Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban received a warm reception Thursday in Texas, where he was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major event on the calendar of the right wing of the Republican Party.
In remarks that ran for approximately 30 minutes, Orban demonstrated why he has become popular among American conservatives, rattling off a litany of claims and accomplishments that dovetailed with many American conservative voters' priorities.
Orban touted his country's low crime rate, its success at preventing immigrants from crossing its borders, its crackdown on the political left, its restrictions on the rights of gay and transgender individuals, and its low taxes.
He cast liberals and progressives as history's great villains and urged audience members to fight to place "Christian values" at the center of their politics.
"The horrors of Nazism and communism happened because some Western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values," Orban said. "And today's progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on Western values and create a new world — a post-Western world. Who is going to stop them if you don't?"
Orban, 59, began his career as a radical liberal, but over the years he steered the political party Fidesz, which he had helped found, in a more populist and conservative direction. He remains president of the party.
When he became prime minister for the second time in 2010 (he had held the office from 1998 to 2002), Orban moved quickly to consolidate both political and cultural power in Hungary, facilitated by Fidesz's two-thirds majority in parliament, which allowed it to draft a new constitution.
The revised constitution, which went into effect in 2012, wrote Hungarian nationalism and Christianity into the country's laws and helped cement Fidesz's political dominance. A new electoral system was put in place that allowed the party to retain more than two-thirds of the body's seats in the 2014 elections despite earning 44.5% of the votes cast.
Transparency International has characterized Hungary's elections as "free but not fair." Citizens can cast votes, and the votes are accurately counted, but the structure of the system ensures that Fidesz consistently wins representation that far exceeds its share of the votes.
In addition to dominating parliament, Orban has restructured the Hungarian judiciary, reducing its independence and installing judges sympathetic to his administration.
At the same time, the government has passed laws limiting freedom of speech and cracking down on independent media. Allies of Orban, meanwhile, have created a pervasive conservative media ecosystem that dominates the airwaves and generally echoes the positions of the Orban government.
"Since returning to power in 2010, Orban has unceasingly attacked media pluralism and independence. After public broadcasting was turned into a propaganda organ, many private media were taken over or silenced," according to the organization Reporters Without Borders. "The ruling party, Fidesz, has seized de facto control of 80% of the country's media through political-economic maneuvers and the purchase of news organizations by friendly oligarchs."
The prime minister's many critics argue he is an autocrat who has turned his country of 10 million people in the heart of Europe into a near-dictatorship. Orban has also been widely criticized for appointing friends and relatives to positions of authority and for turning a blind eye to corruption among senior leaders.
U.S. President Joe Biden, when campaigning for the presidency, characterized Orban as a "totalitarian" and a "thug."
Under Orban's leadership, Hungary has passed laws discriminating against LGBTQ people and has made preserving Hungary's culture — as Orban defines it — a key element of his mission as prime minister.
His defense of Hungarian culture has, according to his critics, frequently come close to explicit racism.
In a 2018 speech, for example, he said, "We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. … We do not want to be a diverse country."
Just last week, in a speech delivered in Romania, Orban criticized other European countries for allowing the "mixing" of people of different races. Referring to Hungary, Orban said, "We are not a mixed race, and we do not want to become a mixed race."