Orbán turned Hungary to the right – and the rest of the world followed

Budapest's strongman exerted an iron grip on national institutions as conservative radicals in the US and beyond took note, writes

- David Aaronovitch

In the weeks after Donald Trump's second inauguration in January, commentators were astonished by the number, and range, of executive orders issued from the White House. They went far beyond anything that the candidate had promised and indicated an attention to detail for which he had never been famous. So comprehensive were these initiatives that they were misanalysed as an attempt to "flood the zone" with measures to disarm opposition.

But perhaps they were better understood as part of a comprehensive plan to use executive power to begin to reshape the institutions of America. Almost no area of American life was exempt. Universities had their grants withdrawn if they didn't agree to the president's demands, law firms were intimidated into agreeing to do pro bono work on Trump's favoured causes, media companies were pressured into legal settlements that had no merit, raids by masked immigration officials became commonplace, cultural institutions such as Washington DC's Kennedy Center were, in effect, hijacked by Trump associates.

The blueprint for this radicalism was a 900-page manifesto, Project 2025, produced under the leadership of the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. The Heritage Foundation is possibly the most powerful of the hybrid thinktank/lobby organisations on the political right and disposes of an annual budget of more than $100m (£74m).

Roberts' accession to the presidency of Heritage in December 2021 marked a shift from the mainstream Republicanism of the Bush era to something far more radical. And from the beginning he was in the market for ideas about how to transform American conservatism and America itself. Roberts, like other conservative Americans, found them in a most unlikely place - a landlocked central European country with a population smaller than that of North Carolina.

"Hungary," said Roberts last November, "is a model for conservative governance."