BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hours before President Donald Trump was sworn in to begin his second term, promising a “golden age” for America, the leader of a Central European country was describing the years ahead in strikingly similar terms.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Trump’s return would usher in Hungary’s own “golden age” and mark the “collapse” of liberal democracy.
The messaging overlap was no surprise.
Orbán’s strongman style has long served as an inspiration for U.S. conservatives, who have looked at Hungary as a possible model for a right-wing America with less immigration, fewer regulations and the removal of democratic constraints they see as unwieldy or inconvenient.
Orbán has formed a close bond with Trump and has made multiple visits to the president’s Florida resort. This week, the prime minister praised Trump’s unilateral outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. During one of last year’s U.S. presidential debates, Trump praised Orbán as “a strong man. He’s a tough person.”
Now, with Trump back in office since Jan. 20, he is testing the limits of presidential power in a way that is drawing comparisons to the anti-democratic methods employed by Orbán and other autocrats.
Orbán used state power to crush rivals, remake the judiciary and game elections to make it much harder to oust his party. He has cracked down on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, the media and civic organizations.
Although the two men and political systems are different, there are striking parallels between what Orbán has achieved in Hungary and Trump’s agenda and approach for his second term.
A blueprint for returning to office
After becoming prime minister in 1998, Orbán suffered an unexpected electoral defeat four years later. He then swore he “would never lose again” and began planning the political transformation of Hungary, said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor who worked at Hungary’s Constitutional Court in the 1990s.
While he was out of power, Orbán and his allies created a legal framework to consolidate authority. It was swiftly implemented after Orbán’s Fidesz party swept to victory with a two-thirds majority in 2010.
“It wasn’t called Project 2025,” Scheppele added, referring to the controversial conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term that has been reflected in many of the president’s early actions. “It might have been called Project 2010.”
The European Parliament has declared Orban’s Hungary an “electoral autocracy.”
Upon returning to office with a Republican majority in Congress, Trump issued a blizzard of executive orders seeking to expand the power of the presidency and test the country’s system of checks and balances. He has continued to make changes to the government without consulting Congress.
The American Bar Association issued a statement warning that many of the Trump administration’s actions are “contrary to the rule of law.”
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the Oval Office of the White House, May 13, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
Remaking the legal system
The most consequential of Fidesz’s early actions was cracking down on judicial independence.
In 2012, Orbán’s government lowered the mandatory judicial retirement age, resulting in the termination of nearly 300 senior judges. Responsibility for filling the positions was vested in a single political appointee — the spouse of a Fidesz founder.
“It took three years and it was all over,” Scheppele said. “As long as he had the highest court in his pocket, he could get away with a lot.”
While Trump and Republicans cannot unilaterally change the face of the judiciary, the parallels with Orbán are clear. Republicans have long sought a conservative judiciary, and Trump embraced that priority when he first became president in 2017.
In his first term, Trump nominated three of the U.S. Supreme Court’s current nine members, giving conservatives a supermajority that last year shielded the Republican from criminal prosecution for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Trump has moved to remake the U.S. Department of Justice after having spoken repeatedly about using it to go after his critics and those who investigated him. He has fired prosecutors who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and moved to purge the FBI.
His administration has criticized judges who have temporarily halted some of its actions, with some in power even suggesting at one point that unfavorable decisions could be defied.
Still, Trump’s power over the judicial branch is not absolute. Many Trump-appointed judges showed independence in 2020, rebuffing his lawsuits to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
The U.S. court system also is larger than Hungary’s and full of judges appointed by previous presidents, including Biden.
Consolidating political power
Orbán’s first moves after regaining power were rewriting Hungary’s constitution and overhauling election laws in a way that ensured his party would have a greater proportion of its own lawmakers in the legislature.
Due partly to those changes, Orbán’s party has won a two-thirds majority in every election since 2010 while receiving as little as 44% of the vote. In Hungary, parties, rather than voters, select candidates for seats in parliament — a system that gives Orbán tremendous power in shaping the government.
“He decides who can be a politician and who cannot be a politician,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a founding Fidesz member who left the party in 1994. “He completely owns the party.”
Orbán has defined his party as embodying true Hungarian identity while branding his rivals as unpatriotic and serving foreign interests. It’s similar to Trump, who has used dark rhetoric against political opponents.
There also are parallels in dealing with the media. Orban undermined his country’s independent media as deep-pocketed allies who benefited from generous state contracts bought out influential news outlets. Trump, too, has put pressure on the media in the United States through lawsuits and regulatory threats.
While Trump does not control party elections in the same way Orbán does, he has put his stamp on the Republican Party, making loyalty to him its organizing principle. He has prioritized loyalty in nominations for top government jobs, including the leadership of the U.S. Justice Department, FBI and U.S. Defense Department.
Trump also is pushing to change civil service rules so he and his allies can remove federal employees who they see as not loyal to him and potentially replace them with ones who are.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban shake hands during a meeting in Moscow, July 5, 2024. (Valeriy Sharifulin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Cozying up to dictators
Orbán’s evolution into an autocrat occurred parallel to another transformation: his drift toward Russia, China and other autocracies.
Géza Jeszenszky, Hungary’s first foreign minister after the fall of state socialism, said Orbán recognized that the constraints of a Western democracy were incompatible with the sweeping changes he wanted. So he took examples from autocratic countries, specifically Putin’s Russia.
“His aim was to follow them,” Jeszenszky said.
Trump has a long history of speaking favorably about autocrats, especially Putin — whom he once said he trusted above U.S. intelligence services. He also had praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “brilliant” and has not committed to Ukraine being an equal participant in negotiations with Russia to end the war.
Szelényi, the Fidesz founding member, said fundamental political and economic differences between Hungary and the U.S. would make it more difficult for such a comprehensive political capture to take place in the U.S.
Still, she said, Hungary’s transformation under Orbán should serve as a warning.
“If autocratization starts, it goes on like a snowball,” she said. “It’s not something that stops — it’s a process.”
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
