Hungary has a history of being partly colonised by the Ottoman Empire and later the Habsburg Empire, where it became an autonomous Kingdom containing for example Croatia and parts of Western Ukraine. The Hungarian social contract has been significantly shaped by this history. More recently, the country’s populist and eurosceptic government has been a challenge for the European social contract. As the promise of economic prosperity has been the basis of the Hungarian social contract since the 1960s, it is interesting how Hungarian political leaders will survive the current crises and the loss of EU funding as a mechanism of criticism for weakening the rule of law.