Who would have thought? A village boy noted for his soccer prowess. Football is his life, but he's not good enough to become a pro. Makes it to a good university, but never breaks into the circle of chic students from better-connected families. Maybe he doesn't even want to. Starts to dabble in politics. Speaks at the reburial of a communist leader who rebelled against the communists. He has no patience for reform communism; to him it's an illness that must be expounded. The cure is the party, Fidesz, that he founds mainly with other friends with similar, relatively unprivileged, backgrounds. Wins a scholarship to Oxford. Feels out of place, quits, returns to Budapest where the communist regime is busy dismantling itself. After it does, Fidesz wins one election, then loses, then comes back reborn as a movement of ‘illiberal democrats’. ‘Liberal’ and ‘globalist’ become the names of the enemy, a vast conspiracy of money men pulling the strings behind the scenes, ruling the world, Washington, Brussels, and Budapest. Some hear anti-Semitic dog-whistles, but he denies that he means ‘the Jews’. Dines with Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, sits around the Oval Office fireplace with Donald Trump. When Trump falls, the two stay in touch.

In his village, Felcsút, folks are proud of Viktor Orbán. They love the world-class football stadium he built there. The Puskás Arena seats 3,500, almost double the population of the community. Amenities include a fine hotel reported to have cost nearly $35 million of taxpayers’ money.

Lőrinc Mészáros, one of Orbán's childhood buddies, became the mayor of the village as soon as Orbán was re-elected prime minister in 2010. With Orbán's protection, this humble gas installer's wealth rose spectacularly, until Forbes named him Hungary's richest man, with a finger in every pie, from construction and hotels to agriculture. In 2017 Lőrinc confessed, ‘My fortune is due to three factors: God, luck, and Viktor Orbán’. Many people think he is Viktor Orbán, the real owner of the assets.

Not since the fiery nineteenth-century revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth (half Slovak, half German by descent, now largely forgotten outside of Hungary), or the composer Franz Liszt (who grew up and lived outside the country), has a Hungarian been as much the talk of the world as Viktor Orbán.