BUDAPEST — Viktor Orbán’s critics are bracing for another tough four years.

Having secured a third straight term with a landslide election win, the Hungarian prime minister is arguably more powerful at home than any other head of government in the European Union. His Fidesz party is set to take two-thirds of seats in parliament, enough to change the constitution and pass bills without consulting the small and fragmented opposition. Orbán’s allies also control powerful companies and much of the media.

For his supporters, Orbán symbolizes stability and national pride. For his opponents, he has put Hungary on the road to autocracy and reintroduced undemocratic practices last seen under communism, such as de facto censorship in state media.

Now he has a new mandate, analysts and opponents of the prime minister expect him to take steps to tighten his grip on power still further. Remarks by Orbán and his officials also suggest that's what he has in mind.

“The nature of this regime is that they can’t stop when there are still institutions they don’t control,” said Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based Political Capital think tank and consultancy. He said the government could turn its attention to the judiciary, remaining independent media, and parts of the economy like retail chains.

The prime minister’s electoral success not only gives him a strong legal and political mandate to implement change he wants.

NGOs are another likely target. Even on election day, government officials were already talking about planned moves against civil society.

Loopholes that allow organizations to meddle in politics “should be closed,” government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told news portal Index late Sunday, in a statement that was interpreted by some media outlets and NGOs as a threat to prevent non-governmental organizations from engaging in public life.

Ahead of the election, the government promised that if reelected, it would pursue a crackdown on NGOs through its “Stop Soros” legal package, named for the liberal American-Hungarian financier and philanthropist George Soros, whom Orbán regularly depicts as a threat to Hungarian society. The package would make it in effect impossible for some civil society organizations to continue working in Hungary.

“The last decades have shown the importance and merit of our work,” the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the NGOs regularly criticized by the government, said in a statement to POLITICO. “This is even more so now, when an unscrupulous government has gained effectively unlimited power to change the constitution, further dismantle the rule of law and arbitrarily restrict human rights.”

Hungarian anti-Orbán activists often point to seemingly small developments as signs of who will be targeted on a larger scale: a police search at the home of a high school-age protester, journalists surrounded by police for no legal reason, or NGO leaders secretly taped.

'National hands'

There have also been signs that Orbán hopes to take control of the few remaining large media outlets in Hungary not already under his influence. In February, magazine Heti Válasz reported that Fidesz hopes to target the independent German-owned RTL television channel and the popular liberal-leaning online portal Index, which is owned by Orbán’s former best friend-turned-nemesis Lajos Simicska.

RTL is the only truly independent television channel that reaches a large segment of the population, while Index is one of the only mainstream outlets still to engage in investigative reporting.

Orbán has publicly talked of his wish to see changes in the media market.

“Most of a country’s media systems should be in national hands,” he said in a December television interview. “And, well, I don’t want to conceal the fact that I would like to achieve a bit more than that."

The prime minister’s electoral success not only gives him a strong legal and political mandate to implement change he wants. It also raised questions about the future of media outlets owned by his former friend Simicska, who poured significant resources into supporting the far-right Jobbik opposition party and got little electoral return on his investment.

Simicska appeared to have decided to cut his losses on Tuesday. His newspaper Magyar Nemzet announced it would close along with Lánchíd Rádió, which belongs to the same media group. Another of his outlets, Hír TV news channel, will implement significant costs cuts, according to Index.

Fidesz is also likely to turn its attention to members of the judiciary. Some ruling party politicians have referred to sitting judges as "communists."

Orbán has already implemented some judicial reforms, which resulted in EU legal action under the bloc's infringement proceedings, ultimately leading to some concessions from Budapest.

But despite the government's changes and the installation of Tünde Handó — the wife of a Fidesz MEP — as head of the powerful National Judiciary Office, many judges have so far resisted growing government pressure and continued to issue independent decisions.

On the foreign policy front, Orbán is set to maintain his controversially close relationship with the Kremlin. Russian company Rosatom is carrying out a major expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, a project that the Hungarian government will pay for using primarily a €10 billion loan from Russia.

Hungary’s election campaign showed the deep influence of Russian propaganda in the country, with both Fidesz and state-controlled outlets running stories and narratives directly borrowed from Kremlin-directed outlets.

Orbán is “the most significant guy on the scene right now” — Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chief and White House adviser

But Orbán is a shrewd politician who knows that his relationship with the European People’s Party, and especially the German members of the pan-European center-right grouping, is shielding him from potential sanctions and the threat of losing EU funds. However, this hasn’t stopped him from growing closer to Europe’s far right, spending time with the likes of Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Brothers of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

Some observers have noted that Orbán at times appears bored with Hungarian politics, and aspires to take on a role as a leader of a nationalist European movement. During the election campaign, most of Orbán’s official campaign videos were posted online with English subtitles.

He has already received an endorsement from Steve Bannon, the U.S. far-right firebrand who served as Donald Trump's campaign chief and White House adviser. Orbán is “the most significant guy on the scene right now," Bannon declared last month.

This article has been updated to include developments in the media sector and clarify comments by Hungary's government spokesman.