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Rory Sutherland: The world according to the Wiki Man

Peter Magyar

Wednesday

William Atkinson

Is time up for Viktor Orban?

For a country of ten million people that spent most of the 20th century occupied and impoverished, Hungary today is thriving. This, in the eyes of his supporters, is down to the 16-year rule of Viktor Orban. Hungary’s Prime Minister has, to use his phrasing, aimed to create an ‘illiberal democracy’. He has reformed the country’s judiciary, given tax breaks to mothers to increase the birth rate and zealously resisted the EU’s refugee policies. The last is illustrated by the 140-mile fence along the Serbian border constructed during the 2015 migration crisis. Proud border guards tell you that 1.1 million migrants have been kept out in a decade. Nevertheless, Orban faces his toughest election yet when Hungarians go to the polls this Sunday.

Sunday

Cockburn

Last waltz for Trump’s Hungarian friends?

From our US edition

Walking by Hungary’s immense neo-Gothic parliament building in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, one of Cockburn’s traveling companions sidles up to him. “For a certain kind of right-winger,” he grins, “Hungary is their Rojava.” ‘We were Trumpists before Trump,’ Orbán often says There’s something to this idea, for sure. Since 2010 the premiership of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has – like the proto-government of the Kurds in Syria – given certain groups in America a space to see their ideas implemented that they do not enjoy at home. The Orbán government is rebuilding Budapest in the traditional Baroque style, and there are generous cash payouts to mothers.

Thursday

Tibor Fischer

The Orban acolyte who became his fiercest critic

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly. Many a grizzled, lugubrious Hungarian hack had tears of gratitude welling as Magyar demolished the tedium and predictability of Hungarian party politics: Viktor Orban trampling a feeble collection of bunglers and chisellers, known as the opposition, again and again. Of course, the foreign correspondents were even more elated. Vilifying Orban? Step this way for your eulogy and hosannas, you smooth-talking cosmopolitan. Magyar is certainly deserving of attention; he’s fought a remarkable one-man blitzkrieg.