The 22-year-old rapper is so popular — he recently played three sold-out concerts at Hungary’s largest stadium — that even Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a conservative advocate of traditional values who has little sympathy for young people or culture, is in denial. Claim to be a fan.
Mr Orban said he I particularly like this song “Rampapapan”, a reggae-flavored ode to cannabis. It was a surprising choice given the prime minister’s conservative views, and it also made one wonder whether he had actually heard the song, or had just seen it. Its video The musician is shown playing football, the leader’s favorite sport.
But Attila Bauko, the Hungarian superstar better known by his stage name Azahriah, has won such a passionate fan base in Hungary that Mr. Orban, who has been in power for 14 years, seems to want to capture some of the rapper’s energy and star power.
“Because they see a lot of people like me, it seems like they want to be nice to me,” Azaria said in an interview backstage before a concert last month at the Puskas Arena, a Budapest stadium where he played three nights and drew nearly 50,000 people each night.
Azaria said being favored by officials “should be an honor, but it feels strange and uncomfortable when so many young fans hate the ruling Fidesz party.”
Last October, after tickets for several of Orban’s recent concerts sold out within minutes of going on sale, his office placed a photo of Orban and a “sold out” sign on a TikTok video to promote a speech by the prime minister.
The video was later removed after a wave of online mockery. Azahriah sold 138,800 tickets online, but only a few thousand showed up to hear Mr Orban sing his best songs – a common complaint about the EU.
Azaria first came to public attention a decade ago when he started a YouTube channel at age 12. He occasionally played guitar but mostly just chatted, engaging a group of young people with his troubles at school in Ujpalota, a down-market district of Budapest dotted with Communist-era concrete apartment blocks.
His personal experience resonates. His parents divorced, and he was raised primarily by his mother, a Hungarian officer. His father moved to Germany to work as a mechanic, a path many Hungarians took when they became disillusioned with prospects back home.
After he began calling himself Azahriah (a biblical name that roughly means “God’s help”), he became an entertainment sensation and recorded his first hit song in 2020 with already established artist DeshgrasslandHis first album, I’m Worse, consisted mainly of English songs.
Later, he switched to Hungarian and “Hungarian English”, a mixture of the two languages with occasional drops of Spanish and Romani.
He quickly topped the Hungarian charts— Earlier this month, four of his songs were among the top five most listened-to songs on Spotify Hungary. The phenomenon has grown so fast that Hungarian media asked psychologists to explain it, calling it “Mass psychosis““
Azaria’s manager, Gergely Toth, recalled that when he first signed Azaria three years ago, Azaria was a niche artist performing in concerts in front of 1,500 people.
“I was in the middle of the whole thing and it was hard for even me to explain what was going on,” Mr. Toth said. “People were cheering for him like they were cheering for the Hungarian national football team.”
However, politics has hampered Azaria’s chances of representing his country at the European music scene’s World Cup, the Eurovision Song Contest, Europe’s biggest music event, which authorities are concerned about. Gay Eventsin 2020 Hungary ended its participation in the annual event.
“It would be amazing if I could win the Eurovision Song Contest as a straight, white man,” Azaria said.
David Sajo, entertainment editor of Telex, a well-known Hungarian online media, said that he was not a big fan of Azaria himself, but praised Azaria for broadening Hungary’s musical horizons by combining African rhythms, Caribbean ska music, Latin music and other musical styles that are “quite basic and common in the West, but unique here.”
Mr. Saccio said Azaria’s real breakthrough came in 2022, when a scandal occurred that could have ended the careers of many others. After a concert at the Provincial Pancake Festival, a video appeared online showing the artist having sex with a female fan backstage.
“Suddenly, his name was in every gossip magazine, every major newspaper and every internet site, day in and day out,” Saccio said. “Before this, he was just a Generation Z celebrity. After this, he became a national A-list superstar.”
Azaria said the incident was embarrassing but acknowledged that “it raised my profile.”
His most ardent fans are young women like Luca Seles, a 20-year-old from a small town in northern Hungary who is studying to be a kindergarten teacher. She bought tickets for the last three concerts and slept on the sidewalk outside the Puskás Stadium to ensure she would be at the front of the line for each one.
She said she connected more closely to Azaria than any other artist, and even liked Taylor Swift because he sang about “real things from my own life” — like when he mentioned growing up in Uipallotta in one song.
She said she had been following his YouTube channel for years but became addicted in 2021 when he released “Thought 1,It’s a sad song sung with Desh. She recalls that she was going through a difficult time at home at the time, and the lyrics read “Every night you’re waiting to see what tomorrow will bring, but you know it’s going to be the same.”
But his fans also include elderly people. For example, Julia Backus, a 50-year-old economist who recently took her 10-year-old son to a concert, said she used to listen to the 1980s British band Depeche Mode and the communist-era band Hungaria, but she fell in love with Azahriah because he had “something for everyone” and often switched between genres and languages.
Unlike many stars, she said, “he seemed like a decent guy” who tried to transcend political and generational barriers.
At a recent concert, he told the crowd that some fans wanted him to talk more about politics, but he said that was not his job.
His occasional political interventions avoided personal attacks and were mostly motivated by disgust at the “atmosphere of war” between Hungary’s extremely hostile political camps.
“Musicians are not obliged to talk about politics,” he said. “If you have nothing to say, that’s fine. But in a free country, it’s not right to remain silent for fear of damaging your career. We are not Russia.”
In February, he joined public outrage over the pardon of a man convicted of covering up pedophile abuse at a children’s home. Hungarian President Katalin Novak, a close ally of Orban, Forced to resign due to anger.
“Some of the issues were beyond the moral level I could accept,” he recalled.
Some of Orban’s supporters tried to discredit his intervention by reviving his scandals and portraying him as a sex offender, but they quickly abandoned the effort, which only strengthened public support for the musician.
“Azaria is one of the few people in Hungary who will not be destroyed by Fidesz,” said Sajo, the entertainment editor. “They know he is too popular to mess with.”
Balazs Levai, a filmmaker who is making a movie about the artist, said he had trouble understanding Azaria’s appeal and thought “he was like a character from a Hungarian fairy tale — someone who went from being a nobody to being everyone’s hero.”
