Summary
- Viktor Orban has seized control of nearly all the levers of power in Hungary since he became prime minister in 2010, effectively turning the country into an electoral autocracy.
- Republicans in the US have noticed Orban’s success. Orban’s Fidesz party and the Republicans have lately strengthened their links significantly; Republicans appear to have learned from the former’s march through Hungarian institutions.
- In the four years since President Donald Trump left office, veterans of his administration have thought hard about how to make a new administration more effective than the last. Many believe that a similar seizure of control of the instruments of US governance is necessary.
- If Trump wins the presidency, Republicans will likely adapt many of Orban’s techniques to the US context to end what they view as liberal control of the “administrative state” and civil society.
- This new form of US governance could have profound implications not only for European foreign policy, including the robustness of NATO’s collective defence, but also EU and domestic European democracy as a Trump White House seeks to lead and champion like-minded allies across the world.
The meaning of Orban
“There is a great man, a great leader in Europe — Viktor Orban. … He is the prime minister of Hungary. He is a very great leader, a very strong man.” – Donald Trump, January 2024.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is arguably the most successful populist leader in the world today. Since he became prime minister for the second time in 2010, he has transformed Hungary into what many describe as an “illiberal democracy”. Over those 14 years, he has seized control of nearly all the institutions of the state and most of the media, and has put increasing pressure on civil society in Hungary. Competitive elections persist, but Orban’s control over the media and the skewed electoral system help ensure his Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz) party continues to win overwhelming majorities. At a time of fierce anti-incumbency sentiment, Orban is currently the longest-serving leader in the European Union and the longest-serving prime minister in Hungary’s post-communist history.
As former president Donald Trump implies, Republicans in the United States have noticed Orban’s success. Many are looking to the Hungarian example to understand how a second Trump administration might succeed at transforming America in a way that the first one never managed.
Orban, after all, also lost power after his first term as prime minister (1998-2002). He accepted that defeat, but Fidesz too planted a seed of doubt about electoral fraud committed by the then-opposition parties. Orban then spent eight years in opposition nursing grievances against the socialists and liberals. In his view, they stood not for the nation but for capitalist and foreign interests and threatened the creation of the “civic Hungary” he sought to build.
Upon returning to power in 2010, Orban and his advisers concluded that the source of Hungary’s problems in the preceding eight years had been the weakness of the executive and the state, which was vulnerable to capture by private business interests. With the constitutional majority now in their hands, they set out to build the so-called System of National Cooperation, in which the governing parties would strengthen the state and, more importantly, the governing parties’ grip on it. A newly empowered executive would allow for the implementation of their agenda that, according to their slogan, put the interests of “the nation” in the forefront.
The concentration of power that Orban achieved after 2010 largely did away with institutional constraints and silenced dissent. For the many who served in the Trump administration who blame liberal bias and obstructionism for their implementation problems, the Hungarian experience is an inspiration. In their view, the first Trump administration fell short on implementing presidential promises such as building a wall on the border, withdrawing from NATO and Afghanistan, or ending the trade deficit with China not because of incompetence but due to a liberal bias and obstructionism in the state administration.
Accordingly, removing checks and balances of all kinds is the only way to counter what they see as entrenched liberal control of key governmental and civil society institutions, including the civil service, NGOs, higher education, finance, the media, and the technology industry. As the preface to The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership evocatively puts it, “[t]he long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values.” In this view, even Trump’s own “establishment” political appointees, unconsciously infused with liberal values, often betrayed him and frustrated his agenda.
The now infamous Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, directed by Paul Dans, the former head of Trump’s White House Personnel Office, contains at its heart the idea that liberal control of the “administrative state” and civil society have long stymied conservative governance and must be overcome for Trump to govern effectively. It avows that the primary effort of a second Trump administration will be to “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.”
As part of that effort, they are seeking to learn from Orban’s success in Hungary. But how did he manage to exercise control over Hungary and can the lessons from Hungary be exported to the very different context of the US? This policy brief seeks to answer those questions. It looks at how Orban seized control of Hungary, what US Republicans have learned from that experience, and whether and how they might translate in American context. We call it the Orbanisation of America.
About the author:
Jeremy Shapiro is the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. His areas of focus include US foreign policy and transatlantic relations.
Zsuzsanna Végh is an analyst focusing on Central European countries’ European and foreign policy, the state of democracy and the radical right in Central Europe, with particular interest in Hungary.