I watched as Orbán schmoozed Jewish voters in a synagogue.

The irony was stark

- Kate Maltby

The first time I clapped eyes on Viktor Orban, still in his pomp as prime minister of Hungary, he was processing through the second-largest synagogue in Europe sporting the wide-brimmed hat of the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition. Towering over him, at 6ft 6in, was his fellow Putin ally the Serbian president Aleksandar ‘Vuti¢. The location was my cousins’ hometown of Subotica, in Serbia; the occasion was the restoration of their synagogue, long derelict, after the Nazi horrors, to which the Hungarian government had contributed €2.5m.

The irony was stark. This was March 2018, two election cycles ago, and Orban was then running the most explicitly antisemitic election campaign of the 21st century. Public enemy No 1 was the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, depicted on posters as a demonic puppet master coordinating a flood of migrants. Ten days before I saw him in Subotica, Orban used Hungarian National Day to declare war on a new enemy, a homeless race of "speculators" described in classic antisemitic terms.