Read: Viktor Orbán’s war on intellect

Because I am preoccupied with memories and am reluctant to ask Orbán right at the start how a former anti-totalitarian militant discovered conservatism and ultranationalism on his way to Damascus (or rather Moscow), or how the recipient of a Soros grant was able to make his former mentor public enemy No. 1 (with Soros’s caricature plastered all over the streets of the capital a while back), and because I did not wish to begin with the mystery of a true dissident who somehow relearned the Stalinist technique of retrospective reinvention of biographies (in this case, it is his own memory that he is purging), I begin benignly with a polite question, simply to buy myself a little time to let everything settle in.

“Why did you choose this monastery? Why such an austere site?”

But his response is curiously intense and sets the conversation in motion.

“Because my old offices were in the Parliament building down the hill on the other side of the Danube, and that wasn’t good from the point of view of the separation of powers.”

He would have been more truthful had he said, Because I wanted to dominate this town, which is the only part of the country that is still resisting me.

But no.

The inventor of illiberalism, the man who uses democracy to torpedo democracy, the autocrat constantly engaged in gagging the Hungarian Parliament, bringing judges to heel, and controlling the media, tells me baldly that he left his former offices out of concern for democratic processes.

I let it go.

I have no idea, at the moment, how much time he is going to give me.

I have no idea that Hungary’s free press is going to observe, the next morning, that I spent with him, in the course of an afternoon, more time than they, collectively, have spent with him in nine years of demotatorship—a term I use to mean a democratic dictatorship. So I prefer to push on.

“You have become the leader, in Europe, of the illiberal strain of demotatorship—”

The term illiberal seems to take him aback.

“Let me stop you there. Because we should agree on our terms. What is the reality? Liberalism gave rise to political correctness—that is, to a form of totalitarianism, which is the opposite of democracy. That’s why I believe that illiberalism restores true freedom, true democracy.”

This time, I feel obliged to tell him how specious I find this line of reasoning.

And I recount to him some of the infringements of the spirit of democracy that I had learned about a few hours earlier, at an NGO meeting organized for my benefit: shuttered newspapers; starving migrants; prison sentences for individuals aiding asylum seekers; the Central European University—known as George Soros University—forced to have its degrees validated in Vienna; homeless people arrested and fined; judges operating under orders; and so on.