The Orban Package

Hungary's made-in-Moscow autocrat is losing his grip

(US vice president JD Vance visiting prime minister Viktor Orban on April 7th, 2026 — five days before Hungary’s elections. [Janos Kummer/Getty])

When Viktor Orban was first elected prime minister in 1998, he campaigned on a liberal-conservative platform for a ‘civic Hungary’. He portrayed himself as a generational alternative to bourgeois socialists who had failed the country.

When he returned as prime minister in 2010 after an eight-year break, he campaigned against the same left-of-centre establishment — this time as a national conservative. He sought a revolutionary break with weak EU leadership. He wanted “national cooperation” for work, family, order and national sovereignty.

When the 2014-15 European migration crisis broke out, fuelled by Assad’s appalling waves of violence against his own people, Orban pivoted quickly.

But every stage of his career — liberal-conservative, national conservative and anti-immigration hardliner — has had one common denominator: Russia.

In a sworn 2016 statement, Dietmar Clodo described handing one million Deutsche Marks from Semyon Mogilevich, a leading Russian mobster then living in Budapest, to Orban ahead of 1994 parliamentary elections.

In an interview this month Laszlo Kovacs, a former Budapest gang member, alleged bomb-maker and bodybuilder, described acting as a courier for Mogilevich in 1997 — just before Orban’s first win — to deliver payments of $300,000, $500,000 and even one million dollars in a single sports bag.

In recent days, we have also learned that Orban’s foreign minister routinely briefed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on confidential EU Council discussions. They even strategized about ways to lift sanctions and block support for Ukraine.