A Dutch Witness to Hungary’s Democratic Journey

Simon Wintermans’ life story connects Dutch family legacy, Central European transition, rural Hungary and a warning about the fragility of democracy.

Simon Wintermans’ life story connects several European worlds: Dutch Catholic family heritage, wartime survival, the final years of communist Hungary, the optimism of the democratic transition, rural life in Central Europe and a deeply personal reflection on the fragility of democracy.

Author: Szilvia Kecsmar

In a wide-ranging conversation with Central European Affairs Magazine, Wintermans offers more than a biographical account. His story becomes a lens through which to examine how Western and Central Europe have changed over recent decades, and how easily political freedom can be weakened when citizens begin to take it for granted.

Wintermans’ family history begins in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, in the province of Brabant. His grandfather, Joseph Wintermans, was born in 1877 into a poor rural family. His life changed when a local priest recognized his intelligence and encouraged the family to send him to school rather than keep him working on the farm. That decision marked the beginning of a remarkable social ascent.

Joseph Wintermans became a teacher, later a headmaster, and eventually a public figure committed to improving the lives of poor farmers. After spending time in Denmark, he helped establish small dairy cooperatives across Brabant, giving local peasants better returns for their work. Following the introduction of universal suffrage in the Netherlands, he entered parliament and later served as secretary of state for agriculture.

The Wintermans name is also linked to the cigar industry. Two younger brothers of Simon’s grandfather, Jacob and Harry, established cigar businesses around 1900. Harry gave his name to the Henry Wintermans brand, which still exists today, although the company is no longer independent. For Simon, however, this was a more distant branch of the family rather than a source of personal privilege.

More influential was the example of his father. After returning from forced labour during the Second World War, his father joined the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, where he spent his entire career. He worked in an important position during the post-war era of international trade negotiations, including the period of the GATT, the predecessor of the WTO. Yet despite the prestige of the role, he did not enjoy his work.

For Simon, this became a powerful negative example. Watching his father return home dissatisfied convinced him that he did not want a life built around duty without personal meaning. He chose instead a less predictable path, one shaped by curiosity, photography, languages, business and movement rather than a fixed career plan.

His connection to Hungary began almost by accident. As a young student and self-taught photographer, he met Hungarian students while travelling in France. They arranged a photo exhibition for him in Eger. During that exhibition, he was invited to join a Hungarian expedition to East Africa as a photographer.

In 1987, Wintermans left Budapest with a group of Hungarians in an Ikarus bus, travelling to Kenya and Tanzania. The expedition followed the route of Sámuel Teleki, the Hungarian explorer who had reached Lake Turkana a century earlier. Because Wintermans was the only non-Hungarian member of the group, he began learning Hungarian during the journey. What started as a practical necessity became the foundation of a lifelong relationship with Hungary.

His first visits to Hungary took place during the final years of the Kádár era. Arriving in 1986, shortly after Chernobyl, he encountered a country still marked by communist control: visa requirements, armed border guards, socialist housing estates, official propaganda and a public culture in which people often dismissed state television news as lies in the privacy of their homes.

He later witnessed the optimism of 1989 and the early 1990s. He knew people close to the founding generation of Fidesz and observed the birth of Hungary’s new democratic politics. The atmosphere after the fall of communism, he recalls, was full of hope. Many believed that Hungary would quickly become a Western-style democracy with Western living standards. Wintermans saw that hope as understandable, but also somewhat naive. The road ahead, he believed, would be much longer.

In 1991–92, he spent an academic year in Pécs through a university exchange programme. Instead of simply studying there, he was asked to teach Dutch at the university. This deepened his knowledge of Hungarian and strengthened his connection to the country. By the mid-1990s, Hungary had become a central part of his life.

Wintermans is particularly attached to rural Hungary. While he appreciates Budapest as a cultural and historical capital, he never wanted to live there. What drew him instead was the quiet of the countryside: space, nature, silence, birds, and night skies still bright with stars. Compared with the Netherlands, densely populated, highly regulated and heavily built-up, rural Hungary offered a sense of openness that he felt had largely disappeared from his homeland.

At the same time, he is careful not to romanticize the experience. Many Dutch people who buy houses in Hungary see only the attractive parts: cheaper property, more land, better weather and fewer restrictions. But according to Wintermans, they often remain outside the everyday realities of Hungarian society. They may not experience the same problems with healthcare, education, wages, bureaucracy or political dependency that ordinary Hungarians face.

The most forceful part of Wintermans’ reflection concerns democracy. He argues that Hungary’s post-communist transition failed to fully confront the structures and reflexes of the old regime. In his view, the country did not build a strong enough democratic culture, civil society or habit of accountability after 1990.

Since 2010, he has watched Hungary move in a direction he finds deeply troubling. He describes this not as an abrupt collapse, but as a gradual weakening of democratic norms: media control, propaganda, public money used for party messaging, institutional capture and a climate of economic fear. Many people, he says, are not afraid of being arrested, but they are afraid of losing their job, promotion or livelihood if they openly oppose the government.

For Wintermans, Hungary is therefore not only a national case, but also a European warning. He sees similar patterns emerging in the Netherlands and other Western countries: political fragmentation, populism, conspiracy theories, the erosion of trust and the destructive effect of social media on public debate.

His central lesson is clear: democracy must never be taken for granted. Free institutions, independent media, civic courage and open political debate do not maintain themselves automatically. They require attention, defence and participation.

Simon Wintermans’ story is therefore more than the biography of a Dutchman who made a life in Hungary. It is a personal European testimony about inheritance, freedom, migration, disappointment and responsibility. His warning is simple but urgent: do not fall asleep inside a democracy, because one day you may wake up in something else.

Cover photo credit: Simon Wintermans (Facebook)

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