On a train travelling from Vienna to Budapest, the landscape outside the windows shifts into snow-covered fields and low winter light. Inside the carriage, passengers sit with coats draped over their seats. Among them, two young Roma women are seated together, returning home after working in Vienna’s hospitality sector. Their conversation begins with everyday matters: family obligations, work schedules, the practicalities of commuting and cross-border employment. After several minutes, the topic turns to Hungarian politics and to a recent pre-election forum held in a countryside town. The women refer to a speech by Hungary’s Minister of Transport, János Lázár, who happens to be one of the most prominent faces in Orbán’s political campaign for the April parliamentary elections. In the widely discussed passage that has circulated in public debate, Lázár stated: “if there are no migrants, and someone must clean the restroom on the InterCity train — because Hungarian voters are not exactly rushing to sign up to clean someone else’s shit in train-restroom — then we have to uncover internal reserves. And the internal reserve means the Gypsy population of Hungary.”

The women respond emotionally, and their reaction is witty, full of sarcasm, and pointed disagreement. They are not alone in their anger.

Lázár’s statement provoked extensive protest and public outrage among Roma and non-Roma politicians, civil organisations, and ordinary citizens alike. As a result, he was forced to issue a public apology.

The speech, which fits into the campaign preceding parliamentary elections due on 12 April 2026, was not a slip of the tongue. It represents how the Fidesz leadership sees, portrays, and instrumentalises the country’s largest ethnic minority, the Roma, for its political goals. János Lázár did not merely insult Roma — over half a million Hungarian citizens — when he suggested they are “fit for” cleaning train toilets. He offered a campaign script, one designed for the right-wing mainstream electorate that wants borders closed, a hierarchical social order restored, and uncomfortable social questions resolved with a single, vulgar image.

The genius of the line, politically speaking, is how much it packs into that image. On the surface, it reassures the anti-immigration electorate: we will not “need” migrants — which is factually untrue, since the Hungarian government has quietly invited in roughly 100,000 guest workers in recent years. But it does so by reviving an older story — “we don’t want outsiders” — and welding it to a newer anxiety about labour shortages and the visible decline of public services that Lázár himself oversees. Someone must do the dirty work, the argument goes. If Hungary rejects immigration at the rhetorical-political level, it must find the workforce at home. And if it must be found at home, why not “tap into” those already treated as a reserve? This is where the statement stops being a gaffe and becomes a political programme in miniature. Lázár invokes what looks like labour-market realism — shortages exist, tasks must be done — but he says nothing about pay, working conditions, public investment, or the quiet dependence of many sectors on underpaid labour. Instead, he points to a “local reserve army“: a subordinated population that can be pressured into low-status, low-bargaining-power jobs. Not as a temporary measure, not as one option among many, but as social common sense.

The toilets are a metaphor — but not for cleanliness

The chosen example matters. “Cleaning train toilets” is not a neutral reference to employment. It is a symbolic assignment to the bottom rung: the kind of work that is simultaneously necessary and socially despised, essential and invisibilised. By pairing Roma with that image, the statement dehumanises while pretending to be practical. It tries to make hierarchy feel natural. Roma are not presented as workers with rights and aspirations but as a workforce stripped of humanity — to be allocated, managed, and, when convenient, blamed.

This is why the language of racial capitalism is not an academic ornament here; it is an explanatory tool. Capitalist economies rarely rely on wages and contracts alone to keep a cheap labour supply available. They also rely on social hierarchies — racialised, ethnicised, and moralised — to explain why some people should accept insecurity, humiliation, and precarious jobs. Those hierarchies translate economic exploitation into a story about character: they “belong” there, they are “like that,” they should be “grateful” for work at all. In that sense, Lázár is not describing a labour market. He is narrating a moral order that makes exploitation easier to sell.

That moral order is also what Huub van Baar calls the normalisation of anti-Gypsyism: the everyday political and media habit of treating Roma degradation as sayable, even amusing, even “truthful.” The power of this style is that it does not need overt biological racism. When a senior politician performs it in public, it does not simply reflect prejudice — it authorises it. It moves the boundary of acceptable speech, making it easier for institutions and employers to act as if Roma humiliation is just “how things are.”

Perhaps the most cynical dimension is the message it sends to Roma themselves. It offers a conditional inclusion that doubles as a warning: you may be preferred to migrants, but only within a pre-assigned slot. You are not the external enemy, but you are the internal workforce to be governed. This is not integration; it is a kind of modern “estate-like social order” in which people are sorted into fixed ranks with different levels of dignity, mobility, and entitlement. Roma — according to this worldview — are valuable when compliant and invisible, and quickly reclassified as a problem when they organise, resist, or demand equal treatment.

Exclusionary nationalism meets labour-market domination

Read this way, the remark is not an “isolated slip.” It is a compact articulation of how exclusionary nationalism and labour-market domination can reinforce each other through racialised categories. Politically, the logic is: reassert national belonging against migrants while tightening internal hierarchy over Roma. Economically, the logic is: secure a controllable labour supply without changing the structures that produce precarity and low pay. Culturally, the logic is: make humiliation appear normal, so that both exploitation and electoral mobilisation feel like common sense rather than choices.

Placed in the context of an election campaign, the function becomes clearer still. Fidesz has long profited from anti-immigration politics, but governing always generates contradictions: sectors need labour, public services strain, and work is required that many citizens refuse under current conditions. “Internal reserves” is a neat rhetorical fix. It allows the government to preserve the symbolic purity of closed borders while redirecting the costs of that stance onto a population already marked as inferior. Instead of asking why decent wages and conditions are not on offer, the public is invited to debate who is “fit” to scrub the toilets.

Yet Fidesz desperately needs Roma votes as much as right-wing ones. That balancing act worked for 15 years, so long as exclusion kept thousands of Roma on public-works employment and election-time handouts. Now a young, ambitious Roma middle class is emerging — like the young women on the train — and they understand that the toilets are a metaphor, but not for cleanliness. For power. They refuse the role Fidesz assigns them, and when they speak up, their voice carries far.

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