So can ‘Putin's poodle' Viktor Orban secure a fifth term?

He’s the hard-Right highly controversial Hungarian prime minister going to the polls this weekend. Samuel Fishwick on the man threatening to bring down the EU

- Samuel Fishwick

HISTORY and the voting booth will judge Viktor Orban this Sunday, as a crunch national election in Hungary concludes. “The whole opposition is united against him,” says Andras Bozoki, Orban’s party’s former culture minister. Hungary’s fragmented Left and Right parties have formed an astonishing anti-Orban alliance to stop him securing an unprecedented fifth term.

Prime minister Orban has been lord and master of the small (population: just under ten million) but significant EU member state for over a decade. His lurch to the Right has seen him lash out at migration, women’s and LGBTQ rights and liberal values, home and abroad. He’s been accused of being Putin’s poodle, helping bring down the EU.

Good luck unseating him: Orban’s Fidesz party owns some 80 per cent of the media, who paint a rosy picture of an avuncular, football-mad family figure from the provinces, rather than a sinister despot who has rigged the system. Orban, 58, rarely gives interviews, letting his media do the talking. Insiders fear this election is the last chance to depose a PM building “Putin’s Trojan Horse” on the edge of Europe; they see his odds of victory as overwhelming.

How did a boy from a sleepy village grow up to be a scourge of the West? And why has a man once a champion of democracy become a nihilistic menace? To two million “obsessed” Fidesz supporters, Orban can do no wrong.