Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has been at odds with his fellow European Union leaders for years over his right-wing nationalist stance on immigration, minority rights, the rule of law, media freedoms and other issues. He would not get in line with his counterparts’ views on aiding Ukraine and has openly sympathized with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
But while E.U. officials criticized his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” other strongman leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey embraced him — and none more than Donald J. Trump, who welcomed him to the White House in 2019 and has remained close, calling him “fantastic” earlier this year.
A look at Mr. Orban’s rise to power shows how he became a darling to conservatives and right-wing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.
Who is Orban?
When Mr. Orban, 61, first became prime minister in 1998, he was a rarity among Eastern European leaders for having never been part of a Soviet-era regime. At the time, Mr. Orban was an advocate of liberal democracy.
As a young man, he attended Oxford University —courtesy of a scholarship funded by George Soros — and studied how young democracies could make the transition from authoritarianism. In Hungary, in 1988, he became a founding member of the Federation of Young Democrats, known as Fidesz, which was dedicated to fighting communism. Even after it lost power to the Hungarian Socialist Party in 2002, Mr. Orban maintained control of the party, which still dominates Hungary’s political arena.
Mr. Orban was ousted as prime minister in 2002, and lost a re-election bid in 2006. But, in 2010, playing the financial crisis to his advantage, he returned to power in a landslide win and has held on ever since.
He and his party have used their hefty majority to enact a more conservative constitution. He stacked the judiciary with more-amenable judges, and also whittled away at some checks and balances that post-Cold War Hungarian leaders had put in place to stave off authoritarianism.
Among them, he changed the electoral rules to better suit his party, throttled the free press and cracked down on nonprofit organizations, including the Open Society Foundations. That nonprofit was founded by Mr. Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and whom Mr. Orban has accused of seeking to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty.
With the state apparatus rebuilt in his favor, Mr. Orban has continued to win elections, lending an air of legitimacy to what he calls the “illiberal state,” in which Mr. Orban rules like an elected autocrat.
Why Does He Vex the European Union?
For more than a decade, the European Union, which Hungary joined in 2004, has criticized what it calls an erosion of democratic values under Mr. Orban’s rule. For his part, he has accused the E.U. of meddling in his country’s internal affairs with “European diktats.” He has also criticized the E.U. for promoting liberal values on issues such as gender and race that go against the traditional, conservative values he has entrenched in Hungary’s “Christian democracy.”
The bloc’s executive, the European Commission, has opened numerous disciplinary procedures against Hungary and blocked the transfer of billions of euros in E.U. funds in an attempt to change its behavior, to limited effect.
Hungary has positioned itself as a critic from within. Mr. Orban has fiercely differed with the bloc’s stance on migration, erecting a fence in 2015 along his country’s border with Serbia, patrolled by sometimes brutal security forces. (Austria, Italy, Slovakia and other countries have since emulated his tough stance.)
More recently, Mr. Orban has dug in his heels on Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine. He has called his fellow E.U. leaders “warmongers” for supporting Kyiv. As president of the Council of the European Union, an organizational role that rotates every six months, he visited Mr. Putin in July, riling many of his counterparts.
He has also positioned himself as a messenger between Mr. Trump and Europe, delivering his plan for a swift end to the war, after visiting the then-Republican candidate at his home in Mar-a-Lago in July.
A Conservative Darling
The Hungarian prime minister may be maligned elsewhere, but he is respected by the U.S. president-elect. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” Mr. Trump said early this year.
At the sole presidential campaign debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump described Mr. Orban as “one of the most respected men,” adding: “They call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart.”
American conservatives have also embraced Mr. Orban’s calls to reshape government institutions in accordance with his ideology and fight against secularism. He has been feted at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. Conservative U.S. media personality Tucker Carlson has expressed great admiration for Mr. Orban, interviewing him in Budapest and in the United States and taking a helicopter ride to inspect Hungary’s border fence.
This week, the 2024 U.S. election results had not yet been fully tallied when Mr. Trump and Mr. Orban were on the phone. “Mar-a-Lago calling,” Mr. Orban posted on social media on Wednesday night, announcing his first call with the freshly re-elected Mr. Trump. “We have big plans for the future!”
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