In June 1989, a long-haired activist with several days’ stubble faced a thicket of microphones on Budapest’s Heroes’ Square and gave a speech that electrified the crowd of 250,000 Hungarians — and millions more watching on television. The event was the ceremonial reburial of leaders of the country’s doomed 1956 anti-communist uprising.
The speaker, an unknown 26-year-old named Viktor Orban, was about to break two huge taboos. He called for free elections — and for Soviet forces to withdraw from his country. Months later, communism was swept away, in Hungary and across eastern Europe.
Some 28 years later, Orban, now Hungary’s prime minister, stood before a gathering of his party faithful in Transylvania last summer, his hair greying, his lime-green shirt struggling to contain an expanding paunch, and delivered a very different speech. Europe, he said, was being “de-Christianised”.
National identities were being broken down to prepare for a “new, mixed, Islamised Europe”. Shadowy global elites, helped by the Brussels-based bureaucrats of the EU, of which Hungary is now a member, wanted to flood the continent with millions of Muslim immigrants. “The main question over the next few decades is this,” he said. “Will Europe remain the continent of the Europeans?”
Orban’s journey from young champion of democracy to creator of what he has called an “illiberal democracy” is one of the most remarkable recent transformations in European politics. It is a story, too, of how the historic transition to democracy in the continent’s east — which had seemed irreversible a decade ago after 10 former communist countries had joined the EU — is starting to unravel, posing a threat to the EU’s values, perhaps even its future.
In power for the past eight years, and four more in a previous government, Orban has set up Europe’s most successful example of nationalist-conservative rule. His methods are being copied in nearby Poland, while populist-nationalists are also in government in neighbouring Austria. Orban is cited as an inspiration, too, by some associates of Donald Trump — the Hungarian premier was the only EU leader to root openly for Trump’s victory.
The EU has struggled to respond as Orban’s Fidesz government has used two election victories to pass a new constitution and reshape Hungary according to its will. Critics say it has eroded judicial independence and appointed staunch loyalists to key positions. It has turned state-owned media into a propaganda machine, and helped loyal oligarchs buy up most independent media. Since Orban built razor-wire border fences in 2015 to keep out refugees from Syria and the Middle East, moreover, his nationalism has become even harder-edged.
Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford university, who was present at Orban’s speech in 1989, says Hungary is “not in the strict sense a dictatorship. But it is certainly not a liberal democracy any more. It is some kind of hybrid regime, a semi-authoritarian regime. That poses fundamental questions about the nature of the EU — whether it is indeed a community of democracies”.
This April, Orban faces elections that seem almost certain to deliver another four-year term. Fidesz enjoys 51 per cent support among already decided voters — three times that of its nearest challenger, the far-right Jobbik party. Yet despite the party’s lead, it has waged a sour campaign, much of it focused on a famous, supposedly treacherous, Hungarian living overseas: George Soros, billionaire funder of liberal causes.
Orban declined several requests for interviews for this article. But the Financial Times spoke to more than a dozen current and former friends, associates, supporters and opponents to understand his political trajectory and current thinking. Those who have known Orban since his earliest political days say his metamorphosis from liberal to nationalist-populist has been driven, above all, by an overwhelming will to power. “His attribute is to see what the public wants to hear, and to say that, first to get into power, and then to stay there,” says a former senior Hungarian official. “The problem is he has no scruples. He has no moral limits.”
Orban’s supporters dismiss such criticisms as sour grapes. Evelin Fesus, an office worker from the eastern city of Debrecen who attended the premier’s Transylvania speech, praises policies such as providing financial incentives for mothers who have more children — aimed at raising Hungary’s birth rate. “Other prime ministers are jealous of him,” she says, “because he can do whatever he wants.”
The party through which Orban still dominates Hungary was founded in those student days, in a shabby college dormitory on Budapest’s leafy Gellert Hill. Istvan Bibo College was an island of intellectual freedom, where lively discussion was encouraged. Orban came from a less privileged background than many of his college contemporaries. Born in 1963, he was a country boy, growing up an hour’s drive west of the capital. The family home had no running water. His father Gyozo, an agricultural engineer, sometimes beat him, Orban once told an interviewer.
Arriving at university in 1982, Orban was already a convinced anti-communist. During military service a year earlier, he had feared he could be sent into neighbouring Poland to crush Solidarity, the trade union then challenging the country’s Moscow-backed leadership. While he was in the army, the communist security services tried — unsuccessfully — to recruit him as an informer.
At college, his intellect quickly stood out. “He was very clever, very courageous, and full of energy. And he loved football,” recalls Gabor Fodor, who shared a room with Orban and became a co-founder of Fidesz (the name means Alliance of Young Democrats). Fodor, a tall, fair-haired urban sophisticate, introduced Orban to foreign literature and cinema and the capital’s underground rock scene. But, adds Fodor, Orban felt Budapest’s intellectual circles never entirely accepted him — something that has become part of his political persona.
Laszlo Keri, a political-science professor who was one of Orban’s teachers at Bibo College after it opened in 1983, says he was “enormously aggressive” in putting over his views. “But what surprised me was his very strong influence over the others in his generation,” says Keri, sipping a spritzer in a restaurant in Budapest’s Ujlipotvaros district. The silver-haired academic recalls chiding Orban in an early debate for being too strident. He joked that, since the young student seemed set to become Hungary’s PM, Keri and Istvan Stumpf, the college’s director, should be “the first people to hang, because we already knew who you were!”
Though Keri meant the comment as a put-down, Orban fulfilled the first part of his prediction. Far from being hanged, Stumpf became Orban’s chief of staff during his first term as PM from 1998-2002, and is today a constitutional court justice. Indeed, from this close-knit group of college friends came Hungary’s current president, parliament speaker, and author of its 2011, Fidesz-sponsored, constitution.
Among those who gave the group early backing was, ironically, George Soros, who had already launched his philanthropic and democracy-promotion activities. He visited Bibo College in 1985, donating a much-needed photocopier — the machines were regulated by the state because of their potential to spread subversive material — and funding a college journal that later became a Fidesz paper. “A copier was fantastic,” says Fodor. “To make copies, to write freely what you think — that was very dangerous to the regime.”
The problem is that Orban has no scruples. He has no moral limits
Orban and his friends took other risks, making underground visits to leaders of the then-banned Solidarity in Poland. Orban’s 1986 master’s thesis on the Polish trade union, which Keri calls a “Himalayan” intellectual achievement, quoted Solidarity leaders first-hand. By 1988, the friends felt ready to launch their own pro-democracy movement. Keri argued it was too dangerous, warning Orban to wait until the departure of Janos Kadar, Hungary’s ageing communist leader.
“Viktor [said], ‘No, this is the time to take the risk. Later on it will be in vain,’” recalls Keri. Orban prevailed, and Fiatal Demokratak Szovetsege, or Fidesz, was launched in March.
Orban’s instincts proved right. The authorities tolerated Fidesz. As Hungary’s first independent youth political movement, it secured an invitation, after Kadar retired in May 1988, to round-table talks the following year and was granted a speaker at the Heroes’ Square event at which Orban would make his stunning breakthrough. When elections were called for March 1990, he cut short a period studying — on a Soros scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford — to campaign. Fidesz won almost 9 per cent of the vote. Aged 26, the student radical found himself leading a group of 22 MPs.
Within two years, however, a battle over Fidesz’s soul would erupt that showed Orban’s early willingness to change his political ideology in pursuit of power. As Hungary’s first post-communist, centre-right government struggled against economic collapse, some of the party’s co-founders wanted to ally with a bigger liberal party. Orban thought Fidesz would be swallowed up. He wanted to take the party to the right, where he thought it could become the dominant political force. “Orban said, ‘Our main enemy is the liberal party. It’s a fight, and we have to win,’” says Fodor.
He prevailed. Elected party president in 1993, Orban announced a more nationalist, conservative platform. This new position gave him control of party resources. He made his oldest school friend, Lajos Simicska, party treasurer. A scandal erupted when it emerged the entrepreneurial Simicska, who would become one of Hungary’s richest men, had sold the elegant party headquarters Fidesz had been granted by the state, ploughing the proceeds into ventures designed to make money for the party.
Orban insisted the party needed funds to compete with the well-entrenched former Communist Party machine. Some members saw it as a worrying sign of willingness to blur the lines between party and private money.
“This was not illegal, but obviously [it was] not according to the spirit of the law,” says Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, one of Fidesz’s earliest members but today an independent MP. In late 1993 and 1994, unhappy with the party’s new direction, Fodor, Szelenyi and others walked out. With them, says Szelenyi, a “whole intellectual circle” departed — and the only group capable of counter-balancing Orban.
At first, Orban’s risk-taking seemed to backfire. In 1994, Fidesz crashed to defeat in an election it had been expected to win. But he doubled down on the party’s new, centre-right stance. The Fidesz leader told his old teacher Laszlo Keri that, on the centre-left, his party was a “kind of spare part”. But on the right, “there are many small players and we can be the co-ordinators of the divided rightwing”. “We will be the best polgari centre party,” he said, using a Hungarian word that refers to a patriotic, property-owning middle class.
Though previously anti-religious, Orban started to cultivate links with church leaders. Two years earlier, he had told Zoltan Balog, a Calvinist pastor, that unless he understood the role of the church “I cannot talk to the people”. He got Balog to organise dozens of round-table meetings at churches, was confirmed in a Lutheran church, remarried his wife Aniko Levai in a church wedding, and had their children baptised. This time, it paid off. In the 1998 election, Orban became, at 35, Hungary’s youngest prime minister, leading a coalition government.
The government was not untouched by scandal. A 1999 magazine article revealed a company linked to Fidesz and Simicska had provided funding in 1993 to Orban’s father and some of his colleagues of Ft4.75m (then just short of £12,000) to help them take full control of a partially privatised dolomite mine. Only about a quarter of the money was repaid. When it later emerged that Gyozo Orban’s mine was supplying state motorway-building contracts, his son said on national TV that he had asked his father to end such deals.
In 2002 Fidesz suffered another traumatic defeat to the rival Socialist party, which had made extravagant spending pledges. Orban, according to those who spoke to him at the time, learnt lessons in opposition. Fidesz’s campaign, he decided, had been “too honest”. He devoted his time out of power to building a formidable grassroots party machine and reinforcing control over the party.
While Simicska was given the task of expanding the Fidesz-loyal media empire, Orban strengthened the party’s nationalist message, taking up the cause of ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries.
Orban also determined that, if he got back into power, he would not be so easily dislodged. When the Socialist government imploded after Hungary became the first European country to need a bailout from the International Monetary Fund in the 2008 financial crisis, Fidesz swept back to power in 2010 with two-thirds of parliamentary seats. This time, with a constitutional majority, Orban faced few constraints.
The past eight years have seen a national rebirth for Orban supporters. They believe that the premier has put Hungary back on the right track, restoring its sovereignty after two decades of often-mishandled post-communist transition. Orban has rolled back alien “liberal” values and restored respect for Christianity and the family. He has curbed, too, the foreign multinationals that bought national assets cheaply in 1990s privatisations, restoring Hungarian majority control of the banking sector, and helped mend public finances without imposing orthodox austerity measures.
“In 2010, Hungary was really at the edge of a cliff, and maybe even a step beyond,” says Peter Szijjarto, 39, the country’s foreign minister who previously served as head of Orban’s office and his spokesman. “Without [Orban’s] courage, without his greatness . . . Hungary would have been on the path of Greece. His achievement is something that will be written about in the history books.”
Speaking in his office in Budapest’s foreign ministry, which he has purged of many longer-serving diplomats since his appointment in 2014, the boyish-looking Szijjarto admits he wanted to work for Fidesz ever since Orban spoke at his school in 1996. He bats away suggestions that Orban has led a turn towards authoritarianism. “I laugh at this. Go out on the streets here, feel the atmosphere, look around. You think authoritarian countries look like that?” he says, gesturing from his ministerial office to the cafés and boulevards beyond.
Supporters admit Orban has “centralised” power, partly for efficiency, and partly to break down the remaining influence networks of the old Communist Party. This is similar to the strategy of Poland’s nationalist-conservative Law and Justice government, whose party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has formed an informal alliance with Orban.
Unlike some former communist neighbours, Poland and Hungary avoided mass uprisings in 1989 and experienced negotiated transitions through round-table talks. Orban and Kaczynski say this did not provide enough of a clean break. Too many former communists morphed into “democrats” or wealthy capitalists — distorting the transition, and creating resentments among those left behind economically.
Yet while Poland’s Kaczynski is an offstage string-puller, Orban leads from the front. “Fidesz as a party is not separated from Orban, it is the party of Orban, the followers of Orban,” says Andras Bozoki, a political scientist at Central European University in Budapest who is another disgruntled former Fidesz member.
A senior Hungarian banker who has known Orban since the 1990s adds that the “concentration of power in his hands is really incredible. He is the one who appoints members of the cabinet. He selects future MP candidates — so they depend on him. He selects members of the executive bodies of Fidesz. So he has no [limits] on him, either in the government or in his own party,” the banker says.
The Viktor Orban of today is jowlier than the skinny student of 1989. But in public appearances, his collar still often unbuttoned, he has the same restless energy, shifting uneasily in his chair when not speaking, fidgeting with notes, his eyes scanning the room. He can be charming, jovial, and sometimes obsequious to those he wishes to cultivate, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But he is also careful not to allow challengers to emerge, pitting rivals against each other. “This is the only environment in which he can work, where there’s conflict,” says Zsuzsanna Szelenyi.
EU leaders say Orban’s private persona largely matches his public rhetoric. He is prone to long lectures on Hungary’s historical role in defending European Christendom from Muslim invasion or the intrinsic traits of different European nations. Media appearances are carefully choreographed. At a recent EU leaders’ summit, Orban took no questions from reporters. Instead, his staff posted videos on social media in which he described the meeting as a “two-day-long march” and a battle against “assaults on Hungarian sovereignty”.
In his regular conflicts with European institutions over Hungary’s alleged weakening of democratic checks and balances, Orban frequently seems to have outplayed them. Unlike Kaczynski, Orban has been adept at appearing to compromise on steps such as a controversial law regulating media or on Fidesz’s 2011 constitution, while leaving much of them intact. He has jokingly described the process to supporters as a “peacock dance”.
The one area in which Orban has refused any compromise is over his opposition to taking an EU-mandated “quota” of asylum seekers. The razor-wire fences he built to keep out migrants in 2015 remain arguably the defining images of his premiership. Orban has turned the quota plan into a battering ram against Brussels. He has challenged it — unsuccessfully — at the European Court of Justice, held a referendum on it (98 per cent voted against, though turnout was only 44 per cent), and sent a “national consultation” to all four million Hungarian households accompanied by a poster campaign urging “Let’s Stop Brussels!”
All of this finally prompted a veiled threat last April from the European People’s party, the centre-right pan-European family that includes Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, to expel Fidesz unless it backed off. At the same time, the European Commission launched legal action against Budapest over an education law that was seen as being aimed at closing the city’s Central European University, a bastion of liberalism founded by George Soros.
But the EU has proved short of tools to combat reversals of democracy among members — something it never thought it would have to deal with. Even if it begins steps — as it did recently with Poland — towards suspending Hungary’s voting rights in EU decision-making bodies, Kaczynski and Orban have each made it clear they will veto such sanctions being imposed on the other. European officials are left wringing their hands.
“Is liberal democracy winning the argument? That’s the big question for the EU,” says one senior EU figure who has met Orban. “Kaczynski and Orban are high in the polls. But are we willing to give up our fundamental values? If we leave our values behind, there is not going to be a Europe down the road.”
Orban’s cultivation of links with “illiberal” regimes such as China and Russia, which he praises as models, poses another challenge. “Because of how the EU works, even if Hungary is a small member state, Russia and China have a prospect of almost having a seat at the decision-making table in Brussels,” says Timothy Garton Ash.
Without Orban’s courage, Hungary would have been on the path of Greece. His achievement is something that will be written about in the history books
If anything, Orban’s clashes with the EU also seem to strengthen his domestic support. Laszlo Keri says Orban portrays himself as defender of little Hungary against an EU, and the invading Muslim hordes, that threaten to swallow it up. That mirrors another role Orban has adopted. While Fidesz used to position itself as the party of the middle class, Orban today portrays himself as champion of the rural poor against the Budapest liberal elites — the same ones the premier feels snubbed him in the 1980s. Staff regularly post videos of him dropping in to drink palinka, a potent fruit brandy, with villagers.
This plays on the sense of victimhood of a small nation with an obscure language that for 400 years was occupied by foreign powers and whose main success is seen as its millennium-long survival. The humiliation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon — which punished Hungary for being on the losing side in the first world war by stripping it of two-thirds of its territory — lingers. By confronting Brussels and handing out citizenship, and voting rights, to one million ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries since 2010, Orban can claim to be redressing historical grievances. “Hungary,” he assured a party gathering in September, “has not been this strong since Trianon”.
Orban’s bitterest conflict of late, however, has been with an 87-year-old multibillionaire who lives thousands of miles away: George Soros. The hedge-fund investor turned philanthropist was born in Hungary in 1930 and left for the UK in 1947, after his family managed to hide their Jewish origins during the Holocaust. Out of the $14bn that Soros’s foundations have spent on promoting democracy and the kind of liberal values that Orban now opposes, some $400m has gone to Hungary.
Recently Orban’s government has ratcheted up its anti-Soros campaign, putting pressure on the Soros-founded Central European University, then last June passing a law that seemed targeted primarily at Soros’s non-governmental groups. After Soros argued in 2015 that the EU should be ready to admit a million refugees, Orban’s ruling circle also began alleging that the philanthropist was behind a “Soros plan” to flood the continent with migrants. Posters went up of a grinning Soros, with the words: “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh” — prompting allegations of anti-Semitism. Some billboards were defaced with graffiti reading “stinking Jew”.
By the autumn of 2017, a questionnaire on the “Soros plan” was sent to all households. In December, the government said 2.3 million Hungarians had responded, overwhelmingly condemning it.
Kaczynski and Orban are high in the polls. But are we willing to give up our fundamental values? If we leave our values behind, there is not going to be a Europe down the road
Gyorgy Schopflin, 78, a Fidesz member of the European Parliament, insists neither the anti-Soros campaign nor the government is anti-Semitic. But, he says, Soros, whom he calls an “NGO warlord”, has made himself a legitimate target by turning himself into a political actor who has used his organisations to try to “destabilise the government”. “In that part of the NGO world, there really are no checks and balances,” says Schopflin. “The role of the opposition has been taken over by NGOs.”
For months, Soros remained silent about Hungary’s campaign. In December, however, he hit back in a video message. He recalled his early help to Orban, but added: “Our relationship went bad because he went bad. He has changed a great deal. He has transformed democracy into an anti-democratic regime.”
In a December interview at his white clapboard house in upstate New York, Soros hardly comes across as the traitor of Fidesz propaganda. At 87, he meets the FT straight after his daily tennis game with his wife. He sketches Orban’s authoritarian shift while sipping tea in his dining room. The “rise of the nationalists”, he warns, means open society is facing its biggest test since the second world war.
But Soros insists Orban’s main motive is the pursuit of power and its trappings. “[Orban] started really going wrong when he made his father rich by giving him a quasi-monopoly on road-building materials, which was a big source of wealth,” he says, recalling the 1999 revelation. “That’s when [Orban] started building a mafia state. It’s really when he actually gained power.”
Orban has never revealed why he turned against Soros but the financier provides a convenient external threat against which Fidesz can try to mobilise its electorate. One theory is Orban was annoyed that Soros was partly funding groups that alleged Fidesz corruption. Soros acknowledges that he took the “mafia state” label from the title of a book by Balint Magyar, a former education minister from a rival liberal party. Magyar argues that, while Fidesz hardly invented corruption in Hungary, the party has taken it to a different level, carrying out a form of “state capture”.
There have been significant recent shake-ups among the country’s alleged “crony capitalists”. In 2015, Orban and Simicska fell out. The tycoon, who had rarely given interviews, rang some of his own media outlets to berate Orban for setting up a “new dictatorship” and referred to his former friend using an expletive. According to one study, Simicska’s companies in 2013 won 12 per cent of all public procurement contracts by value in Hungary. Since 2015, he has won only a handful of state contracts and been squeezed out of some of his former pro-Fidesz media assets.
This has opened opportunities for others, including Lorinc Meszaros, an Orban school friend and mayor of his home village of Felcsut, who built a football stadium across the road from the football-mad Orban’s childhood home. At the end of the premier’s street, he also rebuilt a narrow-gauge tourist train, with the help of €2m in EU funding. In a Hungarian rich list published last May, Meszaros’s wealth was estimated to have jumped more than fivefold in a year, to €383m.
Orban and Meszaros have publicly denied allegations from Jobbik, the far-right opposition party, that Meszaros is a stroman, or frontman, for the PM. Answering a question in parliament in 2016, Orban said: “I am not a wealthy man, and I will never be a wealthy man”. Zoltan Kovacs, Hungary’s government spokesman, says if any businesspeople close to Fidesz have prospered, they have won contracts entirely on merit and done a good job.
My fear is the longer he is in this position, the deeper he believes in these populist ideas
Yet some of Fidesz’s most outspoken critics suggest the premier’s nationalist-conservative ideology is essentially an artificial construct designed to deliver power and its privileges. An ideologically driven party, says Balint Magyar, “can be anti-Semitic or racist. But Orban and his people just cynically use these things. At the same time, of course, they legitimise the presence of such notions in society, which poisons society.”
By contrast, the senior banker who has known Orban since the 1990s suggests that the premier has, over time, convinced himself of his own patter. “[At first] he didn’t take seriously more than 20 or 30 per cent [of his conservative rhetoric],” the banker says. “My fear is the longer he is in this position, the deeper he believes in these populist ideas.”
Critics worry that the negative messages of the government’s anti-Soros and anti-migrant campaigns are seeping into society. Last month, at a time of year when Hungarians traditionally slaughter pigs, a Fidesz MP posted a Facebook photograph of a dead pig, its skin seared black and inscribed in yellow with the words “This was Soros!!”
A few weeks earlier, in Ocseny in south-west Hungary, villagers made death threats to a local guesthouse owner after he offered a free holiday to a group of refugees who had already been granted asylum. Zoltan Fenyesi, the hotelier, later told the FT he thought he could talk the villagers round. “But it was impossible — most were spilling over with rage.” Orban spoke out in support of the villagers.
Such incidents highlight a sense of tension in the country as the elections approach. This is all the more surprising given Fidesz’s poll lead, five years of moderate economic growth and record low unemployment pushing up wages sharply.
One reason for the nervousness may be that Orban’s ally-turned-foe Lajos Simicska has said his “sympathies” now lie with Jobbik. As Fidesz has drifted further to the right, the opposition party is attempting to rebrand itself as more centrist. Jobbik last year launched a billboard campaign picturing Orban and others under the slogan “You work. They steal”. Simicska has denied funding Jobbik and, this week, he said he was “not in the business of buying political parties”. But rumours are rife in Budapest political circles that he plans to release a “bombshell” of compromising information on Orban during the election campaign.
Internationally, too, there is a sense that Hungary’s premier seems less in the ascendant. The failure of France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders to make electoral breakthroughs has robbed Orban, for now, of the chance to become part of a broader group of rightwing leaders set on curbing the EU and returning powers to nation states. To the barely disguised disappointment of Budapest officials, Trump has not yet visited his most ardent admirer among European leaders or invited Orban to the White House.
Still, Orban seems almost assured of another big majority in April — so the bruising clash between the EU and one of its biggest challengers could potentially go on for another four years at least. Beleaguered liberals console themselves with the hope that, in time, Hungary could still swing back from what Orban himself has called the “eastern” style of governance it has embraced to a more democratic, western model.
“Opposition parties or new political forces will break through at some point,” predicts Istvan Hegedus, another of the early Fidesz members who quit in 1994 and today runs a think-tank. “The war is not lost. All such people die or disappear at some point. The problem is we don’t know how long it will take.”
Neil Buckley is the FT’s eastern Europe editor; Andrew Byrne is the FT’s correspondent for Hungary, Romania and western Balkans
Letter in response to this article:
Perhaps the ‘problem’ is not Orban / From Guido Franzinetti, Dept of Humanistic Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy
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