THE 28 PEOPLE FROM 28 COUNTRIES WHO ARE SHAPING, SHAKING AND STIRRING EUROPE.

Sponsored by:

OUR METHODOLOGY POLITICO 28 — An introduction You have in your hands a new publication. POLITICO 28 will be an annual affair — our version of the “chapeau” or “hats-off” magazine in which we …

1 VIKTOR ORBÁN HUNGARY Luke Waller

The small-town rebel helped bring down the Wall. Now he builds them.

Viktor Orbán is impossible to ignore, no easy feat for a leader of a Mitteleuropean state of 10 million souls with scarcely any natural resources. Love him or hate him — and most people do one or the other — you have to pay heed to him. Indifference is not an option.

More than at any time in his winding career, Orbán shapes as much as fits the European zeitgeist. Migration is but one example. His decision to build razorwire fencing and put water cannons at the ready on his borders — all the while needling Europe’s chattering classes with undisguised glee — shifted the debate from how to accommodate the flow of refugees to how to stop it.

“Moral imperialism” was what Orbán called Germany’s unilateral opening of its borders in September, an unsubtle push to get the rest of Europe to follow. He stirred and tapped into a brewing backlash across the Continent. The Hungarian put the EU’s wise and mighty on the spot: As hard as it was for them to admit, and as much as his rhetoric made them blanche, he was the one who respected the law of the Union by not waving migrants across his territory, as Italy, Greece and France had done for months. “To defend borders is a national responsibility,” he told a conference in June. “As a state, you have to protect your own borders. I don’t believe in a European solution.” European leaders once sought to ostracize him. He is now the talisman of Europe’s mainstream right.

If you weren’t Hungarian … It’s impossible not to be Hungarian.

The Orbán brand of politics is a new norm in Europe. You pick up Orbánesque notes from France’s National Front on the far-ish right, Spain’s Podemos on the left, Poland’s new conservative leaders, Italy’s Socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the Tories in Britain — even Donald Trump in America.

Orbán was a pioneer on this ground. His modus operandi is an uncompromising defense of national sovereignty and a transparent distrust of Europe’s ruling establishments. He echoes the resentments of what were once called the working and peasant classes, embittered by economic stagnation and resentful of a distant and incestuous political class. He is an economic populist who carves out a strong role for the state, and also a social conservative. He invokes “Christian values,” and makes clear his contempt for the “corruption, sex and violence” of Western societies. His contempt is for “liberal elites,” the media and greedy bankers. “In most European countries — I could honestly say 90 percent of European countries — there is a gap between the opinion of the people and the policy pursued by the elite,” he told Hungarian diplomats recently.

Orbánism resembles the other -isms taking root on Europe’s edges — in Russia (Putinism) and Turkey (Erdoğanism). His variety is, to be sure, diluted: not bluntly authoritarian, broadly in line with EU norms. Still, his government has kneecapped NGOs, independent media and the judiciary in ways that Putin and Erdoğan would admire. Like them, his confrontational style with his opponents, domestic and foreign, has strengthened his popular position at home. Orbán says his people prefer his stability and strong leadership to liberalism, the effete alternative that since the collapse of the Berlin Wall has morphed, as he puts it in an interview with POLITICO at his office in Budapest in late November, into a tyranny of “political correctness” and “mainstream politics.

What’s your favorite film? “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Westerns aren’t complicated.

Without apology and with great fanfare, Orbán personifies the rise of illiberal politics in Europe. “Liberal democracy can’t remain globally competitive,” he said in a 2014 speech to a group of ethnic Hungarians in Romania. “The most popular topic in thinking today is trying to understand how systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies and perhaps not even democracies can nevertheless make their nations successful.” His examples are Singapore, Russia, Turkey, India (strangely) and China. “We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world,” he said. His own state, a member of the EU and NATO, “will undertake the odium of expressing that in character it is not of liberal nature.”

HOW DOES ONE MAKE SENSE OF THIS MAN?

Seen over the course of his protean public life, Orbán defies categorization — except as a talented and successful politician. He has won three national elections and kept a firm grip on his party since 1989.

In that iconic year for Europe, Orbán the public man was born. At 24, he was the charismatic and fiery co-founder of a youth movement called the Federation of Young Democrats, or Fidesz. He wore jeans, longish hair and frequent stubble. His party didn’t allow anyone over 35 years of age to join. Its posters featured the image of two passionate kisses: Honecker and Brezhnev, the geriatric Communists, set against a young couple smooching, under the banner, “Make your choice.”

His international debut was a passionate speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader during the 1956 revolution who was executed and buried in an unmarked grave by the Soviets.

“The communists took away our future,” he declared that day in June 1989. At the time, he was an unabashedly pro- Western democrat and free marketeer who, for most of the 1990s, was a leader of the Liberal International group of “progressive” parties.

How do you relax? Read books. And football. And I like to drive — not for the speed but I like not to be followed by bodyguards.

Orbán played a prominent supporting role in killing communism in Europe. Its collapse prompted Francis Fukuyama’s fateful speculation on history’s end and the triumph of liberal democracy. One of history’s many jokes is that Orbán then thwarted Fukuyama’s wager. To his legion of critics he’s now the polar opposite of his younger self, metamorphosing from liberal to illiberal — but one with a sense of humor. Orbán laughed this summer when Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, greeted him at a summit with, “Hello, dictator!” Orbán says, with a smile, that his nickname for the Luxembourgish pol is “the Grand Duke.” (He fought against Juncker’s election last year.)

To some people who know him well, the transformation from the ’89 Orbán to the Orbán of today wasn’t so much Damascene as pragmatic. In the early days, Fidesz appealed to progressive urban youth and the intelligentsia. It was a crowded space, dominated by another party called the Alliance of Free Democrats. Fidesz did well in the first free elections, then lost badly in 1994. Orbán got the message. He took the party sharply right, and from the cities into the conservative provinces.

The shift wasn’t wholly unnatural for Orbán. He was born and raised in Székesfehérvár, a provincial town southwest of the capital. “I’m a village boy,” he says. His father was a disciplinarian prone to violence. He came from what he called an “uncultured” background and in his teens he was active in the Communist Young Pioneers. “I always had a bit of a schizophrenic tendency,” Orbán told an interviewer in 1989. “I was able to see myself totally from the oustide. And I was always quite merciless, and I still am, with myself.”

What’s on your night table? The Bible. “You Tomorrow” by Ian Pearson. A crazy book, a futuristic description of how we will live in 30 years. The world is going ahead so quickly.

Reflecting on his political evolution since his days as a student “freedom fighter,” he jokes, “I am 25 years older. Now I have five kids. It would be irresponsible not to have changed my mind and behavior.” His serious point is that “the meaning of liberalism has changed,” in Hungary and globally, turned “sclerotic” and intolerant of anyone “who does not belong to the mainstream.” In other words, him. “Mainstream sometimes is dangerous,” he says in his crisp English.

With his remade party, Orbán won the premiership in 1998, becoming the youngest Hungarian prime minister in the 20th century. He was back in the wilderness for eight years at the start of the next century. The Socialists ran the economy into the ground, while also giving “liberal” a rotten name in Hungary. Orbán roared back in 2010, this time with his pitch even more stridently attuned to Hungarians furious with the Budapest elite for the economic collapse.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, bankers threatened his notions of civilization; now Muslims do. He says those who come now as well as the generations who preceded them in recent decades endanger Europe’s Christian identity and — here he draws a direct, to him “obvious,” link between their presence and last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris — its security. Certainly that’s not a liberal mainstream view in Europe, but it is a spreading one.

Historical figures you most admire? Ronald Reagan. And Helmut Kohl. German reunification is the precondition of Hungarian freedom.

There remains a pragmatism to Orbán’s furies. Whenever the EU pushes back hard on his provocations — on his musings about imposing the death penalty, say, or tightening control of the media — he tends to give in. Once a critic of most things Russian, Orbán embraces Putin and seeks to secure Russian energy supplies for Hungary, even as he signs off on EU sanctions against Moscow. Many Hungarians say, in hushed tones, that Orbán is better than the alternative: Jobbik, the openly anti-Semitic far-right party that has a fifth of the vote. One imagines that Brussels agrees.

At another historic moment in Europe, Orbán prods politics in an unsentimental direction. It may be more opportunistic than principled. Yet for now, the Orbán way is eye-catching, effective … and contagious.

Click here to learn more about our methodology.