Is Viktor Orbán losing his grip on power?

The Hungarian PM described his country as a ‘petri dish for illiberalism’ and is Trump’s inspiration. But a former ally is now threatening his rule

- Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi

On a sunny April afternoon in Budapest, a handful of reporters crowded around the back entrance of the Dorothea, a luxury hotel tucked between a Madame Tussauds waxworks museum and a discount clothing store.

Most had spent hours outside the hotel, hoping to confirm reports that Donald Trump Jr was inside. News of his visit had leaked two days earlier, but much of his agenda remained shrouded in secrecy, save for a meeting with the Hungarian foreign minister.

Reports had also circulated of a closed-door speech the US president's eldest child and Trump Organization executive was slated to give on bridging governments to the private sector at the five-star hotel reportedly owned by the son-in-law of Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Few other details emerged. But it was a hint of the outsized role that this small central European country, home to 9.6 million people, is playing in the US's political conversation.

Trump and those around him have long talked up Orbán's Hungary, depicting it, in the words of one Hungarian journalist, as a sort of "Christian conservative Disneyland".

The veneration of its alliance of populism and Christianity has persisted, even as the country plunges in press freedom rankings, faces accusations of no longer being a full democracy, and becomes the most corrupt country in the EU.

As Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation thinktank that produced Project 2025, a far-right blueprint for Donald Trump's second presidential term, once put it: "Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model." Orbán, who once described Hungary as a "petri dish for illiberalism", has been lauded by Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon as "Trump before Trump". The US vice-president, JD Vance, once characterised Orbán's purge of gender studies in academia as a model to be followed.