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On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the reign of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, ahead of the country’s election on 12 April. The rightwing leader is the longest serving head of state in the European Union, having been elected in 2010 with an absolute majority in government for almost 16 years.

A staunch religious conservative, he’s also beloved by some Republicans in the US, and been officially endorsed in the upcoming election by Donald Trump. But “the lovefest between Orbán and American conservatives is a two-way street,” Oliver explained. Just last week, Orbán praised the US president at a Republican party Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) offshoot in Hungary. “Since President Trump’s win, the western world has become a better place,” Orbán said. “Gender propaganda and woke ideology have been pushed back. People can proudly embrace Christianity as the foundation and sustaining force of our civilization. What’s happening now is the largest political realignment in western civilization in 100 years. The epicenter of this change is the United States, and its European forward base is Hungary.”

“Wow, there is a lot there, but citing the west’s ‘largest political realignment in 100 years’ is pretty striking given, you know, what started happening in Europe around 100 years ago,” Oliver noted. “That’s right, Winnie-the-Pooh was first published. I don’t know what you were thinking about.

“But things in Hungary aren’t going great,” he added. On Orbán’s watch, the country has become one of the poorest in the EU, “so it’s frankly no surprise that in recent years, there’s been plenty of protests against Orbán’s government.” The longtime autocratic leader is now considered an underdog in the upcoming election, though he may still win – legally or otherwise.

Oliver then dived into some background: Orbán came up through the fall of the communist regime in Hungary in the 1980s, where he and his party, Fidesz, were once a relatively liberal youth movement within the formation of the country’s democracy. In the late 80s, Fidesz campaigned on adopting western economic and political standards, as well as limiting the role of the state and religion on public life. But once he was elected to parliament in 1990, Orbán began moving the party to the right. Orbán became the youngest prime minister in the EU when he was elected in 1998, only to be voted out four years later.

In his years out of power, he journeyed further rightward, amping up nationalist populist rhetoric and the trappings of militant Christianity. He also leaned into authoritarianism, promising he would “only need to win once” to stay in power. Since his election in 2010, he and Fidesz have rigged the Hungarian election system heavily in his favor, via gerrymandering and other tactics – in 2014, for example, he won 45% of the votes, but 91% of the districts. Elections in Hungary have been deemed by experts as “free but not fair” – “which is an interesting combination”, said Oliver. “You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.”

Orbán has also corrupted Hungary’s court system, preventing any legal challenges to his power, and instituted a propaganda machine: his party created a new agency to impose heavy fines for coverage it considered unbalanced or offensive, as well as a new state media organization called MTVA that exerts editorial control across radio, TV, print and internet. In short, “you can’t write anything bad about the government”, said one anonymous journalist to Al Jazeera.

Oliver cited a recent study of a nightly news show, finding that over six months, there wasn’t a single instance of government party politicians appearing on-screen in a negative lights. “Literally zero seconds of negative coverage, which just should not be possible,” he mused. “Politicians attract negative coverage about everything they do, whether it’s about their offensive fashion faux pas or their court-ordered liability for sexual abuse, to pick two equivalent examples,” he joked next to photos of Barack Obama in a tan suit and Trump.

Orbán also extended his reach beyond state media, as his allies bought up independent outlets and then consolidated them under one foundation. Oliver saw some concerning parallels. “Wow, a far-right leader’s friends and allies just buying up all the media outlets in the country and turning them into conservative sycophants – can you imagine that? I sure can’t,” he said sarcastically next to an image of David Ellison-owned Paramount, which is in the process of buying HBO parent company Warner Bros. “That’s definitely not something I’ve had recurring nightmares about for the past month!”

Abroad, Orbán has been a thorn in the EU’s side for his close ties with Russia. Domestically, he has “reshaped Hungary into what’s basically a theme park of reactionary talking points”, Oliver said. He’s railed against Hungary becoming a “mixed-race” society and has attempted to ban all migrant asylum seekers from entering the country. And not unlike many conservatives in the US, such as, say, JD Vance, he’s become fixated on low birthrates, as part of “great replacement” theory racist fear-mongering.

All of these changes have fostered a growing resistance movement, but “the truth is, in this election, the playing field is still tilted strongly in his favor”, said Oliver. “And even if he somehow ends up losing the game that he’s carefully rigged, it’s worth knowing his main opponent, Péter Magyar, isn’t exactly the reformer that you would dream of here.” Magyar is a former member of Fidesz who shares many of Orbán’s views, though he has railed against his corruption.

In sum, “Orbán’s stranglehold on power should be alarming for us here in the states,” Oliver warned, “because he has clearly been an inspiration to American conservatives, to the point that JD Vance is apparently planning to visit Hungary to show support for Orbán ahead of their election. And that is because, for them, Orbán is not a cautionary tale. He’s a blueprint.

“We are lucky to have the checks and balances that we do, but we would do well to watch for warning signs of what happened in Hungary starting to happen here,” he added. “Small things, like, I don’t know – stacking the courts, or shameless gerrymandering, or fear-mongering about immigrants, or presidential allies buying up the media. Anything you might spot like that!

“Look, it is not a perfect one to one,” he concluded. “Orbán’s takeover was organized and methodical, while Trump has the attention span of a coked-up hummingbird with a head injury. But they’re not worlds apart either.”