Viktor Orbán Is Winning…: Not Just Every Four Years, But Every Day. How Hungary’s Leader Is Turning Heads And Moving Hearts

By Áron Arnold Hidvégi

How could Viktor Orbán and the party alliance lined up behind him win two-thirds victories several times in a row? The author of this book looks for the answers based on unusual specific criteria. In his opinion, Mr Orbán governs according to the logic of sports and successful startups. What does that mean? He is constantly working out. He is invariably adjusting his training plan. After failures - like true champions and world-famous company founders - he stands up, and goes back to work with even more energy. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Mr Orbán's training strategy! We also get an answer to why his opposition has not been able get back on it’s feet since 2010. We can tell you this much, it does not depend on their training plan, since there is none.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foundation for a Civic Hungary
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9789638918765

Book preview

About the Author

Áron Arnold Hidvégi (born 1981) was raised in a family with strong intellectual traditions and Jewish and Transylvanian Armenian roots. He is a lawyer-economist and personal trainer, entrepreneur, and business consultant—passionate about design, fitness, politics, and personal development. He lives in Budapest, Hungary.

Homepage: aronarnold.hu

Viktor Orbán Is Winning …

Not Just Every Four Years, But Every Day

How Hungary’s Leader Is Turning Heads And Moving Hearts

Áron Arnold Hidvégi

Published in Hungary by the Foundation for a Civic Hungary

This book is the second, revised edition of the author’s original work, entitled Viktor Orbán—The Underground Narrative.

Editor: Gábor Tallai

This edition translated by the Author and Michael Mansell Cover illustration: Luca Gulyás-Szabó

Print preparation: Typografika Kft.

Printed and bound by Alföldi Nyomda Zrt.

Director: Géza György

Publisher: the Foundation for a Civic Hungary

Responsible for the publication: Ádám Kavecsánszki, President

Budapest, 2023

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other— except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

© Áron Arnold Hidvégi, 2023

© Foundation for a Civic Hungary, 2023

www.szpma.hu

ISBN 978 963 89187 6 5

But after all,

if I had to sum up the reason for my success,

I would just say that I always wanted it more than others did—this was my gift.

Tibor Benedek (1972—2020), three-time Olympic champion water polo player

Publisher’s Note

This book is the answer to a riddle: that of why Viktor Orbán accumulates success after success, and what made him one of the most admired leaders in Hungarian politics and a trailblazer of global politics in the 21st century. Those who scream strongman choose to take the easy path and stay within their intellectual comfort zone. They are trapped in the 20th century and deny that a new era has begun.

Áron Arnold Hidvégi’s thought experiment is compelling and contemporary. Tracing the essence of Viktor Orbán’s success in terms of athletic training, marketing, and formulae for start-ups that challenge the status quo, his labors have brought him to a sober interpretation that is free of limiting biases. As a result, this book is not an analysis based on political science, but the brainstorming of a contemporary intellectual working with sparkling ideas and a sense of wonder.

As with all outstanding books, it does not matter what is left out. So many aspects and ideas permeate this work that the question inevitably arises: how did it come about? Well, with regular training (this is a hint). Not just every four years, but every day.

Ádám Kavecsánszki

President

The Foundation for a Civic Hungary

The only difference is the pace.

If you ask me, an elite athlete is more afraid of the shame of defeat than the burnout caused by the pain of tedious training. One of my most decisive experiences during preparations was when my mentor, Tamás Széchy, came to me during a competition and said: Son, why are you afraid of pain? What you’ll feel now is much less painful than what you’ve experienced in your training for years. The only difference is the pace.

He was right. I did go through lots of pain during my training, and on that day all I needed to hear were those six words. Success came: In the 200-meter final I beat my personal best by six seconds! If I think about it, my success was due to my belief in a person who had already proven himself and who could convince and motivate me with the simplest, most obvious explanation at that moment.

But there is more to what I learned from Coach Széchy. When the moment of truth came, when we were in the run-up to a big world competition, he gave us athletes full control. He used to say, Now the swimmer will be proven right. This did not mean that he was ducking responsibility. On the contrary: He believed so much in good teamwork that he wanted to take all the burden off the competitor’s shoulders.

A year before winning the Olympic gold medal in Atlanta, I won every national championship and every possible race—a total of twelve golds at a single national championship. I was on top form. Not so at the European Championships a month later, where I had to settle for two silvers. Thinking back, this is how things went between the 1992 and 1996 Olympics: I lost all my races and experienced defeat. Yet still, between Barcelona and Atlanta, I mastered the art of losing and picking myself up the next day to focus on the future. This is what I learnt from life and Tamás Széchy – as well as my foster coach, Péter Banka.

I am grateful to them.

Today I see no difference between sport and politics. After a lost election you must pick yourself up and focus on the new challenges. Get a mentor, and don’t be afraid of pain, but feel the opportunity in the competitive situation. Remember: The only difference is the pace. To thrive in politics, level up to a faster pace.

Attila Czene

Olympic gold medalist swimmer

Acknowledgments

My generation takes freedom for granted. In the age of my grandparents and my parents, there was no self-actualization. You will never make it, was the mantra: Here, shall you live and die. There were a few things they could hold on to, though. Some like-minded intellectuals and relatives who occasionally visited from their lives abroad as émigrés would meet with them and inspire hope. A few artists also composed narratives of hope. The lyrics of Why Have We Let It All Happen This Way, written by János Bródy and Lajos Illés in 1973, was one of the most iconic Hungarian protest songs of all time. The blooming yellow rose became a symbol of freedom for the Hungarians. In Chapter 4, I will quote some lines from this famous song. Here is my translation of the opening verse:

Do you believe the yellow rose will bloom?

Do you believe we obey your fake words?

Do you believe we’ll always forgive everything?

Do you believe we’ll give up our dreams forever?

Our dreams forever.

So let me begin this book by expressing my gratitude to those who made it possible for me to write it and see it published. I thank my friends, who encouraged and supported me in this venture. I would like to thank the following: Gábor Tallai for editing this book; Ádám Kavecsánszki, the President of the Foundation for a Civic Hungary, for publishing it; and

Luca Gulyás-Szabó, Anikó Juhász and Szebasztián Nagy for making this second edition happen. I would also like to thank Michael Mansell for assisting in the English translation of this second edition. My special thanks to Márton Dávid, Péter Deák, Dzsingisz Gábor, Olivér Farkas, Zoltán Hortsin, László Horváth, Zsolt Jeszenszky, Eszter Kincs, Carter LeCraw, János Nagy, and my father, Máté Hidvégi.

the Author

Viktor Orbán Is Winning …

Not Just Every Four Years, But Every Day

How Hungary’s Leader

Is Turning Heads and Moving Hearts

PART ONE

STRENGTH

"Too often I’ve seen the smartest people

make the biggest mistakes."

(Edward Teller)

1

Introduction

Why did I write this book? Let me start with reasons that did not inspire me. It was not for a commission or money. It was much more from conviction.

You know the feeling when you are watching a movie and are annoyed by the fact that the protagonist does not notice the danger in the background? This is exactly the feeling I get when I read about Hungary in the foreign press. How can we be misunderstood so badly? Let me immediately clarify: I do not think for a minute that such misreporting is intentional; it is simply that we are strangers to one another.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers focuses our attention on how we misunderstand one another when our own biases prevent us from approaching the other person with curiosity and empathy. I am convinced that the nature of the conflict between Viktor Orbán and the liberal press is a communication problem—as are the roots of almost every human problem.

In the eyes of foreigners, we Hungarians are strangers. In English our country is known as Hungary, and the vast majority of European languages use a similar variant. Meanwhile we Hungarians refer to our country as Magyarország (the country of Magyars). Although we live here in Europe as Europeans, our language still isolates us. Our greatest treasure is the language that only we speak. This book seeks to change that: I want to teach you a little Hungarian.

For Hungarians, the illiberal state is the Diet Coke of democracy: same taste, no calories. In Hungarian, a wordfor-word translation of liberal arts would mean works of art created by a person with liberal political views. The Hungarian term for liberal arts is bölcsészettudomány, or, word-for-word: the science of wisdom. In Hungarian, the term liberal democracy does not mean a system in which a country is ruled by law, but one in which it is ruled by parties with liberal views. If someone here asks about your political views and you answer liberal, they will probably think you are a weed-smoking hippie—or at least that you aspire to be one. We translate the word liberty or freedom in Hungarian as szabadság, and it has entirely positive connotations. In other words, for the majority of Hungarians, liberal is pejorative, while freedom is positive.

Please use more empathy and less prejudice when judging us, and when judging the man who represents us Hungarians—and me—in the world: Viktor Orbán.

My book is not based primarily on Hungarian examples. I hope that the text is accessible to a non-Hungarian reader— even to one with little knowledge of the country. I want you to understand a little more about what our Hungarianness means to us—about our love of the homeland and feelings of responsibility towards ethnic Hungarians beyond our borders. About what our nation, freedom, and self-esteem mean to us.

If you approach this Rubik’s Cube with curiosity and patience rather than with a closed-mind, you will see the potential in it. In the six parts of this book, I can explain why.

My grandmother, ¹ a central personality in Hungarian intellectual life, always finds some common ground with those whose worldviews differ from hers. A public intellectual, she has endorsed Viktor Orbán for two reasons: he is neither anti-Semitic, nor anti-clerical. This simple argument in Orbán’s favor is informed by her Jesuit education, a century of wisdom (she was born in 1923), and the experience of surviving both Nazism and communism. When my grandmother turned ninety, the writer Péter Esterházy ² and his wife paid a visit to her home in Budapest. As they were about to leave, I asked Péter when he hoped there would be unity in our divided country. He replied, We won’t exist. We’re too old to see that. Unity is a mission for your generation. These words were one of my main inspirations for writing this book.

Why and how did Viktor Orbán become the darling of Hungarians? Unlike fiction, which invites readers to escape the world, this book has something to say about our reality. Its fifty-five chapters are packed with lessons having various levels of persuasive power. They are sometimes ironic, sometimes severe. I do not aim to cater to any particular individual’s taste, and I cannot guarantee that you will like it. My only promise is that I will give my honest appraisal. Perhaps I am naive, but I am convinced that if intellectuals gain a better understanding of the self-made man of Hungarian politics, I will be able to live in a better country.

This book is not for everyone, but maybe it is for you. If you were a Hungarian, you would agree that Viktor Orbán is a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity, like King Saint Stephen I, the statesman Count István Széchenyi, or Prince Gábor Bethlen. He is a man who has risked his all in politics and put Hungary on the world map.

The reader may find it strange to encounter the names of Steve Jobs, Bob Dylan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a book about the Hungarian Prime Minister. I have grouped the chapters into six parts: Strength, Self-made, Identity, Training, Startup, and Art. I have structured each section around a single thought.

---

1 Katalin Dávid (born 1923) is an art historian, has been made an honorary citizen of Budapest, and has received the highest awards from both Hungary and the Vatican.

2 Péter Esterházy was one of the best-known Hungarian and Central European writers in postmodern literature.

2

Imagine

The following chapter seems to be unrelated to Viktor Orbán. But it may even be one of the book’s central messages. With this book, I want to present you with a novel way of thinking, based on analogies—not only to help you better understand Viktor Orbán, but also the world around you.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the spectacles through which we view the world a worldview. Various filters and lenses aid or limit our vision—to see far and near, in light and darkness. The two most essential filters are our beliefs and emotions. We perceive the outside world through such filters: we see, hear, feel, and touch. Our brain tries to establish causal links between sensory inputs, turning the images and sounds into a film. We call the script of this film the narrative.

The world can be described through stories based on people’s worldview, their beliefs and emotions (see Seth Godin). There is a narrative behind everything abstract and tangible, from liberal democracy to Hungaricums (traditional high-quality products made in Hungary). Humans create stories and use narratives to give meaning to the impulses received from the world. This essential feature differentiates us from other living creatures on the planet.

A narrative tells the story from the viewpoint of the narrator. Every person has a story of him/herself, and there is a story about every person being told in other people’s heads. These two types of story are internal and external narratives. You will be the narrator of your own story, but the narrator of the story about you is another person. For you, the first story is about how you perceive yourself from the inside. The second one is how the outer world sees you. Ideally, our inner and outer narratives are more or less the same. In this ideal state of harmony, you are who you present yourself to be. In extreme cases of imbalance, people will perceive you as insane or pitiable, depending on whether the screenplay of your internal narrative reminds them more of the world of Greek mythology or Greek tragedy. Most people try to balance the two stories: to live in balance.

Of course, we all want to earn other people’s trust. We want others to accept our stories at face value. We want them to say yes to a date, to buy into our sales pitches, and to vote for us as political candidates.

To get ahead in life, you must overcome obstacles. Strength makes this happen. The strong are more likely to succeed than the weak. Now, let us study these two narratives from the perspective of strength:

How strong do you feel or see yourself to be?

How strong do others feel or see you to be?

A healthy self-image is measured in self-confidence. The more confidence you have, the stronger your heroic character will be. The less you trust in yourself, the weaker you will become.

Another person will have a story about you, about how powerful or how helpless you are. Everyone wants to be persuasive, because this is how society measures success. Strength not only means physical strength, but also knowledge and financial success. The strong conquer the weak, the wise outperform the stupid, the big fish eat the little fish. Among other things, people go to school, meditate, or hire a personal trainer to grow stronger in knowledge, in spirit, and in body.

It is seldom possible to instantly ascertain another person’s physical strength, knowledge, or financial influence, but a handful of clues make educated guesses possible. People tend to take a person with an athletic build more seriously than someone who is physically weak. Someone with an academic degree, or letters such as PhD after his or her name on a business card will be considered more intelligent than some other people. People who wear smart clothes are likely to be treated with more respect than those who dress down. Based on appearance and behavior, and on the opinions of others, we can assess whether another person is stronger than us. Here is where self-confidence comes into play; because where other people place us on their scale is somewhat dependent on our self-esteem. It is based in part on our own internal narratives.

In this simplified model, when the protagonist in the film of you that is viewed by another person gives the impression of being a strongman, you can trigger one of two emotional responses in them: trust or fear. Which one it is depends on their assumption about whether you are authentic or fake. If we assume that the person is charismatic and has good intentions, we trust him. If we sense malice, we fear him.

From the point of view of your strength, your challenge in life is not what other people speculate about you, but what conclusions they draw from their speculations: what kinds of emotional response you provoke in others as a strongman, and how this affects the actions they take. Do they trust you, or do they fear you? Or perhaps both?

Therefore, all you need to succeed in life are two well-written narratives. All you need is to believe in your personal story, and it will follow that others trust you, concluding that you are so powerful that no one can defeat you.

For a moment let us accept the premise that everyone accepts your story. How would your life change if, no matter what you do, everyone in the world—regardless of their outlook—concluded that you are so strong that you cannot be defeated? You would be the world’s first individual superpower! This rarely happens, though an example may come to mind: Uncle Sam. If we imagine him as a self-made man, he is someone who believes in himself, while others realize that they cannot surpass his powers.

The internal narrative of the United States is the American Dream, in which most Americans believe. What matters is not inherited privilege, but the work you do to be what you want to be. One symbol of this spirit is the city of New York, and its archetype is the self-made man. In the words of Barack Obama: In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

The external narrative—that seen by others—is that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Regardless of other nations’ worldviews, they all believe this. It is what America’s allies believe, as well as everyone else who fears its power. The USA is the world’s leading technological, economic, and military superpower. It has the know-how and money to run the world, and it is also the global peacekeeper. America’s success endures on a rock-solid foundation, namely that the world’s 8 billion people acknowledge that it is Number One. But wait a minute. Double or nothing is not just Uncle Sam’s formula for success. There is the story of another selfmade man. He was not born on the 4th of July 1776, but on the 31st of May 1963. This book is about him.

3

Nineteen Sixty-three

The unbiased and objective narrative is that Viktor Orbán is the most important statesman in Hungarian history since the Hungarian Reform Era of the 19th century. This single person has exerted a life-changing impact on the lives of all Hungarians. The beginning of this Hungarian success story was in 1963.

In 1963, Bob Dylan recorded his album The Times They Are a-Changin’, which included the protest song that provided its title:

In 1963, Bob Dylan recorded his album The Times They Are a-Changin’, which included the protest song that provided its title:

For the loser now Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin’

Viktor Orbán’s story—his life and politics—is the hero’s journey of a loser becoming a winner. It is emblematic of the explosive power of change. From a poor family to college, from college to university, from Oxford to the stage of history, into Parliament—and, at 36, as a Hungarian prime minister visiting Bill Clinton’s White House. A turning point for this winner was losing everything in 2002. Another turning point was 2010, when hope was salvaged from the pit of despair and he made his way from the gallery of losers to the pantheon of winners. This is the story of how the anti-clerical young man becomes the Church’s most important political ally. How the smallest party in Parliament wins an overwhelming majority, and how a party of the right not given a hope eclipses the liberal hegemony. From a goldfish to a shark, from the Prime Minister of 10 million to the leader of 15 million Hungarians within and outside the country’s borders, a historic figure in Hungarian politics and an international political superstar. How does one turn a headwind into a tailwind? A curved line into a straight one? And politics into an art?

Based on the democratic standards of America’s Americanness, the technology behind his power is the power of the dual narrative: believe in yourself, and the world will believe in your strength.

Orbán’s unique dualist mindset and his problem-solving skills have written the narrative of the loser becoming a winner. His politics is inspired by soccer and the principles of physical training, by reinterpreting Hungarian cultural traditions and history, by Christian values, and by the tactics of disruption. His character blends three self-made man archetypes: the self-inventing superstar; the visionary founder; and the hero role model.

As the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has explained:

Success = talent + luck.

Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck.

After Daniel Kahneman, we can freely associate to arrive at the following equation:

Orbánian success = Orbánian talent + Orbánian luck

The protagonist of the story is Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, who has become an inescapable player on the international scene, variously respected and hated as Europe’s new strongman. Critics in the mainstream media place him alongside Trump and Putin, the two superpower presidents. Nowadays, because of Viktor Orbán, Budapest is no longer confused with Bucharest, and Hungary is an ascendant European nation, whose strength the world increasingly recognizes.

Viktor Orbán drew his identity on a blank page, creating a strong political vision for Hungary. The thread of the