Fidesz

Hungarian officials reacted with shock on Thursday after Laszlo Trocsanyi, the Hungarian candidate for the Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy post in the European Commission, was deemed unfit to serve as a Commissioner by the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, JURI.

It is easy to take exception to the "infelicitous semantic choice" of ditsy new job titles that "reflect a sense of detachment from European realities", as one EU law professor put it to The Guardian.

He is a distinguished legal scholar, specializing in constitutional and European law. No dry academic, he is a pleasant person, with a background in diplomacy.

A two-times ambassador, to Belgium and France, he is one of those few Hungarian politicians who speak both French and English.

A conservative theologist, Semjen is leader of the Christian Democratic People's Party, the pseudo-coalition partner of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's governing Fidesz party. In his doctoral thesis, he famously called Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger "the devil".

Memories of the peace demonstration that put a crack in the Iron Curtain on August 19, 1989 loom large in both German and Hungarian psyches — large enough to lure Merkel to Hungary for the first time in more than four years.

But since Orban's ruling Fidesz party returned to power in 2010, it has become the must-attend event for right-wing Hungarian intelligentsia loyal to Fidesz.

It was a speech in 2014 that made the biggest waves internationally as Orban set out a vision for an "illiberal state" that became a template for nationalist-populists everywhere.

Then there was the suspension of Hungary's governing party, Fidesz, from the European People's Party due to the party's overt shift toward authoritarianism in the past years and straightforward attacks on European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Slovak politician Maros Sefcovic and Bulgarian economic analyst Kristalina Georgieva, head of the World Bank, were left disappointed after being tipped for high-profile parts. Romania and Croatia had also sought a greater role for the Balkan region in the EU's decision-making process.

Fidesz, meanwhile, has rowed back on threats to join a rival political family after right-wing nationalist parties failed to win enough EU parliamentary seats to upset the balance of power in an increasingly fragmented European Union.

This smart, ambitious and energetic group become the face of a generation of activists who were more fearless - and more radical - than any other political circle at the time.

We called ourselves "the children of divorced parents" - a metaphor for the political divisions between rural and urban intellectual circles that we idealistically hoped to heal.