Is there a future for the Hungarians living in Romania?

An interesting article appeared on 24.hu about the Hungarians living in Romania, but outside Transylvania. During the difficult years of Communism, many Hungarian intellectuals had to leave Transylvania to work in other parts of Romania, far from their families and the Hungarian communities hoping that they will assimilate easier. Today, Hungarians move to Bucharest to get higher salaries, but their assimilation did not stop.

In 2020 it was the 100th anniversary of the Peace Treaty of Trianon when the Great Powers gave 2/3rd of Hungary’s former territories and 1/3rd of the Hungarians to neighbouring Romania, Serbia and Czechoslovakia. These states tried and try even today to make these people leave their ancestor’s land or assimilate them with more or less success. Therefore, Romania “offered” jobs for Hungarian intellectuals outside Transylvania for decades to separate them from the Hungarian communities. That is why, for example,

the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania could get more than 20 thousand votes outside Transylvania in 2016, 3,108 of them in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.

Richárd Buday, leader of the Petőfi Community Centre in Bucharest said that Hungarians should not come to the Romanian capital, because it is a melting pot of different ethnicities. He is the offspring of a Hungarian family that has been living in Bucharest for five generations and one of the leaders of the local Hungarian community.

The Hungarian community living in Bucharest is very colourful from the doctors to the housekeepers, and most of them came to get higher salaries after 1989. However, since it is

much easier to assimilate than to preserve the national identity

there are many Hungarians who no longer speak their mother tongue even though they did so ten years ago. Mr Buday said that he could be happy if the Hungarian community there grows. It happens that Hungarian parents talk to their children in Romanian in Bucharest and they do not send them into the only Hungarian school in the capital. Mr Buday added that the situation of the Hungarian communities in Romania