Orbán Turns to Dust

Listen To This Story

The sight of Vice President JD Vance campaigning for authoritarian Viktor Orbán in Hungary days before the national elections was not lost on European leaders. 

Hapless Vance, whose charisma and political gifts roughly approximate that of Trump toady, sniveling Stephen Miller, seems to have cost the strongman a few percentage points in the final hours of the campaign. Our Man in Budapest was indirectly shilling for Putin, of whom Orbán was a great favorite and key ally. But after 16 years, Hungarians had had enough of former liberal turned tyrant Orbán, and he was swept into the dustbin of history.

Immediately, the new government of Prime Minister Péter Magyar, leader of the center-right party Tisza, the binding glue of a center-right coalition, supported a substantial European Union (EU) $106 billion loan package to Ukraine for industrial and defense spending. About $10 billion is earmarked for drone procurement. Orbán had opposed providing important funding for Ukraine in their war against Putin’s Russia.

Orbán swung far to the right in his successful 2010 campaign, under the political guidance of reclusive American consultant Arthur Finkelstein. The Hungarian Socialist Party, which largely endorsed Tisza candidates in the parliamentary elections to form a popular front against Orbán, had seen a collapse of political support because of the global recession’s cascading economy. According to the BBC, Finkelstein, an adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Benjamin Netanyahu, designed a messaging blitz that focused on George Soros as the source of Hungary’s economic and political crises. This year, Orbán updated the message — now it was the leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was harming Hungary by demanding funding from the EU to fight Putin.

The late Finkelstein always told his clients that “it’s good to have an enemy” — he told me that over a cup of coffee and a bagel 25 years ago as some free advice. Well, no problem on the enemy front — plenty to go around these days. And this is a tried-and-true recipe; Nixon, his long-ago client, had an entire enemies list! That shrewdly predatory leader of the Silent Majority (how did he hear them exactly?) directed the IRS, Trump-style, to audit those Democrats, business leaders, actors, peace activists, and nuns and priests who had hurt the frail Nixonian ego. He heard you Arthur (RIP)!

So did the last Finkelstein client. Orbán’s two enemies, Soros and Zelenskyy, did no harm to Hungary but were great targets because they are Jews. Orbán, like Nixon, Trump, and Putin, knew how to stir up tribal hatreds. (Did Arthur advise him too? There are rumors!) His overt bigotry against Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants, and all the Others (Orbán: “Hungarians don’t want to become a people of mixed races”) was an essential strategic device for campaigning and governance.

The Anatomy of an Autocracy

It’s common knowledge that Orbánesque strongman tactics served as a model for Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump 2.0 (Donnie claims he never read it, which is almost certainly true since he can barely read the teleprompter anymore without sputtering into his signature WEAVE of confusion). Orbán took over the Hungarian media and made most of it regime friendly. He painstakingly rigged the courts to hurt his enemies and insulate himself from legal repercussions.

After his 2010 victory, Orbán created the National Office for the Judiciary (NOJ). His appointed NOJ president was given the power to hire and fire all of Hungary’s judges. Older judges hostile to the regime were removed, while young, regime-friendly judges were promoted. Key enforcement and investigative appointive positions such as the prosecutor general and the head of the State Audit Office were given extended 12-year terms. Political opponents were railroaded by the Orbánized judiciary.

Other corrupt Orbánian moves had more than a whiff of Trumpism about them. In February 2024, a list of several dozen people pardoned by Orbán ally Hungarian President Katalin Novák was made public. One of the pardoned convicts was a politically connected former deputy director of a state-run children’s home near Budapest. He had been convicted of covering up the sexual abuse of minors who resided in the home. When the pardon became public, mass demonstrations occurred throughout Hungary. This led to the resignations of Novák and Judit Varga, Orbán’s justice minister and former spouse of Péter Magyar.

Magyar promptly resigned as head of a state-owned bank, left Fidesz, joined the Tisza party, and announced his candidacy against Orbán. So much for Orbán/Fidesz’s defining political narrative that only they could protect Hungary’s children.

Fidesz redrew election districts to gerrymander opponents out of office and at one point held a two‑thirds majority in Parliament with less than 50 percent of the vote. 

There are other MAGA traits that characterized Orbán’s party apparatus. There’s plenty of crony capitalism to go around. According to the Cato Institute, by 2023, just 12 businessmen politically close to Orbán received nearly 25 percent of the value of EU-funded contracts through closed, noncompetitive bids. That didn’t stop Orbán from griping about the EU’s stifling bureaucracy.

Fidesz redrew election districts in 2014 and 2018 to gerrymander their opponents out of office with the full support of the tyrant’s handpicked judges. At one point, Fidesz had a two-thirds majority in Parliament but received less than 50 percent of the vote. Orbán also extended voting rights to Hungarians who lived abroad but who would be a secure vote for his regime.

In the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, Hungary is ranked 79th out of 143 countries, far below any other EU country. In the category “Constraints on Government Power,” it was 123rd out of 143, below Niger and El Salvador.

The Pipeline Behind the Pageantry

One of Magyar’s first pronouncements after defeating Orbán was that the new administration was going to cut government ties and funding to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). MCC is a Hungarian residential college that had been used by the Orbán regime to funnel money into right-wing operations around the globe. One of those operations, cited directly by Magyar, is the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). This is a nerve center of MAGA political pageantry — it was here at the 2025 conference where untidy Epstein pen pal Steve Bannon and the allegedly ketamine-enhanced Elon Musk both gave an admittedly spastic arm push that some have categorized as a Nazi salute. Musk also staggered about the stage struggling to hang on to a bejeweled chainsaw, which became an instant Muskian meme — barmy Elon shearing the American Dream.

Orbán also spoke at CPAC a few years earlier in 2022 to a convention hall that was more than half empty. The authoritarian butterball was full of bluster as he raged on about mixed-race this, mixed-race that, large white families good, gay and trans bad.

His Truculence clenched his chubby fists after a stream of mouth-breathing invective. His yellowish gills tightened as the smallish crowd egged him on. “The globalists can go to hell,” he enthused.

It turns out that Orbán was a great CPAC benefactor. Magyar denounced both MCC, Orbán’s collegiate money laundering front, and CPAC. He told CNN, “I believe the state should never have financed either of these entities in the first place. Mixing party finance with government spending … is a criminal offense.” Magyar’s government has begun an investigation into the MCC-CPAC financial connection. Here at home, Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) has called on Trump suck-up and malicious prosecutor Todd Blanche to investigate CPAC funding from Orbán’s fascist networks.

MCC was the tool through which Orbán funneled nearly $2 billion from MOL, the state‑run company that sources more than 90 percent of its oil from Russia, to fund right-wing operations across Europe and beyond.

MCC was a useful tool for the former dictator/illiberal statist. Paunchy Viktor gave MCC 10 percent of the funds from the state-run oil company MOL. MOL refines oil, 93 percent of which comes from Russia. That 10 percent vig, amounting to just under $2 billion with an annual investment income of $100 million, has been spread throughout Europe to far-right cranks of many stripes and nationalities. Russian oil funds foot the bill for all of this reactionary hodgepodge.

Throughout 2024–25, another MCC front, MCC Brussels, organized rallies and conferences of climate deniers in the home city of the EU to “challenge the EU” consensus on global warming. The conference materials called the EU net zero goals “stupid propaganda.” Gas shills blasted the REPowerEU plan, which has funded solar investments and energy efficiency plans as a “degrowth” policy. Pretty thin gruel/agitprop considering this money flowed from Vladdy’s high-flying Gazprom and Rosneft nest egg.

But there was more.

According to DeSmog, MCC Brussels helped organize farmer protests across Europe, in some cases successfully rolling back parts of the EU green agenda to expand renewables and curb pesticide use. A spokesperson for the Farmers Defence Force (FDF), a group affiliated with MCC Brussels and Orbán, claimed that the EU environmental policy committees were “deliberately exterminating farmers and food production.” The MCC Brussels website called on farmers to organize a series of rallies to protest the “EU’s overzealous green policies.” In late 2025 and early 2026, some of the protests turned ugly. Farmers blocked highways with their tractors, threw eggs and manure at police, and set a ring of fires near the European Parliament in protest of pesticide bans and nitrogen emissions restrictions.

The Fellowship of the Grift

MCC has forked over more than half a million pounds to the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) in the UK. The foundation is named after a crank who wrote op-eds/manifestos about smokers’ rights while on the payroll of Japan Tobacco International. Even The Wall Street Journal pulled the plug on old Scruton when it discovered he was a paid tobacco shill. But Roger persisted. He was welcome at Oxford (or greased the right palms) to give asinine lectures on how “Christian” society is the only strong shield against barbarism. He didn’t say “white Christian,” but he knows that you know that I know what Roger S. means.

In 2014, while giving a lecture in Hungary at the invitation of Orbán, “an old friend,” Scruton took a swipe at their mutual obsession: “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish and form parts of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” In the same lecture, Scruton prattled on about how the nation-state is a Christian “construct,” which is why Pakistan or really any Islamic state “are often failures as nations.” They don’t make them like they used to.

Nowadays, anti-abortion kook James Orr sits on the RSLF board. Orr is close buds with JD Vance and chain-smoking, gin-swilling (taste of Brexit!), immigrant-bashing, Brit far-right icon Nigel Farage. With Orr advising, the RSLF still pounds out propaganda against choice and climate activists and has hosted women-shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-vote advocate Peter Thiel for a lecture on the “diversity myth.” At Oxford no less.

Thiel, remember, is the emblematic tech/spook with government intel contracts up the kazoo from various countries. His company, Palantir, gets oodles of money essentially to collect data globally on an unsuspecting citizenry. Thiel had a warm, oligarch-buddy pen pal relationship (really email pal) with Jeffrey Epstein. This was at the same time that Thiel invested in a newish product, the ever-shifting blob of mercury now called JD Vance, the white-guy Scrutonian construct that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Thiel Inc.

Vance ~ Orbán ~ CPAC ~ Scruton/Orr ~ Thiel ~ Vance. Well, maybe they still do make them like they used to.

As a service to our readers, we curate exceptional stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. Richard Schrader is a veteran New York environmental and political strategist and a former commissioner of consumer affairs. He has also led the Natural Resources Defense Council’s advocacy throughout the Northeast and at the national level. This column was adapted with the author’s permission from his Substack Bad Energy.