Europe | Last-ditch pitch

Hungary’s opposition struggles to beat Viktor Orban’s stealth autocracy

The populist prime minister has subverted nearly every institution that matters

|BUDAPEST

THE RALLY stretched half a kilometre along the Danube, past Budapest’s Technical University where in 1956 students launched a doomed rebellion against their communist overlords. It was March 15th, the day Hungary commemorates its revolution of 1848. On the stage Peter Marki-Zay, the opposition candidate for prime minister, was invoking history. In 1848, 1956 and 1989, when the communists were finally ousted, Hungarians had been “on the right side”, he said. Now they were embarrassed by their country, which had become the fief of one man: Viktor Orban.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Last-ditch pitch”

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