The only difference between Mr. Orban and authoritarians in other countries, Mr. Kreko said, is that “when they turn to the West, they try to smile, and Orban doesn’t even try.”

The grand center of Budapest, with its floodlit palaces flickering in the Danube, its sophisticated cafes, crowded theaters and the tourist-choked streets, betrays little sense of authoritarian unease. Yet behind the designer boutiques, young and struggling artists worry about when their state financing might be cut off if they fail to hit the proper note, and government watchdog groups suffer attacks in the state-controlled media while waiting anxiously for the arrival of investigators.

Image Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Credit... Akos Stiller for The New York Times

In the west of Hungary, German auto plants and other foreign investments create the semblance of a Western European lifestyle. But the feeling is quite different in the rural east, where destitute families, many of them Roma, either toil in one of Mr. Orban’s public works projects or languish in hopes the economy will improve.

Even the iconography of Budapest has taken on Mr. Orban’s stamp, exemplified by a much-derided statue unveiled last summer near Parliament showing a German eagle attacking an angel, meant to represent the Hungarian people — widely seen as an attempt by Hungarian nationalists to whitewash the country’s alliance with the Nazis during World War II.

Mr. Orban’s subordinates in the ruling party, Fidesz, which he firmly controls, say that he is unchanged from the anti-communist rabble-rouser of the past and that charges of incipient dictatorship are left-wing fantasies.

“He is the same guy he used to be 25 years ago,” said Zoltan Kovacs, the prime minister’s international spokesman. “He wants to get rid of the attitudes, the remnants of the former system — get rid of the attitude that people live on social aid rather than work.”