Viktor Mihály Orbán (born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian lawyer and politician who served as the prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002 and from 2010 to 2026. He has also been the president of Fidesz, which has been variously characterised as a Christian nationalist, illiberal, and far-right political party. He has served as its president since 2003, and previously from 1993 to 2000.
Orbán was first elected to the National Assembly in 1990 and led Fidesz's parliamentary group until 1993. During his first term as prime minister and head of the conservative coalition government from 1998 to 2002, inflation and the fiscal deficit shrank, and Hungary joined NATO. After losing re-election, Orbán led the opposition party from 2002 to 2010. He was re-elected as prime minister in 2010, and then in 2014, 2018, and 2022, winning supermajorities in all four elections. On 29 November 2020, he became the country's longest-serving prime minister.
Starting from its return in 2010, Orbán's government enacted a series of constitutional and institutional changes, including the 2013 amendments to the Constitution of Hungary, reforms to the judiciary affecting the administration of courts, and the creation of regulatory bodies overseeing media. Organizations such as the European Commission and Freedom House have described these developments as weakening judicial independence and media pluralism, and enabling democratic backsliding. His government has also faced allegations of corruption involving the allocation of public contracts and EU funds. In March 2019, Fidesz was suspended from the European Union's Christian Democratic party, the European People's Party (EPP). In March 2021, Fidesz left the EPP over a dispute over new rule-of-law language in the latter's bylaws. Orbán lost the 2026 parliamentary election, which saw record turnout, to Péter Magyar's Tisza Party in a landslide. Orbán subsequently announced that he would both remain as leader of Fidesz and refuse to take his seat in the new parliament, which subsequently adopted a constitutional amendment barring Orbán from returning to the prime ministry by imposing a two-term limit on the position.
In foreign and social policy, Orbán opposed aspects of European Union migration and asylum policy, and supported domestic legislation restricting LGBTQ rights in Hungary, including same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption and LGBTQ-inclusive education. While advocating Christian nationalism and describing his political model as an "illiberal state", he promoted soft Euroscepticism, opposition to liberal democracy, and closer economic and political ties with countries including China, Russia, and Turkey. Orbán approved Finland and Sweden's NATO membership applications despite delays in processing them but opposed Ukraine's accession to both the European Union and NATO. His government faced allegations of enriching elites associated with the administration, and was characterized as a kleptocracy. Analysts and institutions variously characterized Hungary under his leadership as a hybrid regime, dominant-party system, or mafia state.
Early life and background (1963–1988)
Viktor Mihály Orbán was born on 31 May 1963 and has two younger brothers, both businessmen, Győző Jr. (born in 1965) and Áron (born in 1977). Their paternal grandfather, Mihály Orbán, a former dockworker and a war veteran, farmed and worked as a veterinary assistant in Alcsútdoboz in Fejér County, where Orbán first lived while growing up. In 1973, the family resettled to neighboring Felcsút, where Orbán's father headed the machinery department at the local farm collective. Orbán attended school there and in Vértesacsa. In 1977, the family moved to Székesfehérvár, where Orbán had secured a place at the prestigious Blanka Teleki school. In his first two years there, he served as local secretary of the Hungarian Young Communist League (KISZ), in which membership was mandatory for matriculation to a university. Additionally, his father happened to be a patron of the KISZ.
After graduating from high school in 1981, Orbán completed his military service alongside Lajos Simicska, whom he had befriended in high school. Orbán was jailed several times for indiscipline, which included a failure to appear for duty during the 1982 FIFA World Cup and striking a non-commissioned officer during a personal altercation. His time in the army also coincided with the declaration of martial law in Poland in December 1981, which his friend Simicska criticized. During that period, Orbán recalled, he expected to be mobilized to invade Poland. He would later remark that military service had shifted his political views radically from the previous position of a "naive and devoted supporter" of the Communist regime. Nonetheless, a state security report from May 1982 still described him as "loyal to our social system".
In 1983, Orbán went to study law at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. There, he joined Jogász Társadalomtudományi Szakkollégium (Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences), a residential college—established in 1983 by István Stumpf and modeled on English universities—for law students from outside the capital. Its members were permitted to explore social sciences beyond the socialist canon and the "new" field of "bourgeois" political science, in particular. There, Orbán met Gábor Fodor and László Kövér.
Orbán became chairman of the executive committee of the college's 60 students in 1984. He also went on a series of trips to Poland with his classmates and a lecturer, Tamás Fellegi, during the 1984–1985 school year and again in 1987, during the third pastoral visit of John Paul II. Their lead Polish contacts were Małgorzata Tarasiewicz and Adam Jagusiak, who would become members of the anti-Communist student movement Freedom and Peace, beginning in 1985.
In 1986, Orbán submitted his master's thesis on the Polish Solidarity movement, based on interviews with its leaders. That August, shortly before his marriage to Dr Anikó Lévai in Szolnok, in September 1986, a police source reported him as affiliated with an organization whose members were lecturing in the United States and West Germany, presenting themselves as "the country's expected future leaders." They received Western support while also enjoying full protection by the Budapest police (BRFK) and insider access to top-level government decisions through the Communist Interior Minister István Horváth. The minister was expected to intervene personally to clear Orbán, in particular, of any sedition charges.
After obtaining the higher degree of Juris Doctor in 1987, Orbán lived in Szolnok for two years, commuting to his job in Budapest as a sociologist at the Management Training Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food. In November 1987, at the Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences, Orbán welcomed a group of 150 delegates from 17 countries to a two-day seminar—backed by the European Network for East–West Dialogue—on the Perestroika, conscientious objection, and the prospects for a pan-European democratic movement.
In September 1989, Orbán took up a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford, funded by the Soros Foundation, which had employed him part-time since April 1988. He began work on the concept of civil society in European political thought, under the guidance of Zbigniew Pełczyński. During this time, he unsuccessfully contested the Fidesz leadership elections in Budapest, which he had lost to Fodor. In January 1990, he abandoned his project at Oxford and returned to Hungary with his family to run for a seat in Hungary's first post-communist parliament.
On 30 March 1988, at the Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences, Orbán–alongside Stumpf, Fodor, Kövér, and 32 other students and activists–founded the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, FIDESZ), a liberal-nationalist youth movement conceived as an overt political challenge to the Hungarian Young Communist League, whose members were banned from participation.