On the Hungarian plain south-west of Budapest, the rich, dark soil of Kishantos presents the saddest of sights. As far as the eye can see, a cornucopia of organic wheat, cereals, sunflowers, pulses and legumes has been turned into a vista of emptiness.

In what appears to be an extraordinary act of vindictive destruction, a lifetime’s work in Hungary has been destroyed in only a few months.

Eva Acs, an agronomist who has run the thriving organic farm for 22 years, is at her wits’ end. “The state just took the farm away. We were absolutely punished and rubbed out. Then the private security firms came in and closed down the roads and blocked the tractors. The new owners destroyed all our plants and crops. Just to bankrupt us and hurt us.”

Since the 90s, Acs has overseen one of Europe’s biggest organic farms, earning international plaudits and coveted Swiss “bio-certificates” for pioneering work on a vast scale, covering 452 hectares (1,116 acres) of rolling fields, land that was leased from the Hungarian state. Last year, the government cancelled the contracts and sold all but nine hectares to oligarchs and businessmen, who ordered the destruction of the organic bounty.

Three weeks ago, they dealt the final blow, spraying the area with glyphosate weedkiller and instantly terminating the farm’s organic status.

In the handsome 19th-century manor house at the centre of the estate, surrounded by sacks of drying red peppers, Acs has no doubt about who to blame for her heartbreak: the all-powerful conservative government in Budapest under Viktor Orbán, the prime minister.

“You can’t imagine how high the pressure is now. We’re living in fear. We have to protect one another. This couldn’t happen in a normal country. It’s incredible the things that are happening in this country.”

For the liberal middle classes of Budapest, the latest outrage in Orbán’s Hungary is the world’s first internet tax, a gigabyte levy denounced at home and abroad as an assault on free speech while shoring up the budget.

On Tuesday tens of thousands of protesters commanded bridges over the Danube in central Budapest in the biggest challenge to the prime minister since he returned to power in 2010. The demonstrators likened Orbán to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and flew the EU flag, which Orban regularly denounces.

Bernadett Szél, MP and co-leader of a small Green liberal party, cites the events in Kishantos and Budapest as a prime example of the “endless cynicism” of the prime minister and his party, Fidesz, whose actions and policies set him apart in the European Union, and are setting off alarm bells in Brussels and Washington. “Kishantos is a symbol of what Orbán is doing. It’s pure power and pure destruction. Fidesz is the state. The party is the state. We don’t know how to end that.”

Tens of thousands of protesters march against the introduction of an internet tax in Budapest. Photograph: PuzzlePix/Rex

In a time of collapsing public confidence in the political classes across Europe, Orbán can claim to be unique – a gifted, popular strongman with the most formidable electoral mandate in the EU. Untroubled by a fragmented and morally bankrupt centre-left opposition, Orbán led his rightwing Fidesz to a landslide victory in 2010. He coasted to a second term last April, won the European elections in May and in October took control of virtually every town and city in Hungary in local elections.

Highly unusually, he has a two-thirds parliamentary majority, meaning that the vast Westminster lookalike on the banks of the Danube in Budapest is a rubber stamp. After his election hat-trick this year, he need not face the voters again until 2018. He shows every sign of using that time to reshape Hungary.

The only organised opposition are the neo-fascists of the Jobbik party on the far right, suggesting that the opposition on the streets this week might challenge Orbán but not really threaten him.

“Orbán divides and rules. All decisions are taken by him,” says a senior western diplomat in Budapest. “He’s very skilled. He has a political vision. You might not like it, but he has it. Control is the key word here.”

Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a liberal left MP and psychologist who has studied Orbán at close quarters as a colleague in the 1990s, describes him as restless and combative with leanings towards megalomania. “He’s a very strong character, he’s always talking of revolution. And a very polarising person. He needs enemies and is always creating them. That’s how he sees the world. He was always a destructive person.”

The number one item on Orbán’s destroy list appears to be the western democratic model. In an infamous speech to supporters in Romania in July, he declared the western model dead and cited the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, Turkey and Singapore as the templates to follow. “We are parting ways with western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them,” he declared. “We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organising a society. The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

Protesters don masks during demonstrations against the proposed internet tax. Photograph: PuzzlePix/Rex

To his many critics in Budapest, this means hollowing out democracy, retaining a semblance of pluralism while controlling all the key levers. Orbán has used his power to rewrite the constitution and has appointed 11 of the 15 supreme court justices to guarantee himself a two-thirds majority on the constitutional court.

“The vast majority of the justices are not only politically loyal, but very strongly connected to the Fidesz party,” says Csaba Tordai, a constitutional lawyer.

Orbán has used new media laws to turn public television into a mouthpiece for his government, and used tax inspectors and advertising money to intimidate, impoverish and weaken critical media.

“Journalists don’t go to jail here. But he controls the media and there’s a lot of self-censorship,” said the senior diplomat. “When they want to intimidate they send in the tax inspectors. And you can always find something.”

He has launched a crackdown on opposition non-governmental organisations, accusing some of them, Putin-style, of being foreign agents. “During the day these guys are civil activists and during the night they’re political activists,” says a senior government official.

According to western and Hungarian diplomats in Budapest, Orbán is planning to purge the diplomatic service, culling up to three-quarters of Hungary’s ambassadors.

He wants the banking sector, which is dominated by Austrians and Italians, partly renationalised so that 50% is in Hungarian hands. He has also ordered land leased by foreigners over the past 20 years to be returned to its Hungarian owners, arguing that the natives have been swindled by wealthy westerners. Brussels is threatening legal action.

“China says it’s a democracy,” says the government spokesman, Zsoltan Kovacs, explaining the new policy. “By liberal, the prime minister means a rejection of everything before 2010.”

The radicalism of Orbán’s vision for Hungary has put him on a collision course with Brussels, although the EU is crucial to his plans as Hungary is to receive €34bn (£26.8bn) in European funds over the next four years. Defying EU policy, Orbán has cuddled up to Putin in Moscow at a time of the greatest tensions between Russia and the west since the 1980s. The result has been the strongest criticism from Washington of an EU member state.

In January, Orbán secretly went to Moscow, met Putin, and secured a $10bn (£6.2bn) credit in return for awarding nuclear power contracts to the Russians. In September, he met the boss of Gazprom, the giant Russian gas monopoly, and ditched EU policy on Russia and Ukraine by refusing to repump gas supplies back to Ukraine from Hungary, sabotaging EU attempts to safeguard Kiev’s energy requirements.

Barack Obama unusually bracketed Hungary, a Nato ally and EU member state, recently with Azerbaijan, Russia, Venezuela and Egypt in attacking Orbán’s attitude to fundamental freedoms.

Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European affairs, then went further in a clear reference to Orban: “How can you sleep under your Nato blanket at night while pushing ‘illiberal democracy’ by day, whipping up nationalism, restricting free press, or demonising civil society?” The Americans then blacklisted 10 Hungarian officials, some of them said to be close to the prime minister, banning them from entering the US on the grounds of corruption and complaining about “kleptocracy”.

The Orbán government, prone to fanning paranoia and regularly conjuring conspiracy theories about foreign plots to undermine Hungary, insinuated the White House had been bribed. “We know the amount of money it cost to put Hungary’s name alongside Egypt’s,” said the senior government official. “It’s quite a lot of money. We know who’s funding it. It’s not easy with the Americans most of the time. It’s quite unfriendly.”

In April, around the same time as Acs’s organic crops were being pulverised, Budapest police raided the home of Vera Mora and took away her laptop. Mora runs the environmentalist non-governmental organisation Őkotárs in Budapest, which acts as the intermediary distributor of money from Norway’s generous aid programme for civil society projects in central and eastern Europe.

Norway is providing €153m to Hungary over five years, 10% of it to “independent” NGOs. Orbán’s government demanded control over how the money is spent. Oslo refused and suspended payments of €140m, while still distributing €13m through Őkotárs.

The government then raided the NGO’s offices and launched a corruption investigation. The investigators have said they are pressing charges “on suspicion of mismanagement, budget fraud, forgery of private documents and unauthorised financial activity.” Reviewing the police evidence, the news website index.hu said: “This is how a show trial looks in a history book.”

Viktor Orban takes his oath of office in parliament in 2010. He need not face the voters again until 2018. Photograph: Karoly Arvai /Reuters

The Norwegians are furious, demanding that Brussels take action. “We have this programme in 16 countries. The only place we have problems is Hungary,” said Tove Skarstein, the Norwegian ambassador in Budapest. “The fact that something like this is happening in the EU is quite shocking,” said Mora.

In his drive to create a new political system in Hungary, Orbán appears to view politics as a zero-sum game where the winner takes all in a fight between good and evil. In July, Orbán thanked the opposition for his landslide victories – “those who turned against us and provided the chance for good to win. Because if there is no bad, how could good get mastery over the bad?”

It is a binary, polarising outlook that recalls the tactics of another strongman leader, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Both appear to believe democracy ends at the ballot box.

“Democracy does not mean the dictatorship of the majority,” said Marton Gulyas, director of Krétakőr, a political art and theatre group whose state funding has been reduced by the Hungarian government. “People were tired of the endless fighting and in 2010 they said we need one leader to put the country in order, to take it in one direction. We were in no-man’s land. Since then they’ve changed everything.”

Foreign ministers Gyula Horn, right, of Hungary and Alois Mock of Austria cutting the iron curtain between Hungary and Austria in 1989. Photograph: Karoly Matusz/EPA

In a detailed analysis of the clampdown on civil society, Heather Grabbe, director of EU affairs in Brussels for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, concluded Orbán was rolling back the democratic gains achieved in central Europe since the revolutions of 1989, which brought Orbán to national prominence as a student leader telling the Russians to go home.

“Hungary is quickly losing the defining features of a democracy under the rule of law,” Grabbe wrote. “Independent civil society organisations are the last remaining check on government power in Hungary. Since 2010 the government has enjoyed a parliamentary super-majority which it has used to undermine the independence of the judiciary, the power of the constitutional court and media freedom and pluralism, as well as to gain control over state institutions.”

But while Orbán has amassed formidable power, he is not omnipotent as the current wave of internet-fuelled protest shows. His vote is down considerably since 2010. He does not command a simple voters’ majority either in Budapest or nationwide. But he has used his powers to change laws and gerrymander constituencies to tilt the system, making it much harder to defeat Fidesz at the ballot box.

“Hungary is not an illiberal democracy yet,” said Szelényi. “But it’s obviously in danger.”

Viktor Orbán’s rightwing Fidesz party has a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament in Budapest. Photograph: Alamy

• This article was amended on 31 October 2014 after Krétakőr asked us to clarify our description of it. An earlier version of the article referred to it as “the agitprop theatre group”, misspelled the name of its director as Martin Gulyas, and said incorrectly that it had “lost its Norwegian funding”.