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Orbán received a law degree from the University of Budapest in 1987. The following year he gained a fellowship appointment at a central and eastern European research group sponsored by the Soros Foundation, a pro-democracy organization created by the financier George Soros. Orbán also became a founding member of the anticommunist Federation of Young Democrats (Fidesz). In 1989 he received a scholarship from the Soros Foundation to study political philosophy at the University of Oxford. That June Orbán gained wide recognition when he gave a speech at the reburial of former premier Imre Nagy, leader of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in which he called for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. All Soviet forces did indeed withdraw by mid-1991.

First elected to Hungary’s new National Assembly in 1990, Orbán became the leader of Fidesz in 1993. The party won only a sliver of seats in the 1990 parliamentary elections, and their representation declined further when even fewer seats were won in the 1994 elections. To appeal to more voters, Orbán moved his party to the centre-right by forming alliances with right-of-centre groups. In the elections of 1998, Fidesz and its allies won the largest number of parliamentary seats; Fidesz then formed a coalition government with two other parties, and Orbán became prime minister.

As prime minister, Orbán appointed a number of young ministers who had no associations with earlier governments; he also took steps to move Hungary further toward a free-market economy. At the same time, he claimed an active role for Hungary in European affairs and oversaw Hungary’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999.

Orbán stepped down as leader of Fidesz when, in January 2000, a party congress voted to separate the posts of prime minister and party head. He was ousted from the premiership in 2002, after Fidesz lost to the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) in parliamentary elections. Shortly thereafter he was elected as a vice president of the European People’s Party. In 2003 Orbán returned to lead Fidesz, but, when his party lost again to the MSzP in 2006, there were calls for his resignation. Orbán’s popularity rebounded, however, after it was discovered that the ruling MSzP had lied about the state of the country’s economy in order to gain votes. Orbán supported the resulting protests at first but distanced himself when the demonstrations turned violent.

In June 2009 Orbán was reelected leader of Fidesz, which won 14 of Hungary’s 22 seats in the European Parliament that same month. Hungary continued to struggle in the wake of its economic collapse of 2008, and, after Fidesz scored an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections in mid-April 2010, Orbán again became prime minister.

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Throughout 2010 and 2011 Orbán exploited his party’s supermajority in Parliament to push through a series of broad legislative measures that culminated in the adoption on January 1, 2012, of a new constitution embodying conservative moral and religious themes. The new constitution elicited protest both at home and abroad, including a report by the Council of Europe that questioned judicial reforms that curtailed the independence of Hungarian courts. Largely in response to foreign criticism, the Orbán government scaled back a proposed media law that would have given Fidesz significant direct control over the press.

In 2013 his government continued to implement a moderate austerity program, introduced a new set of crisis taxes on banking and selected industries, and ordered utility companies to reduce charges for all Hungarian households. At least partly as a result of the popularity of that last initiative, Fidesz and its junior electoral partner, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, swept to another commanding victory in the national parliamentary elections in April 2014, earning Orbán another term as prime minister. That success was mirrored in Fidesz’s triumph in the elections to the European Parliament the next month, in which it won more than 50 percent of the total vote.

In a speech in July 2014, Orbán declared that his government aimed to build a “workfare” society, which would be “illiberal” in nature. He cited Russia, China, and Turkey as examples. Orbán’s pronouncement highly alarmed the opposition and prompted an outraged reaction in the foreign press. His response to Europe’s migrant crisis was equally dismaying for many of his critics at home and abroad. In 2015 Orbán’s government constructed a barbed-wire fence along Hungary’s border with Serbia to stanch the wave of migrants and refugees seeking to enter the country, en route from turmoil in the Middle East and Africa to a hoped-for home in Europe. By the time the fence was completed in September 2015, Orbán had outraged many observers by characterizing the migrant crisis as a “German problem” (many of the migrants hoped to settle in prosperous Germany) and had joined other eastern European leaders in rejecting calls for mandatory quotas for sharing migrant settlement across the countries of the European Union (EU).

Before Hungarians voted on October 2, 2016, on a referendum on the EU’s migrant-resettlement policy (which asked, “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament?”), Orbán made his opposition to the proposition abundantly clear, saying, “We will never, never, ever accept the mandatory quota for migrants.” In the event, more than 98 percent of those who voted rejected EU imposition of migrant quotas, but, because only about 40 percent of eligible voters went to the polls—less than the 50 percent required to make the result legitimate—the referendum was invalid. Nonetheless, Orbán spun the result as a victory, promised that the Hungarian constitution would be amended to prevent the EU from requiring migrant settlement, and called on other EU members to take similar votes.

A high voter turnout (nearly 70 percent of eligible voters) initially buoyed the hopes of the opposition, but, when the ballots were counted, Fidesz and its junior coalition partner, the Christian Democrats, swept to a landslide victory, winning some 48 percent of the vote (as opposed to about 45 percent of the vote in 2014). The ruling coalition maintained its supermajority (two-thirds majority) in the 199-seat Parliament by once again capturing 133 seats. The right-wing Jobbik party, which had tacked to the centre for the election, finished second with 26 seats. The Socialist-led leftist coalition took 20 seats. Voters cast one ballot for a list of national candidates to fill 93 seats and another to elect 106 local representatives. There was a pronounced split between the desires of voters in metropolitan Budapest, where leftist candidates won 12 of 18 seats, and those in the rest of the country, where Fidesz took 85 of 88 seats.

The results accorded Orbán a fourth term as prime minister. Having made a speech in March promising to “seek moral, political, and legal amends” from his enemies, he was poised to further centralize his increasingly autocratic rule. So-called Stop Soros legislation was already in the works that would force NGOs involved in immigration issues to apply to the government for a license and that would impose a 25 percent tax on foreign contributions to those organizations. By June the National Assembly had enacted legislation that criminalized NGO involvement with undocumented immigrants altogether.

To this point Orbán’s march toward autocratic rule had been largely unopposed—at least publicly—by the leaders of the other national parties that with Fidesz made up the European People’s Party (EPP), the centre-right coalition that was the largest pan-European presence in the European Parliament. By September 2018, however, Orbán’s outspoken criticism of not just the EU but also the EPP had eroded support for him within the coalition. In particular, Orbán had intimated that if coalition policy did not change more to his liking, he might lead a far-right breakaway group into the 2019 elections for the European Parliament. Moreover, his increasing overtures to Russia’s Vladimir Putin did not sit well with some of Orbán’s EPP colleagues.

Responding to a report by a Dutch Green Party member of the European Parliament that condemned policies of the Orbán regime as antidemocratic, in September 2018 the European Parliament voted 448–197 (with 48 abstentions) to invoke seldom-used Article 7, also called the “nuclear option,” against Hungary, launching proceedings that could lead to sanctions against the country, including suspension of its voting rights in the European Council. Orbán’s foreign minister complained that the action was pro-immigration politicians’ revenge for Hungary’s strong anti-immigration stance. Orbán himself argued that the criticism of his government was predicated on opposition to its hard-line immigration policies: “This is the first case in the history of Europe where a community condemns its own border guards.” Although the vote to open the way for sanctions against Hungary was a setback for Orbán, the probability of their coming into force was slim: among other steps before they could be imposed, at least four-fifths of the European Council would have to find Hungary in violation of EU “founding values,” and the council (excluding Hungary) would have to vote unanimously in favour of imposing sanctions—a measure that Poland, which was facing the same threat of sanctions, would likely oppose.

In the run-up to the May 2019 elections for the European Parliament, Fidesz undertook a media campaign featuring posters depicting Soros and European Commission Pres. Jean-Claude Juncker that intimated that they had conspired on EU migrant policy to threaten Hungarian security. In March, members of the EPP—many of them already arguing that Orbán had violated the rule of law—voted overwhelmingly to suspend (but not expel) Fidesz from the EPP. The group established a three-member panel to consider Fidesz’s future in the EPP and to evaluate its “respect for the rule of law.”

In capturing more than 52 percent of the vote and gaining an additional seat (going from 12 to 13 of 21 seats), Fidesz mirrored the broader trend of populist anti-immigrant parties of the right making significant gains in the elections but failing to achieve the sweeping turnover of power that had been predicted by some political pundits. In the immediate aftermath of the elections, Orbán seem to strike a stance that would keep his political options open, as he chose not to rush to join a pan-European anti-immigrant far-right coalition. Instead, for the moment at least, he opted to keep Fidesz within the EPP, reserving the option of withdrawing should its policies not serve what Orbán deemed to be the national interest of Hungary. He told supporters that, with the victory, “Hungarians have given us a directive on three things: first of all, to stop immigration across Europe; they’ve tasked us to defend the Europe of nations; and they’ve tasked us to defend Christian culture in Europe.”