Viktor Orbán
Viktor Orbán has been prime minister of Hungary since 2010, and was before that from 1998 to 2002, the longest-serving head of government in the European Union, the student who on 16 June 1989 at the reburial of Imre Nagy in Heroes' Square demanded that the Soviet troops leave, which made him at twenty-six the face of the change. He has since built what he himself named in 2014 the illiberal state. The two-thirds majority of 2010, won after the socialist prime minister was recorded admitting he had lied to win, was used to write a new constitution, to pack the constitutional court, to put the media under a council his party appointed and then, through friendly owners, to take most of it, to redraw the constituencies, to send the Central European University to Vienna, and to win two-thirds again in 2014, 2018 and 2022. The fence on the Serbian border in 2015, the billboards against Soros, the friendship with Putin kept up through the war in Ukraine, the vetoes on sanctions and on aid, and the European funds frozen over the rule of law were the foreign policy. The government's people got the contracts. He was born in Székesfehérvár in 1963, the son of an agronomist, grew up in a village without running water, studied law in Budapest and, on a Soros scholarship, at Oxford. He founded Fidesz, the alliance of young democrats, in a student hostel in March 1988 as a liberal party with an age limit of thirty-five. It moved right in 1994 when the liberals lost. The first government, 1998-2002, joined NATO, cut taxes, and lost narrowly to the socialists, after which he spent eight years in opposition building the civic circles and waiting. The second period's economics were the flat tax, the nationalisation of the private pension funds, the bank and telecoms levies, the German car plants, the Chinese battery plants, and the lowest unemployment in the country's history. Its politics were the referendum on migrant quotas of 2016, the law against Soros-funded groups, the constitutional amendment defining the family, and the child-protection law of 2021 that banned depictions of homosexuality to minors, over which Brussels sued. The opposition united in 2022 and lost by twenty points. The pardon of a man convicted of covering up abuse in a children's home cost him his president and his justice minister in February 2024. A former insider, Péter Magyar, has since built the first rival Fidesz has feared, ahead of the election of April 2026.
- Lived: 1963 CE – ?
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
