Since 2010, Hungary has had the same leader – far-right populist Viktor Orban. He rose in popularity in the late 1980s after he called on the Soviet Red Army to “go home.” He empowered Hungarians to topple the communist dictatorship, and said that he had “exposed everyone’s silent desire for free elections, and an independent and democratic Hungary.”

He became Prime Minister in 1998 and lost in 2002, quickly relinquishing power. However, after returning to office after the economic crisis in 2008, many have accused him of causing the erosion of Hungary’s democracy, and some are wondering how one of the most promising defenders of Hungarian democracy “became the chief author of its demise.”

Even with democratic institutions eroding under Orban’s rule, including a restructuring of the electoral system and a dismantling of the legal system, he has received a mandate in all of his elections since 2010 which indicates that the majority of Hungarian voters support his decisions to do so. In other words, by centralizing his power and distancing Hungary from the West, he is fulfilling the popular will of the people of his country.

Orban’s party, Fidesz, has received supermajorities in every election since Orban was elected in 2010. So besides the manipulation of the legal, media, and political landscape, what makes him so popular? In short, his style of nationalistic populism makes his supporters proud to be Hungarian, and provides the promise of a “greater Hungary” that harkens back to a mythological era of Hungarian martyrdom and prosperity. 

Though many nationalistic right-wing leaders rise and fall, Orban’s ability to remain in power for as long as he has can be attributed to his legacy. Orban is someone who has been on the frontlines of the Hungarian promise since the country became a democracy. Of course, Orban helped to push Soviet influence out of the country, and immediately after coming to power in 2010, Orban pushed through dual citizenship for the millions of Hungarians living abroad, strengthening his support from Hungarian nationalists, and hundreds of thousands of new diaspora voters, who historically give Fidesz over 90% of their vote. 

In addition to this, Orban has taken a hard stance against migrants, while other EU countries have been relatively open to those fleeing warzones and economic hardship in the Middle East and Africa. Orban has called migrants “poison” and “not needed.” In response to the EU wanting Hungary to accept migrants, Orban’s state secretary said Hungary would “offer these illegal migrants, voluntarily, free of charge, one-way travel to Brussels.”

And this is not just an executive position. The vast majority of Hungarians are anti-migration too. 76 percent of Hungarians are against the EU’s migration policy, and 78 percent are against the EU’s quota system to resettle migrants in member states. In addition, 85 percent of Hungarians support the border fence that was put along Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia after the migrant crisis of 2015. 

Migration in Hungary is not a fringe issue, and Orban’s handling of the situation has been widely popular with the vast majority of Hungarians, even though many in the West have rejected Orban’s style and tone of leadership on the matter. Because of his broad support from Hungarian nationalists, there hasn’t been any meaningful opposition from the far-right, allowing Orban to win over right-wing voters in the country without any major competition over the last 14 years. 

Although the policies are popular, Orban’s rule is of course not entirely legitimate. He has undoubtedly tilted the scales in his favor. He and his party have gerrymandered the country’s electoral map, he has controlled the media to support his party while bashing the opposition, and before the last election, the opposition candidate was only given five minutes of airtime, the legal minimum. 

Since 2022, the European Parliament has formally considered Hungary a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” no longer qualifying as a genuine democracy, and the country’s score on the Freedom House Index continues to fall, now at just 65, being labeled “partly free.” This is down from a 76, and a rating of “free,” when country reports were first published in 2017.

However, even with these institutional constraints and consensus about Hungary’s eroding democracy in mind, Orban is genuinely popular, and his wins are so huge that they would probably happen even in a fairer democratic system. His style of Christian conservatism and rebuking of pro-immigrant and pro-LGBT laws are supported by many Hungarians, and he continues to take these controversial issues head-on.

For example, many believed he would be endangered by his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but Orban played up his neutrality to shore up more support from his voters. He explained that “65 percent of Hungary’s oil and 85 percent of its gas supplies come from Russia,” and that cutting ties with Russia would be very economically detrimental. Orban’s distance from the West in terms of response to Russia did not have the negative effect on him that many thought it would. Instead, opinion polls show that 60 percent of Hungarians feel Orban’s strategy is the best way to keep them safe during this tumultuous crisis, even though it supports authoritarianism in Russia. The fact that Orban’s actions are backed up by popular support suggests that Hungarians tolerate decisions contrary to Western dogmas of democracy. 

This in turn points to the fact that Hungarians are not just supportive of Orban himself, but truly are supportive of the idea that democratic erosion is a means to reach the ends of a greater Hungary. According to Pew Research data from after the Hungarian election in 2022, only 38% of Hungarians believe that their system of government has become less democratic. In addition, literature suggests that appeals to traditional values, as is popular in Hungary, underpin support for populist authoritarianism even at the expense of democratic institutions. As Jan-Werner Muller points out in What is Populism, illiberal democracies, which typically refer to regimes with elections but without rule of law or checks and balances, are seen in Europe, especially by traditionalists, as a way to restrict “both markets and morals” (Muller, 33). This is why when Orban described his plans to create an “illiberal state,” it only bolstered his support from Christian nationalists who felt that the West had turned the Hungarian homeland into an “investment site” (Muller, 33-35).

From an outside perspective, Orban is seen as a ruler who has turned Hungary’s democracy into a dictatorship. However, for most Hungarians, this is exactly what they wanted. Only about one-third believe that their democracy has weakened, and a majority support his performance as prime minister, even after more than a decade at the country’s helm. Orban has been integral in backsliding Hungary’s democracy, but the mandates by which Fidesz continues to win suggest that citizens are happy with this reality. Hungarians have consistently voted overwhelmingly for a conservative Christian nationalist, and that is exactly who has been leading the country for the past fourteen years.