HE HAD THEM AT ISLAMOPHOBIC ANTI-IMMIGRANT:

It was an interesting time to arrive in Hungary. Orbán and his Fidesz party have controlled the government since 2010 and made major changes to its structure. First, in 2012, came a new constitution, which increased the number of justices on the Constitutional Court from eleven to fifteen and introduced a new process for selecting them; by 2013, Orbán's party had chosen nine of them. The new constitution also eliminated election runoffs, allowing Orbán's party--the largest of a half-dozen in the country--to convert vote totals of forty-four per cent and forty-eight per cent in the past two parliamentary elections into legislative supermajorities. Second has been an extension of political power into cultural spheres, a shift marked first by the strident anti-migrant position Orbán took in 2015 and his statement the previous year that a democracy need not be liberal. The landmark Central European University, founded in 1991 by George Soros, was effectively evicted from Hungary; theatre directors have been replaced by politically compliant figures; the largest newspaper in the country, Népszabadság, was shuttered, with journalists and opposition figures alleging that government pressure was responsible, and owners blaming declining sales. In its 2020 annual report, Freedom House concluded that these steady incursions against Hungarian freedoms meant that the country no longer met its definition of a democracy. Next year, Orbán will stand for reëlection; Hungary's other parties have formed an anti-Orbán coalition, making the vote especially high-stakes. Meanwhile, Orbán has begun taking stands against cultural progressivism--banning children's media deemed to be L.G.B.T.-friendly, granting broad subsidies to the country's churches, and refusing to let Muslim migrants settle in Hungary--that have made him the kind of figure whom American social conservatives could idolize, and drawn his politics nearer to their own.

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