It'd be really interesting to know when and how Orbán flipped from a moderate progressive mindset to autocratic dictator.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Interesting question. This is what I found.
What happened to the shaggy-haired freedom fighter, many asked [in 2015], and why has he taken a sharp right turn? But that is the wrong question, shaped by Western liberals’ erroneous expectations of post-communist central Europe. A better question is, why wouldn’t he?
(...)
He graduated [from law school] in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group, which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz. The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media. They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists. They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.
In the early 1990s, Orban decided to reinvent the party as a conservative and moderately nationalist movement. Many of Fidesz’s original members left in disgust. Others stayed loyal and were rewarded with ministerial posts in the first Fidesz government from 1998 to 2002. That laid the groundwork for Orban’s later slide toward centralizing political and economic power. It was based, say those who know him, on two pillars: ideology and electoral mathematics.
Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above. Nationalism, and increasingly, populism, provided the ideological underpinnings. The left of the country’s political spectrum was crowded with liberals and socialists of the post-communist variety. There was a large gap on the right, where, it is now clear, a majority of Hungarians naturally sympathize.
This doesn't explain anything.
What information are you looking for?
The linked text thats highlighted in OPs comment basically just says he did it bcz he could. That's not a reason.
The last paragraph does address his motive:
Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above.
The mistake is assuming that Orban was ever anything but a populist. Orban never really changed, what changed was the state of populism in central Europe.
Basically, in the 90's liberal reform was popularized following the implosion of the Soviet Union. However, there was a conservative backlash following the "shock therapy" doctrine the IMF took when reforming the former Soviet block.
Conservative backlash in this case being styled after late Soviet socialism. Which was conservative in social mores, and in nationalist intent, but left leaning in economically. The older more impoverished population wanted to go back to the days before the collapse and before the implementation of shock therapy.
Orban has almost always riden the sentiment of populism whether that be liberalism or the sentiment of the Soviet era. The lone time he abandoned populism was in the early 00's where he tried to align himself with the middle class, which cost him the election. Since then he has doubled down on his populist agenda.
He was never progressive, just used those ideas to get to where he is now.
2002, when Gyurcsány mopped the floor with him in that debate would be my guess.
At this point I think we should just bribe Fico in order to finally suspend Hungary's rights in the EU