BUDAPEST, Hungary — He paid youths to attend his speech and clap. He championed laws to silence critical journalists. He rammed through a constitution aimed at remaking Hungary on conservative Christian values.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who made his name protesting Hungary’s communist dictatorship, is now confronting protesters who are chanting “Viktator!”
As a student radical, Orban wrote a stinging analysis of the dirty tricks communists used to cling to power. He now faces accusations of playing by a similar handbook as he consolidates power for his right-wing party and erodes the democracy he once fought for with zeal.
“Orban is a big threat to Hungarian democracy,” said Jozsef Debreczeni, author of two biographies of Orban and a former adviser who broke with him in the 1990s because he felt Orban was even then beginning to abandon his liberal principles. “I am convinced he is ruining the country.”
Debreczeni is now also a vice president of the Democratic Coalition, the party headed by Orban’s archrival of the past decade, former Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany.
Since Orban’s Fidesz party swept to power in 2010, it has used a two-thirds majority in the parliament to reshape the country’s laws in a way that has startled political opponents, the EU and the United States.
The victory was the result of deep disillusionment with the former Socialist government, which mismanaged the economy so badly that Hungary became the first European country to need a bailout when the global financial crisis took hold in 2008.
But Orban declared his victory a “revolution in the voting booth” and took it as license to push through a new constitution and hundreds of laws that fit into his vision of a conservative Christian state.
