Viktor Orbán's Hungary: Master plan for democracy despisers

Viktor Orbán's latest blow against Hungarian civil society has an inconspicuous name: the Transparency Act. It stipulates that non-governmental organizations, associations, and media outlets require approval from the tax authorities to receive money from abroad. Ever since Orwell's novel "1984," however, it has been known that totalitarian measures can hide behind even the most inconspicuous names. This is also the case with the Transparency Act. If you think it through to its logical conclusion, every independent organization that relies on donations, membership fees, or funding from the EU will be subject to state control. The state can then not only determine whether an organization continues to receive funding, but can also classify it by law as a threat to "Hungary's sovereignty."

Although the vote on the law was postponed until the fall following protests, the draft once again demonstrates the direction Hungary has taken under Viktor Orbán : a state with autocratic tendencies that is now seen as a kind of blueprint for how to dismantle democracy through democratic means. Right-wing populists around the world are now following this "authoritarian playbook," as the American historian Anne Applebaum once called it.

But how did it even come to this? Journalist Petra Thorbrietz explores this question. In "We Will Conquer Europe !" she traces Hungary's history and politics since the fall of the Iron Curtain. And attempts to answer the question of what Hungary's development could mean for Europe . Spoiler alert: nothing good. "The Magyars, this small nation of just 9.5 million within and about two million on the other side of its borders, could destroy the European Union ."

Thorbrietz essentially pursues two theses. First, numerous historical upheavals have allowed Viktor Orbán to successfully portray his country as a kind of superpower that feels bound by no rules. Second, the EU has stood by and watched for far too long. While there has been repeated criticism from Brussels about how Orbán brought the media into the state's sphere of influence, how he changed the electoral system in favor of his Fidesz party, and most recently created a two-tier society in which, for example, homosexual people are disadvantaged by law, Hungary did not feel the consequences until 2022, when the EU Commission initiated a rule of law procedure and the country was subsequently denied funding.

Thorbrietz takes the perspective of an insider who sympathizes with the country and its people. She came to Hungary as a journalist in the late 1980s, married a Hungarian, and stayed. Through living with him and her own knowledge of Hungarian, Thorbrietz penetrated the smallest ramifications of Hungarian society. She became acquainted with post-communist Hungary, which, on the one hand, was open, vibrant, and "full of wondrous things" and had the best conditions for a functioning democracy. On the other hand, it was oppressed by enormous economic problems.

She witnessed how foreign investors "competed for the prime pieces of the country" and how the resulting poverty fueled discontent with the ruling socialists. And how, in this conundrum, Viktor Orbán came to power for a second time in 2010 and did everything he could not to lose it again, just as he had done in 2002. Back then, as Europe's youngest prime minister (Orbán was just 34), he had led a government that outwardly appeared liberal for four years, but internally staged a kind of "imaginary monarchy" and celebrated the former Hungarian Empire in its culture of remembrance. For example, the Holy Crown, the insignia of the Hungarian monarchy, was moved to the parliament building, the heart of democracy.

One could criticize the book for not understanding, even after reading it, why Viktor Orbán's rise to power was unstoppable. Thorbrietz does trace Orbán's biography, his upbringing in the countryside, his law studies, and his stay at Oxford, which he financed with a scholarship from the Soros Foundation , which Orbán now considers something like the embodiment of the liberal West infiltrated by opaque powers. One also learns how purposefully Orbán restructured the system.

But it remains unclear why he, of all people, an average citizen from the provinces with a penchant for football, was able to do this. What kind of personality Orbán has, where he gets the self-confidence to "lead the EU around the political arena by the nose," and how often he has gambled away in the process. For this, one is rewarded with unique insight into the details. Thorbrietz illuminates every corner of Hungarian society, no matter how hidden; she knows just as much about the oligarchs in the orbit of the Fidesz party as she does about China's influence, the off-scene in Budapest, and the Hungarian minority in Romania. Thus, from many cleverly researched individual pieces, the picture of a country that has changed Europe is pieced together. Not least because the EU must learn its "lessons from the Orbán school" so that it does not "collapse under the influence of its internal enemies."