---

slug: viktor-orban name: Viktor Orbán role: Prime Minister of Hungary type: person

Viktor Orbán

Biography

Viktor Orbán (born 1963) is Hungary's prime minister and, in George Soros's telling, the man who turned Soros's own country into the most painful test case of his life's work. The two men are bound together by a shared biography that makes their enmity singular: Orbán rose to prominence as a young anti-communist dissident in the late 1980s, exactly the kind of independent-minded activist Soros's Hungarian foundation — established in 1984 — existed to cultivate. The foundation supported the democratic opposition of that era with scholarships, grants, and equipment, and the young Orbán was among its beneficiaries, studying at Oxford on a Soros-funded scholarship in 1989 before returning home to help lead the transition. Soros's own account of that giving is matter-of-fact: "George Soros started his giving in Hungary in the 1980s, establishing a foundation there in 1984. Since then, his support for Hungarians has totaled roughly €350 million" — scholarships, health care, and humanitarian efforts among them (see the 2017 rebuttal).

Orbán co-founded Fidesz in 1988, served a first term as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, and returned to power in 2010 with a two-thirds parliamentary majority that he has used to rewrite the constitution and the electoral law repeatedly. In 2014 he publicly declared his intention to build an "illiberal democracy," and Soros noted the ideological alignment early: writing in 2015, he observed that "Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has gone so far as to cite Putin as his role model – and he is no anomaly" (Europe at War). Over the following decade, in Soros's corpus, Orbán becomes the archetype of the elected autocrat: a leader who captures the courts, the central bank, and the media from within, while preserving the outward forms of democracy.

The relationship turned openly hostile during the 2015 migration crisis, when Soros's foundations and Orbán's government issued rival six-point plans for Europe's refugees, and it reached its nadir in 2017–2018 with a state-funded propaganda campaign against Soros personally and the expulsion of Central European University — the institution Soros considers his proudest creation — from Budapest. Since then Soros has described Orbán's system in the bluntest terms in his vocabulary: a "kleptocratic" regime, a "mafia state," and the European Union's most dangerous internal enemy.

Key Stories

The two six-point plans (2015). The break became explicit in September 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis. As Soros told Gregor Peter Schmitz, "My foundation developed a six-point plan on this basis and announced it at exactly the same time as Orbán introduced his six-point plan, but the two plans were diametrically opposed to each other. Orbán’s plan was designed to protect the national borders against the asylum seekers; ours sought to protect the asylum seekers. We have been at odds ever since" (The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse). In Rebuilding the Asylum System, Soros warned that Orbán's plan, "which subordinates the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants to the security of borders, threatens to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built." Asked who was winning, Soros conceded: "In Hungary, he has won hands down. More disturbingly, he is also winning in Europe."

The "Soros Plan" campaign (2017–2018). Orbán then did something no other head of government had done: he made George Soros, by name, the central villain of a national election. Billboards, state media, and two "national consultations" portrayed Soros as plotting to flood Hungary with Muslim migrants. Soros's foundation answered with a point-by-point rebuttal of the October 2017 national consultation, documenting that the Hungarian government had "selected George Soros for this purpose, launching a massive anti-Soros media campaign costing tens of millions of euros in taxpayer money, stoking anti-Muslim sentiment, and employing anti-Semitic tropes reminiscent of the 1930s." Soros himself was sardonic about the accusation: "Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, won the last elections by basing his campaign on the false claim that I wanted Hungary to be flooded with Muslim immigrants" (If the EU Punishes Italy, It Will Reap the Whirlwind). Accepting the Ridenhour Courage Award in 2018, he described what it felt like from the receiving end: "In my native Hungary, the government of Viktor Orban has turned me into the super villain of an alleged plot to destroy the supposed Christian identity of the Hungarian nation" (Ridenhour Courage Award remarks).

The expulsion of Central European University. The campaign's most concrete casualty was CEU, the graduate university Soros founded in Budapest in 1991. In his 2017 Brussels address, delivered while the Hungarian parliament was passing the law aimed at the university, Soros said: "I am the proud founder of the Central European University that has, after 26 years, come to rank among the fifty best universities in the world in many of the social sciences" (Brussels Economic Forum remarks). He described Orbán's method — casting "himself in the role of the defender of Hungarian sovereignty and me as a shady currency speculator" — and noted that he had "strenuously resisted Orban’s attempts to translate our ideological differences into personal animosity." The university was ultimately forced to move its US-accredited programs to Vienna. At Davos in 2020, Soros recorded the outcome with restrained fury: "In recent years CEU gained a global reputation for defending academic freedom against Victor Orban, Hungary’s ruler, who is hell bent on destroying it" (Davos remarks 2020).

The rule-of-law veto (2020). When the EU tied its budget to rule-of-law conditionality, Hungary and Poland vetoed the €1.8 trillion package. Soros's response was the most sustained indictment of Orbán in the corpus. "Orbán has constructed in Hungary an elaborate kleptocratic system to rob the country blind," he wrote, citing the transfer of nearly $2.8 billion in public assets to foundations controlled by Orbán's circle and a ventilator procurement in which Hungary paid over 50 times what Germany paid (Europe Must Stand Up to Hungary and Poland). When Angela Merkel brokered a compromise, Soros called it capitulation: "Orbán has stolen and misappropriated vast sums during his decade in power, including EU funds that should have gone to benefit the Hungarian people" (The Costs of Merkel's Surrender).

The enablers in Brussels. Soros reserves real anger for Orbán's European protectors. The European People's Party, he wrote in 2019, "is almost entirely devoid of principles, as demonstrated by its willingness to permit the continued membership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in order to preserve its majority" (Europe, Please Wake Up). When the EPP merely suspended Fidesz instead of expelling it — after Orbán refused even the modest demand to let CEU function freely — Soros called the arrangement what he saw: protection for "what amounts to a mafia state" (Europe's Silent Majority Speaks Out).

Impact on Soros's Work

1. The personal front line of the open society. Orbán transformed Soros's defense of the open society from a global program into a fight for his own homeland. "Being of Hungarian Jewish origin, I am particularly concerned with the situation in Hungary, where I have been active as a philanthropist for more than 30 years," Soros wrote in 2020. The country where his philanthropy began became the country where it was most violently rejected — and the proof, in his framework, that open societies have no permanent victories.

2. The philanthropist as political target. The anti-Soros campaign became the template for authoritarian attacks on civil society worldwide, and it shaped how Soros talks about political philanthropy: foundations must expect to be vilified, and must defend not just their grantees but the principle of independent private giving itself. His response — publishing rebuttals, funding independent Hungarian media coverage, refusing the personal feud Orbán sought — is his theory of open-society defense practiced on himself.

3. From CEU to OSUN. Orbán's expulsion of CEU directly provoked Soros's largest late-life commitment: the Open Society University Network, endowed with $1 billion and announced at Davos in 2020 as the institutional answer to the destruction of academic freedom in Hungary (Davos remarks 2020). What Orbán broke up in Budapest, Soros rebuilt as a global network — his characteristic move of converting a defeat into a larger structure.

4. The EU's internal enemy as a stress test. Orbán, more than any external threat, forced Soros's analysis of European disintegration to focus inward: "Orbán attacks them from the inside; Putin from the outside." Soros's late European advocacy — rule-of-law conditionality, enhanced cooperation to bypass vetoes, directing EU funds to opposition-held cities rather than national governments — is a policy architecture designed almost entirely around the problem Orbán posed.

Key Passages