Observers disagree about whether Orbán’s shift to the right was purely strategic. “He planned for years how to get where he is,” Scheppele, the Princeton legal scholar, told me. She believes that if the left had been weaker in the nineties, Orbán would have moved in that direction. In 1995, Scheppele accompanied Orbán on a visit to an ethnic-Hungarian enclave in Ukraine, to observe as he tested out a new nationalist message. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Scheppele said. “Orbán’s mind is like a tractor beam that can melt even the strongest resistance.” She continued, “He feels any constraint, no matter how small, as if he is in a prison, and he is always trying to bust out.”[...]
“They do everything by law—there will never be an illegal action,” Scheppele told me. “Any one law didn’t look that bad, but if you stack them together it creates this web. That’s why the E.U. is unable to cope. They look at one thing at a time, but Orbán is a systemic thinker.” Orbán created a counterterrorism force, which initially had apparent constitutional constraints on its surveillance powers. Subsequently, in several paragraphs inserted into a law on reservoirs and waterworks, he invalidated the restraints. [...]
Opposition politicians and investigative journalists maintain that Orbán has become fantastically rich through companies that are registered in the names of family members. His extended family has shown a special affection for buying the old villas of the Jewish bourgeoisie. A stone quarry near Felcsút has earned Orbán’s father millions of euros; his son-in-law receives E.U. money in the form of contracts for installing street lights and making tourism-related renovations. Lőrinc Mészáros, a former pipe fitter from Felcsút who connected with Orbán on the soccer field, in 1999, won a slew of state construction contracts. (He helped build the town’s stadium.) In 2010, when Orbán returned to power, Mészáros owned one company; now he owns two hundred and three, and is, by most accounts, one of the richest men in Hungary. His gated estate spreads into the hills at the edge of Felcsút, where he served as mayor from 2010 to 2018, joining the eighty-five per cent of mayoralties and local councils controlled by Fidesz. The Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has written, “Certainly, elections will continue to be held in Hungary, Orbán’s opponents will be allowed to demonstrate in Budapest, critical voices will find a niche somewhere in the media. Power really changing hands, however, is increasingly unlikely.” [...]
Four years later, Orbán had refined his idea. “There is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy,” he said at this summer’s gathering. “And we must show that the liberal élite can be replaced with a Christian-democratic élite.” Orbán offered some clarification. “Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”
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