Viktor Orbán
Viktor Mihály Orbán is a Hungarian lawyer and politician who has been the 56th prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has also led the Fidesz political party since 2003, and previously from 1993 to 2000. He was re-elected as prime minister in 2014, 2018, and 2022. On 29 November 2020, he became the country's longest-serving prime minister.
Orbán was first elected to the National Assembly in 1990 and led Fidesz's parliamentary group until 1993. During his first term as prime minister and head of the conservative coalition government, from 1998 to 2002, inflation and the fiscal deficit shrank, and Hungary joined NATO. After losing reelection, however, Orbán led the opposition party from 2002 to 2010.
Since 2010, when he resumed office, Hungary has experienced democratic backsliding, weakened judicial independence, increased corruption, and curtailed press freedom. During his second premiership, which is also known as the Orbán regime, several controversial constitutional and legislative reforms were made, including the 2013 amendments to the Constitution of Hungary. He frequently styles himself as a defender of Christian values in the face of the European Union, which he claims is anti-nationalist and anti-Christian. His portrayal of the EU as a political foe has led to accusations that his government is a kleptocracy. It has also been characterized as a hybrid regime, dominant-party system, and mafia state. Orbán defends his policies as "illiberal Christian democracy".
In March 2019, Fidesz was suspended from the EU's Christian Democratic party, the European People's Party. In March 2021, Fidesz left the EPP over a dispute over new rule-of-law language in the latter's bylaws. While shifting Hungary towards what he has called "illiberal democracy", he has also promoted Euroscepticism, opposition to liberal democracy, and the establishment of closer ties with China, Russia, and Turkey.
Early life and background (1963–1988)
Viktor Mihály Orbán was born on 31 May 1963 and has two younger brothers, both businessmen, Győző Jr. and Áron. Their paternal grandfather, Mihály Orbán, a former dockworker and a war veteran, farmed and worked as a veterinary assistant in Alcsútdoboz in Fejér County, where Orbán first lived while growing up. In 1973, the family resettled to neighboring Felcsút, where Orbán's father headed the machinery department at the local farm collective. Orbán attended school there and in Vértesacsa. In 1977, the family moved to Székesfehérvár, where Orbán had secured a place at the prestigious Blanka Teleki school. In his first two years there, he served as local secretary of the Hungarian Young Communist League, in which membership was mandatory for matriculation to a university, Additionally, his father happened to be a patron of the KISZ.After graduating from high school in 1981, Orbán completed his military service alongside Lajos Simicska, whom he had befriended in high school. Orbán was jailed several times for indiscipline, which included a failure to appear for duty during the 1982 FIFA World Cup and striking a non-commissioned officer during a personal altercation. His time in the army also coincided with the declaration of martial law in Poland in December 1981, which his friend Simicska criticized. During that period, Orbán recalled, he expected to be mobilized to invade Poland. He would later remark that military service had shifted his political views radically from the previous position of a "naive and devoted supporter" of the Communist regime. Nonetheless, a state security report from May 1982 still described him as "loyal to our social system".
In 1983, Orbán went to study law at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. There, he joined Jogász Társadalomtudományi Szakkollégium, a residential college—established in 1983 by István Stumpf and modeled on English universities—for law students from outside the capital. Its members were permitted to explore social sciences beyond the socialist canon and the "new" field of "bourgeois" political science, in particular. There, Orbán met Gábor Fodor and László Kövér.
Orbán became chairman of the executive committee of the college's 60 students in 1984. He also went on a series of trips to Poland with his classmates and a lecturer, Tamás Fellegi, during the 1984–1985 school year and again in 1987, during the third pastoral visit of John Paul II. Their lead Polish contacts were Małgorzata Tarasiewicz and Adam Jagusiak, who would become members of the anti-Communist student movement, beginning in 1985.
In 1986, Orbán submitted his master's thesis on the Polish Solidarity movement, based on interviews with its leaders. That August, shortly before his marriage to Dr Anikó Lévai in Szolnok, in September 1986, a police source reported him as affiliated with an organization whose members were lecturing in the United States and West Germany, presenting themselves as "the country's expected future leaders." They received Western support while also enjoying full protection by the Budapest police and insider access to top-level government decisions through the Communist Interior Minister István Horváth. The minister was expected to intervene personally to clear Orbán, in particular, of any sedition charges.
After obtaining the higher degree of Juris Doctor in 1987, Orbán lived in Szolnok for two years, commuting to his job in Budapest as a sociologist at the Management Training Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food. In November 1987, at the Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences, Orbán welcomed a group of 150 delegates from 17 countries to a two-day seminar—backed by the European Network for East–West Dialogue—on the Perestroika, conscientious objection, and the prospects for a pan-European democratic movement.
In September 1989, Orbán took up a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford, funded by the Soros Foundation, which had employed him part-time since April 1988. He began work on the concept of civil society in European political thought, under the guidance of Zbigniew Pełczyński. During this time, he unsuccessfully contested the Fidesz leadership elections in Budapest, which he had lost to Fodor. In January 1990, he abandoned his project at Oxford and returned to Hungary with his family to run for a seat in Hungary's first post-communist parliament.
Political ascent (1988–1998)
On 30 March 1988, at the Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences, Orbán–alongside Stumpf, Fodor, Kövér, and 32 other students and activists–founded the Alliance of Young Democrats, a liberal-nationalist youth movement conceived as an overt political challenge to the Hungarian Young Communist League, whose members were banned from participation. The college journal Századvég, established with Orbán's help and funded by George Soros since 1985, grew into Fidesz's press organ.On 16 June 1989, Orbán gave a speech in Heroes' Square, Budapest, on the occasion of the reburial of Imre Nagy and other national martyrs of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In his speech, he demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which brought him to national prominence and announced the existence of Fidesz. In the summer of 1989, he took part in the opposition round table talks, representing Fidesz alongside László Kövér. Fidesz was established as a political party in October 1989.
On returning home from Oxford, he secured the first spot on the Fidesz candidate list ahead of Fodor and was elected Member of Parliament from Pest County at the April 1990 election. He was appointed leader of Fidesz's parliamentary group, in this capacity until May 1993.
On 18 April 1993, Orbán became the first president of Fidesz, replacing the national board that had served as a collective leadership since its founding. Under his leadership, Fidesz gradually transformed from a radical liberal student organization to a center-right people's party.
The conservative turn caused a severe split in the membership. Several members left the party, including Péter Molnár, Gábor Fodor, and Zsuzsanna Szelényi. Fodor and others later joined the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, initially a strong ally of Fidesz, but later a political opponent.
During the 1994 parliamentary election, Fidesz barely reached the 5% threshold. Orbán became an MP from his party's Fejér County Regional List. He was chairman of the Committee on European Integration Affairs between 1994 and 1998. He was also a member of the Immunity, Incompatibility and Credentials Committee for a short time in 1995. Under his presidency, Fidesz adopted "Hungarian Civic Party" to its shortened name in 1995. His party gradually became dominant on the right wing of the political spectrum, while the former ruling conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum had lost much of its support. From April 1996, Orbán was chairman of the Hungarian National Committee of the New Atlantic Initiative.
In September 1992, Orbán was elected vice-chairman of the Liberal International. In November 2000, however, Fidesz left the Liberal International and joined the European People's Party. During this time, Orbán worked hard to unite the center-right liberal conservative parties in Hungary. At the EPP's Congress in Estoril in October 2002, he was elected vice-president, an office he held until 2012.
First premiership (1998–2002)
In 1998, Orbán formed a coalition with the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Independent Smallholders' Party. The coalition won the 1998 parliamentary elections with 42% of the national vote. Orbán became the second youngest prime minister of Hungary at the age of 35 and the first post-Cold War head of government in both eastern and central Europe who had not previously been a member of a communist party during the Soviet era.In February, the government decided that plenary sessions of the Hungarian Parliament would be held only every third week. Opposition parties strongly opposed the change, arguing that it would reduce parliament's legislative efficiency and ability to supervise the government. In March, the government also tried to replace the National Assembly rule that requires a two-thirds majority vote with one of a simple majority, but the Constitutional Court ruled this unconstitutional.
Two of Orbán's state secretaries in the prime minister's office had to resign in May, due to their implication in a bribery scandal involving the American military manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation. Before bidding on a major jet-fighter contract, the two secretaries, along with 32 other deputies of Orbán's party, had sent a letter to two US senators to lobby for the appointment of a Budapest-based Lockheed manager to be the US ambassador to Hungary. The government was also involved in a lengthy dispute with the Budapest City Council over the national government's decision in late 1998 to cancel two major urban projects: the construction of a new national theatre.
Relations between the Fidesz-led coalition government and the opposition worsened in the National Assembly, where the two seemed to have abandoned all attempts at consensus-seeking politics. The government pushed to swiftly replace the heads of key institutions with partisan figures. Although the opposition resisted, for example, by delaying their appointing of members of the supervising boards, the government ran the institutions without the stipulated number of directors. In a similar vein, Orbán refused to participate in the parliament's question time for periods of up to 10 months. His statements, such as "The parliament works without opposition too...", also contributed to the image of arrogant and aggressive governance.
A later report in March by the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists criticized the Hungarian government for improper political influence in the media, as the country's public service broadcaster teetered close to bankruptcy. Numerous political scandals during 2001 led to a de facto, if not actual, breakup of the coalition that held power in Budapest. A bribery scandal in February triggered a wave of allegations and several prosecutions against the Independent Smallholders' Party. The affair resulted in the ousting of József Torgyán from both the FKGP presidency and the top post in the Ministry of Agriculture. The FKGP disintegrated, and more than a dozen of its MPs joined the government faction.