Do we like them?

Do we like Viktor Orbán?

Our score: 1 out of 10. A long run of laws and speeches aimed at LGBTQ+ people and migrants, with no sourced good deeds found to set against it.

Orbán took office in 2010 and became the EU's longest-serving leader, ruling Hungary for 16 years until he conceded defeat on 12 April 2026. He has been a close ally of Donald Trump since 2016, and the record of those years is what this card is about. The backstory is thinner than the headlines here, because what we could open and read was mostly about the last stretch of his rule.

On LGBTQ+ people, the record is long. His Fidesz party banned depicting homosexuality or gender transition in media aimed at under-18s in 2021, and in March 2025 parliament voted 136 to 27 to ban Pride events and allow facial recognition at them. His government says this protects children from “sexual propaganda”; Budapest Pride organisers called it fascism. At CPAC Hungary in 2023 he told a cheering crowd “No migration, no gender, no war”.

The courts have since weighed in. In June 2024 the EU's top court fined Hungary €200 million plus €1 million a day for failing to follow asylum rules, and Orbán called it “outrageous and unacceptable”. In April 2026, nine days after the election, the same court found the 2021 anti-LGBTQ law breached EU law, saying Hungary could not hide behind its national identity. Those are rulings against the state he led, not against him personally.

The money questions are still open. EU officials and watchdogs have accused his government of undermining democratic institutions, and Transparency International says Hungary ranks as the EU's most corrupt member. After the vote, incoming PM Péter Magyar alleged that Orbán-linked oligarchs were moving tens of billions of forints abroad, and police opened an embezzlement probe. None of that is a finding against Orbán himself, and the pieces we opened carried no direct response from him.

Losing didn't make him disappear. He said he would serve from opposition, then turned down his parliamentary seat to work on rebuilding the party, and in June Fidesz re-elected him 729 votes to 8. He took responsibility for the defeat and told the congress he would never give up. Meanwhile Magyar's government has authorised Pride marches and is moving to strip the 'promotion' wording from the child-protection rules.

We couldn't find good deeds in the sources we read to set against all that. He conceded defeat on the night and congratulated the winner, which counts for something in this part of the world, but it isn't a platform used for other people. On the harm test he fails on his government's laws and his own words, and on the good-person test it's a close call because the corruption claims are unproven in court.