Viktor Orbán’s Affairs with Women. The Illiberal Playbook: Gender, Power, and Control

Andrea Pető, Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, will give a lecture on the impact of Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power on human rights and gender equality in Hungary on Tuesday, 21 April 2026.The lecture, organized by RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference at the University of Iceland and the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association, begins at 4:00 p.m. and will take place in Auðarsalur at Veröld – House of Vigdís.

The lecture, based on the co-authored book Viktor Orbán’s Affairs with Women, offers an analysis of Orbán’s illiberal policies on human and gender rights. It provides an introduction to how the illiberal gender playbook impacts women, showing how the government has co-opted and eroded national and international anti-discrimination and equality provisions, thereby creating an alternative to liberal values.

Moreover, the lecture analyses the reasons behind the decision of women to cast their votes in favor of an illiberal government that discriminates against and impoverishes them. In the lecture, Pető also tells the story of how soft censorship works in Hungary through the case of this book.

Andrea Pető is a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Pető is an internationally sought-after public speaker, and her works on gender, illiberalism, and politics have been translated into 25 languages. She has held guest professorships at universities in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Serbia, and Sweden.

She has received numerous awards for her contributions to public life, including the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. She is a Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University in Sweden.The highly contested category of gender is always central to her work as a researcher and teacher, as well as to her engagement as a feminist public intellectual. Over the last few years, she has analyzed and debated the relationship between illiberalism and anti-gender campaigns targeting higher education, gender studies, and gender scholars.

Andrea Pető has been tireless in speaking out about the importance of historical knowledge and sustained public discourse as underpinning societies that are sustainable and democratic, with human rights at their core.

Recent publications include Viktor Orbán’s Affairs with Women (2025), Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944 (2021) og The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (2020).

The event will be held in English and is open to everyone.