Daniel Nolan is a Budapest-based award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster from Manchester, England. His work on Hungary and CEE has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and numerous other outlets. He won a Foreign Press Association Award in 2018 and was named a European Press Prize laureate in 2016 and 2019.
Viktor Orbán’s policy of doing business with Russia and China, and turning Hungary into a beacon of “illiberal democracies”, alienated the country’s EU partners and that came with an economic cost. Orbán’s main rival Péter Magyar shares some of Orbán’s views, but he promises to make amends with Brussels.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claims Ukraine is meddling in Hungary’s election campaign. The claim is not notable because it is proven, but because it can be deployed without proof and still do political work.
Viktor Orban's party is facing its biggest challenge since it took power in 2010, having been overtaken in the polls by Peter Magyar’s TISZA party. Magyar was an insider of Fidesz power circle and has known how to neutralize the kind of discourse that Orban's success has relied on in the past.
Viktor Orban’s domestic “pro-family” policies made him a champion for the conservatives engaged in the so-called “culture wars”.
Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban share a way of doing politics: they’re both populists craving for the spotlight, ready to exploit in their favour the divisions of their respective societies. They also share an irreverence for the European Union. Johnson was one of the leading figures of the Leave camp, while Orban became a nuisance for Brussels as he kept on defying, time and again, the EU values and policies. The two seem to use the same recipe to consolidate their grip on power, so it only makes sense that their respective oppositions may eventually take similar paths.
Hungary’s plans to become a hub for eastern superpowers were widely mocked after Viktor Orban’s government’s “Eastern Wind” policy had to be renamed “Eastern Opening” after a party official noted that an eastern wind blows things everywhere except to the east. That hilarity turned to anger, however, when it emerged that China plans to build its first ever European university on the banks of the Danube by way of a EUR 1.5bn construction project that will be funded by Hungarian taxpayers.