Orbán seized Hungary by the neck – and the right followed in his wake

 In the weeks after Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, commentators were astonished by the number, and range, of executive orders issued from the White House. They went far beyond anything that the candidate had promised and indicated an attention to detail for which he had never been famous. So comprehensive were these initiatives that they were misanalysed as an attempt to “flood the zone” with measures to disarm opposition.

But perhaps they were better understood as part of a comprehensive plan to use executive power to begin to reshape the institutions of America. Almost no area of American life was exempt. Universities had their grants withdrawn if they didn’t agree to the president’s demands, law firms were intimidated into agreeing to do pro bono work on Trump’s favoured causes, media companies were pressured into legal settlements that had no merit, raids by masked immigration officials became commonplace, cultural institutions such as Washington DC’s Kennedy Center were, in effect, hijacked by Trump associates.

The blueprint for this radicalism was a 900-page manifesto, Project 2025, produced under the leadership of the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. The Heritage Foundation is possibly the most powerful of the hybrid think-tank/lobby organisations on the political right and disposes of an annual budget of more than $100m (£74m).

Roberts’ accession to the presidency of Heritage in December 2021 marked a shift from the mainstream Republicanism of the Bush era to something far more radical. And from the beginning he was in the market for ideas about how to transform American conservatism and America itself. Roberts, like other conservative Americans, found them in a most unlikely place – a landlocked central European country with a population smaller than that of North Carolina.

“Hungary,” said Roberts last November, “is a model for conservative governance.”

It’s September 2024 and an expatriate British academic, Dr Calum Nicholson is compering events in what looks like a castle dungeon. The dungeon is in Budapest and Nicholson, formerly of Cambridge University, is now director of research at Hungarian thinktank, the Danube Institute. The occasion is the fourth Danube Institute and Heritage Foundation Geopolitical Summit. Lord David Frost of Brexit is there, as is former Australian PM, Tony Abbott. Quite a few Americans are also participants.

The Danube Institute was founded in 2013 and its president is another Brit – Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter John O’Sullivan. But the man who is really in charge is Balázs Orbán, political director for prime minister Viktor Orbán, and what you might call his soft-power tsar.

When Orbán speaks it’s to remind his guests how urgent their work is. “The values that are dear to us – God, nation and family and the way of life we love – could all be thrown away,” he says. But it needn’t be like this. “The bitter truth is we American and Hungarian conservatives were the losers of the previous liberal world order. But now this liberal world order has come to an end, the new world order is coming and we need to know what narrative and what actions will help we conservatives to become the winners of this new world order.”

That’s the offer: be the winners in the new world order. Just as the “we” here – the populist right –have been the winners in Hungary. And the instruments of spreading the word are not to be door-to-door missionaries, let alone military force, but the soft power wielded by well-funded thinktanks. It’s the seminar, the summit, the residential training course, the fellowships, the podcasts and the glossy publications. That’s the Hungary template. Train up the people who end up in the room where it happens.

The template began to be created in 2010 when former liberal Viktor Orbán led his now-conservative Fidesz party to a landslide victory in that year’s election. With the necessary two-thirds majority Orbán changed the constitution to favour his government and then set about taking over the various “neutral” institutions of the state and civil society. Punitive sanctions forced media companies to sell up to Orbán’s business allies, an independent university was in effect closed down, and inconvenient judges were retired.

These changes hugely increased the chances of Orbán’s serial re-election but at the expense of allies abroad, and especially in the European Union, who baulked at his slide towards authoritarianism, his closeness to Vladimir Putin and his extreme anti-migrant stance. In 2024 Orbán’s Fidesz became a founding party of the Patriots for Europe group in the European parliament, alongside Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Geert Wilders’ frankly racist Dutch Party for Freedom. But that group wasn’t big enough to save Hungary from financial sanctions imposed by the Euroepean Commission. Hungary needed more allies.

“We call them gongos, for government-organised non-government organisations,” Zubor Zalán, an investigative journalist based in Budapest, tells me. “These groups look from the outwards like a thinktank or civic society organisation, but their funding comes entirely from the government or through intermediaries.”

The biggest gongo Zubor has been looking into is the Danube Institute. “This is actually an organ of Orbánism and their main goal is to organise for the international influence of the Orbán government,” he says. “The Danube Institute receives money through various government agencies. And because of how it’s set up, they can hide the exact amount that they are handing out to various actors.”

All the same, Zubor and colleagues at his Átlátszó outfit have been able to do some digging. In the three years up to October 2024 the institute spent more than €1.2m (£1m) on researchers, guest lecturers and writers – many from abroad.

The Danube’s executive director, István Kiss, says it’s an independent foundation and nothing to do with the government. And I have a bridge over the Danube to sell you, says Zubor.

The Danube Institute is a project of another foundation, the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, which is funded and run by the Hungarian government. As an example of how that largesse is spread around, that foundation paid $35,000 (£26,000) to the Trumpian culture warrior Christopher Rufo in 2023, whose contract required him to deliver two lectures on critical race theory, appear on a panel, in a podcast and write an article for a pro-government publication.

There are myriad similar examples: just google your favourite British or American right-wing commentator and see if they’ve made their pilgrimage to Budapest.

Another big “gongo” is the Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). The chairman of its board of trustees is Balázs Orbán. In November 2022, as part of its propaganda campaign against the Commission, MCC set up a Brussels office. To head its 20-strong team they appointed the Hungarian-born, British-based academic Frank Furedi. Once the leading light in the tiny Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, Furedi had, along with many of his former comrades, undertaken a remarkable migration – through the Brexit party – to the other side of the political spectrum.

Among other priorities the collegium in Brussels proselytises for the Patriots group and supports Orbán in his wars against “wokeism” and migration. Recently this has involved them in strenuously defending Orbán’s action in banning the annual Budapest Pride march. Europe’s objection to the ban, said Furedi, was a form of “colonialism”.

The trouble with this is that the Hungarians didn’t seem to agree. On 28 June more than 100,000 people defied the Orbán ban. Meanwhile, polls in advance of next April’s general election show Fidesz trailing badly. The economy is in trouble, inflation is high, public services are crumbling and Orbán’s current tactic – to stress the fight against wokeism – appears not to be working. Whether Orbán will allow himself to lose an election is a question that worries his Hungarian opponents.

Should he lose, the ideological dynamic of the Orbán network, created to maintain him, may paradoxically have its greatest influence after he has gone. In the next few years, if Le Pen’s party wins the French presidency, if Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick become UK prime minister, if JD Vance takes over from Trump, if those things do happen and all of a sudden you find yourself being governed according to new rules, at least you’ll know where they came from.