Until recently, the story of Budapest’s public monuments since the revolution of 1989 appeared to be a closed chapter. The worst offending bronzes from the communist era, such as portraits of Lenin and liberating Soviet soldiers, were removed from city squares and relocated to a custom-built statue park on the outskirts of town where, stripped of their political gravitas and quarantined from public space, they could be enjoyed as ironic relics of the past or even for their aesthetic qualities. Less controversial statues were left in peace, while some monuments were modified or transformed to rid them of their socialist connotations. Today however the debate around the fate of surviving left-leaning monuments to cultural and historical figures originally favoured by the communist regime has been dramatically reopened, while apologists for Admiral Horthy have begun to clamour for a statue of Hungary’s controversial wartime leader.

Government plans to return Kossuth Square, the site of the national parliament, to its pre-1945 state, have opened up a new front in Hungary’s culture wars between left liberals and a resurgent right. Removed this spring at the crack of dawn to make room for an underground car park, and in the face of attempts to protect it with a human shield, was the statue of the first president of the Hungarian Republic, Count Mihály Károlyi, blamed by the extreme right for the ‘lost territory’ after World War I. On the other side of the square, demonstrations have been held in defence of the statue of proletarian poet Attila József, which is also threatened with relocation as part of the reconstruction work. There are even rumours of a plan to move the monument of 1956 martyr Imre Nagy, which was erected as recently as 1996 and takes the symbolic form of a bridge between past and future, to a less prominent site.

In addition to settling accounts with the cultural left by removing many of the remaining historical icons of progressive Hungary, there are disturbing signs of a movement to use monuments to rehabilitate the Horthy era in public consciousness. The Order of Vitéz, established by Miklós Horthy in 1920 and revived in the 1990s, is campaigning to erect an equestrian statue to one of the most disreputable figures in Hungarian history, held responsible by historians for the deportation of half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz during the Second World War. According to a report in Hungarian daily Népszabadság, the Order hopes to have the larger-than-life statue ready for installation in the Buda Castle District by this October, assuming they’re able to raise the money and get permission from Budapest mayor István Tarlós to erect it.

Opponents to the rehabilitation of Horthy’s memory are already mobilising, through both petitions and direct actions, such as the vandalism of a provincial Horthy statue carried out by celebrity lawyer Péter Dániel. After hearing of its erection in Kereki near Balaton, the legal activist felt morally compelled to travel to the town and douse the wooden likeness in red paint to symbolise the blood of Horthy’s victims, hanging a sign around its neck that read ‘mass murderer and war criminal.’ Another strategy to oppose the revival of the Horthy cult is to ensure the Holocaust is not forgotten. László Rajk’s exhibition ‘Missing Fate: The Walls of Auschwitz’ at 2B Galéria used the frottage technique to commemorate those who engraved their names into the bricks and plaster of the concentration camp, a reminder that: ‘Although there are no graves at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp is nevertheless one of the largest cemeteries in Hungarian history.’ If ultimately the revival of the Horthy cult can be seen as a form of holocaust denial, then Rajk’s Missing Fate is a fitting counter-monument to that tragic era.