budapest, hungary —
When Vice President J.D. Vance held his cell phone up to the microphone, he momentarily thought his boss wouldn’t answer. However, on the second attempt, after a few rings, he was connected to Donald Trump. In the president’s defense, he had a lot on his mind, having just hours earlier threatened to destroy “the entire civilization” of Iran.
The crisis felt a world away from Budapest’s MTK Sports Park, where thousands of Hungarians had gathered to celebrate Hungarian-American Friendship Day.
Billed as a celebration of friendship between the two countries, the day was actually about the friendship between President Trump and Hungarian populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a darling of the MAGA movement who is trailing in the polls ahead of this weekend’s parliamentary elections.
President Trump told the audience, “I’m a huge fan of Victor. I’m always with him. America is always with him.” Mr Vance said he was in Budapest to help Mr Orbán “as much as possible”. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Budapest in February, he emphasized that “Hungary’s success is our success.”
At first glance, it is unclear why the “success” of Prime Minister Orbán’s Hungary, considered the most corrupt and least free country in the European Union and the most corrupt of the European Union’s poorer countries, would have any bearing on the “success” of the United States.
But for Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist who has known Orbán since the 1990s, the situation is not so strange. Mr. Krastev said that during his 16 years in office, Mr. Orbán had built Hungary into the “intellectual, institutional and financial center” of the European right. The Trump administration sees Orbán and the ideological foundation he has built as central to its push for a more “like-minded” Europe: anti-woke, anti-environmental, anti-immigrant.
Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategy in Sofia, Bulgaria, told CNN: “This administration believes that there is a Trumpist revolution and that this Trumpian revolution is coming to Europe, and that Europe is just one election cycle behind the US.”
Sunday’s election will test that belief. Péter Magyar’s opposition Tisa party has held a double-digit lead over Orbán’s Fidesz party in most opinion polls for more than a year. Mr. Magyar, an Orban supporter turned archenemy, has distanced himself from the prime minister’s favored areas of foreign policy, focusing instead on kitchen issues such as corruption, health care and the public’s wallet.
For Hungarians, this election may be an opportunity to see what the future holds without Orbán. But its impact can be felt far away. “If Orbán, who is a symbol of the strength of the far right, loses, it will have an incredible psychological impact,” Krastev said.
Political scientists have struggled to define the “model” Orbán has constructed. Some call this a “hybrid regime.” This is not a dictatorship, but it is not a full democracy either. Although the government is somewhat authoritarian, it still faces competitive elections, leading some to advocate “competitive authoritarianism.” Or, in Orbán’s own words, Hungary is an “illiberal democracy,” a system in which everyone has the right to vote but has low tolerance for dissent.
Péter Kleko, a political scientist who runs a think tank in Budapest, favors an “information dictatorship.” Unlike 20th century dictatorships, there is little threat of physical violence in Mr. Orbán’s Hungary, he said. Rather, it harms the world of words and ideas.
“If you criticize the system, they don’t want to immediately censor you, suppress you, silence you,” Kleko told CNN. “It’s much more of a smear campaign, a disinformation campaign against you. It’s character assassination.”
István Hegedos, who served with Orbán in Hungary’s first freely elected parliament in 1990, said the system needed a steady supply of enemies to work. Although Mr. Orban has come a long way since his youth as a liberal anti-communist, “his thinking has always been – and still is – black and white, friends and enemies, us and them,” Hegeshus told CNN.
For 16 years, Orbanism found enough enemies to sustain itself. “The system started acting in a more violent and brutal manner in its campaigns against NGOs,” Hegedus said. Next, a “campaign against liberal philosophers, then free media, then journalists” and Central European University (CEU) were launched.
Once one of the most funded liberal arts universities in the post-Soviet world, Mr. Orbán picked a fight with the university, branding its donor, liberal philanthropist George Soros, an enemy of Hungary. In the face of relentless pressure from Orban’s government, it moved its academic operations to Vienna, Austria, in 2018.
Today, CEU maintains a ghostly presence in Budapest. That campus still stands today, and researchers (among them Cleco) still use it as office space. Just as there was no need for physical violence against residents, there was no need to physically close down the campus. The continued pressure was enough for Orbán to get his way.
When CEU fell from grace, another university took over as Budapest’s premier educational institution. The Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), funded in recent years by a generous government grant of a 10% stake in Hungary’s largest oil and gas company, now serves as a kind of training ground for conservatives across Europe.
Mr. Vance visited MCC on Wednesday morning. If the crowd at MTK Sports Park was past its prime (much more MAGA hat-wearing, gray-haired, bald heads), the crowd at MCC was mostly men in their 20s, with slicked-back hair and tight-fitting suits.
“The MCC is not just an institution; it is a mission,” said Baras Orbán, the prime minister’s political director (no relation), as he introduced the vice president. Before Vance spoke, the audience listened to presentations from a panel that included Gladden Papin. Gladden Papin is an American-born, Harvard-educated adviser to the prime minister who once reportedly predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress and pave the way for the Pope to anoint Melania Trump as queen to rule the United States.
Vance’s speech to the MCC wasn’t all that outlandish. “Resist the temptation to think that victory will be instant or that you can get instant gratification and take civilization back,” he told the next generation of potential culture warriors. “Our civilization was not built overnight. We will not be saved overnight.”
The MCC is only part of Mr. Orbán’s ideological platform. There are well-funded conservative think tanks such as the Danube Institute and the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs. There are also fascinating publications like The European Conservative and online sites like Remix News that detail alleged crimes committed by migrants in Europe. Through this structure of soft power, Orbán has made himself “to the Western far-right what Fidel Castro was to the left in the 1970s,” Krastev said.
It took a few years, but America started to notice, too. Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first presidential campaign, was one of the early cheerleaders. Bannon, speaking from Hungary in 2018, called Orbán “Trump before Trump.”
Within a few years, the Conservative Political Action Conference, long a cornerstone of the American right, established a regular presence in Hungary. During his time at Fox News, Tucker Carlson interviewed Orbán on a popular prime-time program broadcast from Hungary. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank that developed Project 2025, described Hungary as “not just a model of modern national strategy, but a model.”
Mr. Orbán, who established Budapest as MAGA’s European headquarters, is beginning to benefit from this relationship.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán panicked last fall after the Trump administration announced sanctions on purchases of Russian oil. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had warned that such measures would “collapse” Hungary’s economy, which is almost entirely dependent on energy imports from Russia.
Fortunately for the prime minister, President Trump granted Hungary a one-year exemption from U.S. sanctions, even though he has long criticized EU countries for continuing to buy Russian oil. On Tuesday, Vance praised Orbán’s energy policies and argued that other European countries “should have followed” his policies.
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Vance’s visit will help or hinder Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in Sunday’s parliamentary vote. The leader has condemned alleged foreign interference in Hungary’s elections, but appears willing to accept support from his allies in Washington. “Go vote,” Vance told the crowd at MTK Sports Park. “Stand with Viktor Orban, because he stands with you.”
In a brief statement about Vance’s visit, Magyar, head of the opposition Tisza party, said: “No foreign country should interfere in Hungarian elections…Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow or Brussels, but in the streets and squares of Hungary.”
Krastev said it was notable that Orbán was seeking international support to strengthen his campaign after many years of ruling as a “nationalist.” “Ironically, if he were to lose, he would lose like a globalist,” he said.
Even if Orbán loses, the ideological structure he built will not collapse. Right-wing intellectuals will still find a home in Budapest, conservative publications will continue to print, and the MCC will not be closed down. Perhaps in time, like CEU, it will cast a ghostly presence over the city.
But Orbán’s defeat would undermine the credibility of the European nationalist movements that he, and more recently the Trump administration, are trying to internationalize.
Meanwhile, for Russians and Americans who support the same candidate, Mr. Orban’s defeat “would not just be a defeat, but a humiliation,” Mr. Krastev said.
“These two superpowers are making it look like they can divide Europe. They’ve done everything they can to win, and then all of a sudden their candidate loses. This will give a huge boost to Europe’s sense of resilience.”
