A turning point for Hungary?

The Hungarian parliamentary elections of 12 April 2026 may have far-reaching consequences for the country’s political direction and important implications for the wider European Union. This roundtable, organised by the SSEESing NOW seminar series, will provide timely analysis of the results and their potential impacts drawing on a range of academic and policy expertise.

SPEAKERS

Paul Fox (UCL SSEES) is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL SSEES and served as His Majesty’s Ambassador to Hungary from 2020 to 2025. He holds a BA in History from the University of Sussex and studied for a doctorate in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

He joined the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1987 as an analyst specialising in Yugoslavia and the politics of Eastern Europe. During a diplomatic career spanning more than three decades, he held postings in New Delhi, Baku, and Bangkok, and later served as Consul-General in Warsaw from 2006 to 2010. He subsequently headed the Afghanistan Department at the Foreign Office and served as Deputy Head of Mission in Abu Dhabi and Consul-General in Dubai. Before his appointment as HM Ambassador to Hungary, he was Minister Counsellor at the United Kingdom Embassy in Moscow.

Dr Tom Lorman (UCL SSEES) is Associate Professor in Hungarian History at UCL SSEES. He received his PhD from UCL in 2002 with a dissertation examining high politics in Hungary in the early 1920s. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati, he returned to UCL SSEES in 2010.

His research focuses on the modern history of Central Europe—particularly Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland—with expertise in religion, nationalism, high politics, and constitutional developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work explores the interaction between political institutions, church–state relations, and nationalist movements in the region, and he has published widely on Hungarian political and intellectual history and the politics of historical memory in Central Europe.

Dr Aliz Tóth (LSE) is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on state capacity, bureaucracy, and the politics of natural resources.

Her work examines state–society relations and distributive politics, and her current book project explores bargaining between states and communities over land acquisition for infrastructure projects in India. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, and International Organization. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2023, having previously completed undergraduate studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is originally from Maglód, Hungary.

Zsófia Stavri (UCL SSEES) is a British-Hungarian PhD candidate at UCL SSEES. Her research examines the relationship between post-1989 Hungarian politics of memory and memory activism, focusing on iconoclastic actions directed at monuments and public symbols. She holds a BA in Communication and Media from the University of Szeged and an MA in Political Analysis from UCL SSEES. She also serves as coordinator of the UCL Centre for Places, Identities and Memories (PIMs).

Dr Eszter Társoly (UCL SSEES) is Senior Teaching Fellow in Hungarian at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she has taught since 2012. She holds degrees in Hungarian Literature, Linguistics, and Applied Philology from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and an MA in Central and South-East European Studies from UCL. Her research and teaching explore language, migration, and sociolinguistic dynamics in Central and South-East Europe, with a particular focus on minority communities and intercultural interaction. She has contributed widely to courses on the sociopolitical and cultural landscapes of the Danube region and lectures on Hungarian cinema, politics, and society. She has also led UCL’s Global Citizenship summer school strand on Intercultural Interaction and has designed language and cultural programmes for governmental and European institutions.

Chair

Dr Sherrill Stroschein (UCL Political Science) is Reader in Politics in the Department of Political Science at UCL. She received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 2000 and joined UCL in 2005 after holding positions as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and teaching at Ohio University.

Her research focuses on the politics of ethnicity, nationalism, and democratic institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, with particular expertise on Hungary and Hungarian minority communities in neighbouring states. She has written extensively on minority politics, ethnic party competition, and the politics of ethnically mixed cities. She is the author of Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her forthcoming new book within states, focusing on ethnic enclave cities in Central and South-Eastern Europe, examines how political parties consolidate control, sustaining both democratic backsliding and democratic resilience.

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