Viktor Orbán: the populist throttling Hungary

Former Hungarian dissident Viktor Orbán was once a champion of a liberal, open society. Now that he’s entrenched in power, critics say he’s the chief danger to it. Jane Lewis reports.

In 1988 a Hungarian dissident wrote a letter to billionaire investor George Soros, asking for help to obtain a scholarship to Oxford University to study "the rebirth of civil society" and duly won a place at Pembroke College. The young supplicant, says The Economist, was Viktor Orbn, the Hungarian premier who has just won his third election in a row and is "now busy throttling the independent society he once championed".

The author of Hungary's "illiberal democracy" has "shed beliefs as a chameleon shed skins" and now depicts himself as "the defender of Christian Europe". Soros in particular has every reason to feel affronted, says The Times. Orbn is likely to use his landslide to increase his power over the judiciary and media. But a spokesman from his right-wing Fidesz party says that his "first priority" is to pass a "Stop Soros" bill to shut charities backed by the financier, who is of Jewish Hungarian origin, and whom Orbn has accused, in thinly disguised anti-Semitic attacks, of "trying to overthrow" Hungary's indigenous culture.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up

Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.