AUTHORS: ANDRÁS BÍRÓ-NAGY – TAMÁS CSONTOS – KRISTÓF MOLNÁR – ATTILA VARGA JUNE 2025 Several Policy Solutions surveys performed in recent years have shown a widespread demand for an active state and, as part of the latter, high-quality public services. The pileup of major crises in the 2020s – the health care crisis stemming from the Covid pandemic, followed by the economic crisis, along with the Russian-Ukrainian war and the massive concomitant energy crisis, runaway inflation and the cost-of-living crisis – has highlighted the question of the extent to which Hungarians can rely on the state and what kind of services they have access to when there is trouble afoot. Furthermore, the issue of public services has entered the political agenda with a newfound rigour in the past two years: in addition to the political debates we had already been accustomed to, news surrounding the state of health care and educational institutions, the problems with public transport and the issues plaguing child protection. Hence, it is very timely to survey how Hungarians assess the state of public services, what type of changes they have observed during the years of Viktor Orbán’s governance, 1