Towards the end of 2015, the dominant issue for Hungarian voters was clearly the omnipresent refugee question. There was only a single issue that became important enough to challenge the refugee question's monopoly for the attention of the voting public: the Orbán government's announcement to privatise several hundred thousand hectares of publicly-owned lands in the span of just a few weeks. The governing party, Fidesz, claimed to be helping farmers, while the left-wing opposition spoke of another round of corruption and the far-right accused the government of treason. For many Hungarians, the issue of land ownership is of pre-eminent importance, but to fully understand the phenomenon, we must go back a 1000 years in Hungarian history.