The ways of the European Parliament in Strasbourg are inscrutable to the American visitor. Political parties bearing maddeningly similar names—the Sweden Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats; the German Social Democrats, the German Free Democrats, and the German Christian Democrats—form coalitions whose names elude all meaning. The design of the immense campus, a cylindrical tower abutted by an ellipse, is meant to represent the transition of Western civilization from centralized power to democracy. An exhibition of photographs in the pillared courtyard reveals the body’s aspirations to be the arbiter of international statecraft: the parliament’s former president Nicole Fontaine poses with Yasser Arafat, the Dalai Lama, and the leader of a delegation of female Afghan refugees. Yet it is rare to hear Europeans express any measure of reverence toward the body; its name is evoked more often in the matters of regulating light bulbs and Roquefort cheese.
This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Then Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, comes to town. Since 2011, Orbán has regularly travelled to Strasbourg to receive a kind of public stoning. The latest such session took place in mid-September, when the parliament convened to vote on enacting Article 7 proceedings, which can strip a country of its voting rights. Orbán’s government was accused of routinely violating European regulations on the rule of law. Before the vote, Judith Sargentini, a member of the European Parliament for the Dutch GreenLeft party, had prepared a report detailing the erosion of democratic norms in Hungary: constitutional amendments were passed after little consultation with groups outside the government; the court system had been reorganized and its oversight body placed under the control of the Hungarian parliament; the European anti-fraud office had found “possible fraud and corruption” in public-investment projects; and the European Commission had repeatedly sued Hungary for its treatment of migrants. Observers fear that Fidesz, the Hungarian political party that Orbán has led since 1993, has become the state.
I sat in the gallery, where I could hear only murmurs as Orbán arrived, strolling into the chamber late, after Sargentini had begun presenting her report. At fifty-five, Orbán has acquired a heft that he carries with the relative ease of a retired athlete. His hair is gray but clipped boyishly short. Spotting Orbán, Sargentini seemed distinctly irritated and said, “I think I should stop now and start again.” There was a round of applause in the hall.
Orbán took a seat in the second row, and for the next two and a half hours members of parliament alternately castigated or defended him. When Nigel Farage, one of the United Kingdom’s most bellicose nationalists and an M.E.P. for South East England, stood and declared that the proceedings were a show trial, Orbán allowed himself a smile. “Come and join the Brexit club, you’ll love it!” Farage shouted across the chamber.
For the past seven years, Orbán has used a maneuver that he has called the “dance of the peaco*ck.” His government would insert measures into new laws precisely for the purpose of removing them. “He’ll generally put in one outrageous thing and one super-outrageous thing,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary, told me. “But the super-outrageous thing isn’t really necessary—it’s designed to be jettisoned.” When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government on the antidemocratic measures, he has made a few symbolic gestures of conciliation, “as if,” he has said, “we would like to make friends with them.”
Now Orbán ended the dance. Speaking to the chamber, he declared Sargentini’s report an insult to his country. “Hungary’s decisions are made by voters at parliamentary elections, and you state nothing less than that Hungary is not reliable enough to decide what is in its interests,” he said. “Let’s be straightforward with each other: Hungary is going to be condemned because the Hungarian people have decided that this country is not going to be a country of migrants.”
Until 2015, Hungary received around three thousand asylum requests per year. That year, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, travelled from Turkey through Bulgaria to Serbia and Croatia, where they attempted to cross the Hungarian border into the E.U. Many wanted to reach Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel, declaring, “We can do this,” was welcoming a million refugees. Hungary, a smaller and poorer state than Germany, was ill equipped to deal with the chaotic crowds in the border area headed toward trains and buses that would take them onward.
In January, 2015, Orbán went to Paris to attend a vigil for the victims of the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in which two French brothers of Algerian parentage killed twelve people. When he returned home, he launched a P.R. campaign. Posters throughout Hungary read, “If you come to Hungary, you must respect Hungarian culture!” All the posters were in Hungarian. That summer, Orbán’s government began to construct a fence along Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia, essentially halting immigration to the country. Der Spiegel declared him “the political victor” of the immigration crisis, and, since then, each new terrorist attack at a Christmas market in Berlin or Strasbourg seems to bolster his standing.
Fidesz and other right-wing parties in the E.U. contend that unelected bureaucrats are making consequential decisions—regulating markets, inflicting rules on technology and economic development, setting quotas of refugee resettlements—without the participation of European citizens; increasingly, voters agree. This resentment is at the core of the Brexit movement in the U.K. and lies behind the growing strength of xenophobic parties in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Central Europe. Steve Bannon, who has been serving as an informal adviser to various nationalist parties, told me, “The fight right now in the E.U. is between those who look at the nation-state as something to be overcome and the others, who look at the nation-state as something to be nurtured.”
The E.U. has been unable to deal with the big issues it faces: despite years of trying to develop a more practical and equitable refugee policy, it hasn’t come up with an effective means of assisting the countries where most migrants arrive. It has also been unable to deal with the small issues—in a recent attempt to mollify the roughly eighty per cent of Europeans who dislike daylight-saving time, the E.U. Commission proposed that each country choose its own time zone, a move that would seriously disrupt the single market.
Orbán thrives on conflict, and those around him say that, having consolidated power in Hungary, he is now a bit bored. “He thinks he could have been much more powerful if he were from a bigger country,” András Pethő, a senior editor at the independent Hungarian news outlet Direkt36, told me. “He likes maneuvering among the big powers.”
Orbán sees himself as the continent’s ideological counterweight to Merkel, but for the past eighteen years Fidesz and Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, have been united in the parliament’s center-right European People’s Party. The E.P.P. has used Fidesz to achieve legitimacy with increasingly anti-establishment voters in Germany; Fidesz has used the E.P.P. to achieve mainstream credibility. Now Orbán is ready for more. He “wants to be important, to change Europe and to change the world,” István Hegedűs, the chairman of the Hungarian Europe Society, told me. “He hopes to be one of the new leaders in Europe, savior of the European Union, and to be appreciated as such.”
The day after Orbán’s appearance in Strasbourg, the European Parliament voted in favor of triggering Article 7. “European institutions have tried to address specific breaches of E.U. law for a long time,” Márta Pardavi, a co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human-rights N.G.O., told me. Now, she said, “it’s about core European values.” In November, inspectors from the United Nations travelled to Hungary to insure that the country’s immigration centers accorded with international standards. The Hungarian government refused to let them in.
In May, Europe will elect a new parliament. Merkel has stepped down as the leader of her party, and a shakeup is expected—an enlargement of the nationalist bloc, or a realignment of centrists behind Emmanuel Macron, the President of France. Either way, Orbán expects to increase his power. Bannon told me that he didn’t anticipate any more Brexits. “I haven’t heard one of the people we’re dealing with ever say that they want to leave the E.U.,” he said. Europeans want a different E.U. Bannon has been visiting Budapest and plans to work with Orbán, whom he has called “Trump before Trump.” The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who has proposed that all applications for asylum in Europe be processed offshore, and that Germany, Austria, and Italy form an “axis of the willing” to enforce the process, has cultivated a close relationship with Orbán. Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, talks about immigration in terms of “mass cleaning, street by street,” but he lacks depth; for European far-right movements, Orbán is the inspiration.
Not long ago, I visited a soccer stadium twenty-five miles west of Budapest, in the small town of Felcsút. The stadium has a gracefully curved slate roof and seats thirty-four hundred, double the local population. It is home to the soccer club Puskás Akadémia. There are no restaurants or hotels nearby, but on game days the parking lot is filled with the cars of Hungarian oligarchs, who come to socialize while Viktor Orbán intently watches the game, often standing alone. The stadium, which opened in 2014, was built on the location of a soccer field where he once played center forward; twenty yards away is a tidy white house with a peaked wooden roof and a small rose garden, where Orbán lived between the ages of ten and fifteen.
A footpath leads up a small hill to a narrow-gauge railway, built with two million euros from the E.U. A vintage three-car train with a wood-burning stove and a poppy-colored engine runs several times a day between Felcsút and the neighboring village of Alcsútdoboz. When I rode it, on a sunny afternoon in early October, there were two other people on board. A twenty-five-minute ride delivered us to Alcsútdoboz, not far from a private compound owned by a real-estate-development company belonging to Orbán’s father, where Orbán is said to make business deals.
“Ever since we invented language, the kids aren’t breaking and mauling things anymore.” Link copied
Orbán spent his early childhood in Alcsútdoboz. His father, a mechanical engineer, became a member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party when Orbán was three; his mother taught students with special needs. The family was very poor, and even after moving to Felcsút, in the early nineteen-seventies, they didn’t have running water. Orbán has said that he first used an indoor bathroom when he was fifteen. He was an exceptional student, and when he was accepted to a prestigious high school in Székesfehérvár, Hungary’s medieval capital, the family moved there. He was, in his own words, “badly misbehaved”—cheeky and violent, both to his teachers and to his father.
After high school and a year in the Army, Orbán attended Bibó István College, a school in Budapest that opened in 1983. Hungary had fallen into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence following the Second World War. In 1956, a nationwide uprising was crushed by the Soviet Army, and Moscow installed János Kádár as the leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Kádár, after presiding over a period of retaliatory terror, established a kind of bargain: as long as politics was left to the Party, people would not have to adhere to strict Communist orthodoxy. There were even some private properties and businesses. This model was known as Goulash Communism.
