In 2015, prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán decided to meet the immigrant challenge by erecting an impenetrable barrier— a barbed wire fence— on the southern Hungarian border, thus keeping asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East out, while making himself and the Hungarian regime unpopular in the EU and propelling the self- styled “illiberal democracy” of Hungarian populism to international prominence. Hungary quickly became the talk of the town, the despised object par excellence of liberal- minded people, at least until 2016, when Donald Trump promised that he would build a wall on the southern US border if he were elected president. Since then— if not before— populism has been seen almost exclusively as a manifestation— an excrudescence— of antimigrant policies, and Hungary as the country no civilized nation- state should be seen to associate with.

Hungary is no doubt a different case from both Sweden and Catalonia. Where in the former, mainstream parties are doing their utmost to keep the populists from power, and in the latter separatist movements are adopting populist measures— so far unsuccessfully— to reach their imagined goal, in Hungary we are dealing with a full- fledged populist regime, democratically elected, enjoying the backing of close to 80 percent of citizens (the aggregate support for Fidesz and Jobbik) and having ruled the country since 2010. Since then, it has done its best to promote its nationalist program, instill national pride among the Magyars in their Hungarian identity, curtail liberal institutions and practices, strengthen control of the judicial system and the media, keep unwanted aliens and foreign influences out (both the poor from the South and rich elite Jews, like George Soros, from the West) and simultaneously ridicule and extract maximum benefits from the EU.