Last month at the European Union summit in Riga, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker dispensed with diplomatic protocol to greet Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán with a puckish, “Hello, dictator!”—an open handed salute, and a slap on the cheek.

It was all in good fun for Juncker, the longtime prime minister of Luxembourg, who also teased Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for not wearing a tie and patted the ample belly of Karl-Heinz Lambertz, leader of Belgium’s German-speaking community. Orbán smiled broadly at Juncker’s greeting and reportedly called him “Grand Duke,” a reference to Luxembourg’s constitutional monarch.


For many Hungarians however, Orbán’s dictatorial tendencies are no laughing matter, but rather the source of a deepening tragedy at the heart of Europe with lasting implications for the west. Many observers both here and abroad fear Hungary will become the first EU member state to abandon liberal democracy, and nobody really knows what to do about it.

Orbán has declared that he is building a new state in Hungary, “an illiberal state” capable of guiding the Hungarian nation to victory “in the great global race for decades to come.” Inspired by the alleged successes of illiberal states like Russia, China, Turkey and Singapore, Orbán promises a new order that puts the collective goals of the Hungarian people—including the more than two million of them living in neighboring countries that were once part of the Hungarian Kingdom—ahead of the liberal goal of maximizing individual liberty. Throughout his tenure, Orbán has slapped down EU criticisms of his policies with nationalist rhetoric, saying Hungary “will not be a colony” and won’t “live according to the commands of foreign powers.”

“The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed,” he told ethnic Hungarians in Romania last year in a speech laying out his vision. Hungary, he said, is “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West and keeping ourselves independent from them… to construct a new state built on illiberal and national foundations within the European Union.”

And so he has. Orbán, a youthful anti-communist dissident when Hungarian communism fell in 1989, has spent the past two decades transforming a libertarian-minded youth group into an immensely powerful national conservative political machine. When he swept into power in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown (during which Hungary accepted a $26 billion rescue package to avoid bankruptcy), Orbán’s Alliance of Young Democrats (or Fidesz) and their loyal coalition partners used their two-thirds majority in parliament to rewrite the constitution and pass hundreds of new laws during their first year and a half in power.

The combined effect: an erosion of the independence of the judiciary, the packing of courts with political loyalists, a wholesale political purge of the civil service and the chief prosecutor’s office, new election rules that advantage the governing coalition and the intimidation of the news organizations (who can be issued crippling fines for content deemed “not politically balanced” by a government-appointed panel.) When laws criminalizing homelessness, curtailing political advertizing, foreclosing the possibility of gay marriage and restricting judicial review were found unconstitutional, Orbán used his parliamentary supermajority to simply add the measures to the new constitution.

If that weren’t enough, after passage of a new Law on Churches, hundreds of religious organizations lost government recognition and subsidies; they can only regain them by a two-thirds vote in the Fidesz-controlled parliament. The move, critics pointed out, restricts religious freedom and literally politicizes the decision of which denominations are considered legitimate.

“Most definitely the two-thirds majority of 2010 gave the opportunity to have the political will and force to actually take on lots of issues that should have been implemented in Hungary a lot earlier,” explains Orbán’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács. “In Central Europe the historical and philosophical legacy is a lot more complicated than what you would call ‘liberal.’… What we are trying to establish is a democracy which is fitting the legacy and perspective of Hungary as a central European country.”

After winning a renewed, if slimmer, two-thirds majority in an April 2014 election, Orbán has turned his attention to the allegedly corrosive influence of foreigners in Hungary. He’s overseen tax raids on a number of non-profit groups funded by the government of Norway—including the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the local chapter of the corruption watchdog Transparency International—and called members of such groups “paid political activists who are attempting to enforce foreign interests here.”

Given how big of a problem corruption has become, it’s easy to see why Orbán would go after such groups. Transparency International reported in 2012 that the erosion of checks and balances and a “symbiotic relationship between the political and the business elite” had led to a situation where “the Hungarian state has been captured by powerful interest groups.”

Eleni Kounalakis, US ambassador here for the first three years of Orbán’s regime, writes in a new memoir that her staff discovered these conclusions were “very well grounded in fact,” noting that a single company controlled by a close ally and former college roommate of Orbán’s, Közgép, had won $1.3 billion in government contracts in the first two years of his administration. “International companies located in Hungary that ordinarily would have bid for the projects told us it was no longer worth the time and money required to submit proposals, because Közgép was sure to win,” she recalled.

Bálint Magyar, a sociologist who twice served as minister of education as a member of a now defunct center-left party, is less diplomatic. “Hungary has become a mafia state, like Russia or Azerbaijan,” he says, describing an argument laid out in a book that’s sold briskly here and argues that the division between economic and political power has vanished under Orbán. “What is different between those former Soviet countries and Hungary is that we went through a liberal democratic development first, then took a U-turn.”

Orbán has also been busy constructing a new and more comforting historical narrative for his country, which has been on the losing side of every conflict it has fought since the Ottoman Turks invaded in 1526. (The national anthem is an extended plea to God to take pity of a nation “long torn by ill fate” on a “sea of its misery.”) A new holiday established via a 2010 constitutional amendment memorializes the post-World War I Treaty of Trianon, by which the allies stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory, helping create Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The political genius of the move is that it's essentially a day memorializing Hungary being betrayed by the West. Today maps of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary” are ubiquitous in the capital, despite their implicit suggestion that fellow EU and NATO member Slovakia shouldn’t exist.

The historical revisionism doesn’t end there. Last year, a controversial memorial to the victims of the 1944 Nazi occupation of Hungary was erected overnight in Budapest’s Szabadság Square. It depicts Hungary as an innocent angel preyed upon by a nasty German eagle, a problematic interpretation given that Hungary was allied with the Nazis and its officials helped the Germans deport 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz while local fascists shot or drowned thousands more in the Danube; a year later, the memorial is surrounded by handmade and lovingly maintained shrines to the Jewish victims.

“Populist demagoguery tries to turn Hungarians into completely innocent victims of history: we’re not responsible for any of our problems,” says historian István Rév, director of the Open Society Archives in Budapest. “And according to the latest version, our problems are due to the attitude and treason of the West…. We’re supposedly fighting our liberation war, defending our 2000 year-old Christian traditions against the moral relativism of the decadent West.”

Making matters worse, the only effective opposition to Orbán and Fidesz is the far right Jobbik Party, an often overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma movement that for years had a jackbooted militia that marched through Roma neighborhoods in uniforms evocative of those of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross, the group that murdered Jews on the banks of the Danube.

Jobbik made gains in the 2014 election, garnering 20.5 percent of the vote and 12 percent of the seats in Parliament. Earlier this year they won a high-profile by-election in a Rust Belt district in the north of the country. Already the second largest block in parliament, polls suggest they are growing at the expense of Fidesz, which has already lost its supermajority. The Hungarian left remains weak and disorganized, having failed to recover from corruption scandals and the anger over the austerity measures imposed after the 2008 bailout.

“After the neo-liberal model collapsed in the 2008-2009 economic crash, the left has nothing to say,” says Mária Schmidt, longtime advisor to Orbán and director of the Terror House, a controversial and well-funded museum to the victims of totalitarianism. “So we have two parties on the right. But I’m not concerned. Hungarians are clever and they never vote for extremists.”

Not surprisingly, Orbán has pivoted his foreign policy eastwards, embracing Vladimir Putin, whom he invited to a state visit in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which borders on Hungary. Budapest recently negotiated an $11.2 billion deal for Russia to refurbish and expand Hungary’s nuclear power plant and Orbán has complained that EU sanctions against Russia merely amount to “shooting oneself in the foot.” For a man whose political career started with a call for an end to the Soviet occupation of his country, things have gone full circle.

The Obama administration has been taking an increasingly stern stance on Hungary’s illiberal direction, including a travel ban instituted in October against six unnamed Hungarians allegedly “engaging in or benefitting from corruption.” As the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Budapest put it, if unchecked, corruption will cause the situation to “deteriorate to the extent where it is impossible to work together as an ally.” Last fall in a speech on the persecution of civic groups in Russia, Venezuela, Cambodia and China, Obama cited Hungary as a country where “endless regulations and overt intimidation increasingly target civil society.”

Orbán has mounted a counter-offensive, hiring former Florida congressman Connie Mack to polish his government’s image. Last month the Hungarian government’s efforts appeared to bear fruit, as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.)—a stalwart defender of Putin and chair of the House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia—presided over a hearing on Hungary in which he badgered expert witnesses and suggested Hungary was the victim of “malicious untruths and lies” by gay marriage and abortion rights supporters. “You’re claiming we should question if Hungary has a democratic government when [the Obama administration] doing worse things here then they’re charged with,” Rohrabacher said. The charges, he argued were “politically motivated” and flowed “directly from these traditional values that their government had and has embraced.”

Meanwhile, the regime’s democratic opponents see no light at the end of tunnel, especially given the absence of a democratic opposition, liberal or otherwise. “If there are no imaginable formalized ways to change the government,” laments Rév, “then you have to be prepared for something very bad.”