiting patiently for their food, that was prepared by a kind and considerate Middle Eastern man who singlehandedly ran the entire restaurant and also provided a job for a differently-abled friend and serviced food delivery services that provide jobs for the most gritty of the recently arrived immigrants. None of us in this restaurant appeared to be a Hungarian citizens; but probably most of us were aware of the iron fist of Hungarian immigration and minority politics. However, overall, this situation also illustrates the grit and resilience of migrants who survive and even thrive in a system that discriminates against them on a daily basis. Migrant men and women in Budapest marvelously represent what James Scott has labeled the everyday resistance of the weak who have not consented to the dominance of the state.
Literature:
Majtényi, B. (2022). Recasting Political Community. Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community, 39, pp. 39-56.
Nagy, K. (2022). Freedom within Frames The perception of paradoxical freedom among workers of the food delivery sector in Budapest (Doctoral dissertation, Central European University).
Simonovits, B. (2020). The Public Perception of the Migration Crisis from the Hungarian Point of View: Evidence from the Field. In: Glorius, B., Doomernik, J. (eds) Geographies of Asylum in Europe and the Role of European Localities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer.
Juhász, A., Molnár, C., & Zgut, E. (2017). Refugees, asylum and migration issues in Hungary. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
*******