Viktor Orbán speaking out for liberal reform in 1989, shortly before arriving in Oxford

Viktor Orbán. In 1989 he arrived at Pembroke College as a young pro-democracy activist aspiring to liberate Hungary from its corrupt communist regime. Fast forward thirty years, and he now sits entrenched in Budapest’s prime ministerial palace as the authoritarian ruler of a self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy”, having become the bête noire of progressive Europe for his anti-migrant, anti-Roma, and antisemitic policies.