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| “ | Just because a state is not liberal, it can still be a democracy. And in fact we also had to and did state that societies that are built on the state organisation principle of liberal democracy will probably be incapable of maintaining their global competitiveness in the upcoming decades and will instead probably be scaled down unless they are capable of changing themselves significantly. | „ |
| ~ Viktor Orbán, July 2014 |
Viktor Mihály Orbán (May 31st, 1963) is a Hungarian politician serving as Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010. He also served as Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002. He is the present leader of the national conservative Fidesz party, a post he has held since 2003 and, previously, from 1993 to 2000.
Born in Székesfehérvár, Orbán studied law at Eötvös Loránd University, graduating in 1987. He briefly studied political science at Pembroke College, Oxford, before entering politics in the wake of the Autumn of Nations at the head of the reformist student movement Alliance of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége), the nascent Fidesz. He became a nationally known politician after giving an address at the 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy and other martyrs of the 1956 revolution, in which he openly demanded that Soviet troops withdraw from the country.
After the transition to democracy in 1990, he was elected to the National Assembly and served as leader of Fidesz's parliamentary caucus until 1993. Under his leadership, Fidesz shifted away from its original centre-right, classical liberal, pro-European integration platform toward right-wing national conservatism. After Fidesz won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly in the 1998 elections, Orbán became Prime Minister for four years at the head of a right-wing coalition government.
Fidesz narrowly lost the 2002 and 2006 elections to the Socialist Party, and Orbán spent eight years as the leader of the opposition. The Socialists' rising unpopularity, exacerbated by Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány's "Őszöd speech", led to Orbán's re-election to the premiership in 2010 in a landslide victory (in coalition with the Christian Democrats). At the helm of a parliamentary supermajority, Orbán's cabinet spearheaded major constitutional and legislative reforms. Fidesz retained its supermajority in the 2014 and 2018 elections.
Orbán's second, third, and fourth premierships have been the subject of significant international controversy, and reception of his political views is mixed. The 2011 constitutional changes enacted under his leadership were, in particular, accused of centralizing legislative and executive power, curbing civil liberties, restricting freedom of speech, and weakening the Constitutional Court and judiciary.For these reasons, critics have described him as "irredentist", "right-wing populist", "authoritarian", "autocratic", "Putinist", as a "strongman", and as a "dictator". Orbán's social conservatism, national conservatism, soft Euroscepticism and advocacy of what he describes as an "illiberal state" have attracted significant international attention. Some observers have described his government as authoritarian or autocratic.
Orbán is allies with Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.