Viktor Orban
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00:00ORBAN VİKTOR MIHAĞLİ ORBAN
00:07On May 31, 1963, he was born to a middle-class family in Şageşvaharvar,
00:14as the first sons of agriculture engineer Gyozo Orban and speech therapist Ersepet Sipos.
00:24Orban spent his childhood in the towns near the city of Feyer,
00:30and graduated from the Blanca Tele Church in this region in 1981.
00:37At the age of 15, he became the secretary of the school's Communist Youth Organization.
00:43In those years, it was compulsory for the university to make him the secretary of this organization.
00:49In a report Orban later gave, he said that his political view had changed sharply during his military service,
00:58and that he had previously seen himself as a naïve, voluntary supporter of the communist regime.
01:07After completing his two-year compulsory military service,
01:11he received law education at Föth-Jöss-Loran University in Budapest.
01:16He wrote his master's thesis on the Polish Resistance Movement.
01:22After graduating, he lived in the city of Solnok for two years,
01:27and then started working as a sociologist at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food in Budapest.
01:34In 1989, he took a scholarship from the Open Society Institute to study political science at the Pembroke College,
01:42where he studied for two years.
01:46His advisor was the Hegelian political philosopher Zbigniew Pelczynski.
01:56Orban, one of the founding members of the Fidesz,
02:02a young democratic alliance,
02:08started his political career as the first spokesman of the Fidesz.
02:13The founders and first members of the Fidesz, including Viktor Orban,
02:19were students of the Bibo-Icvan College, which opposed the communist regime.
02:29He returned to his country before the 1989 revolutions, which would begin in Hungary.
02:35The Hungarians joined the formation of a political student called Yurttaş Birliği.
02:40Under his leadership, Fidesz left the classical liberal and pro-European ideologies at the beginning
02:48and moved towards the center-right and national conservatism.
02:54In 1989, at the Heroes Square in Budapest,
02:59Yurttaş Birliği held a political speech at the commemorative ceremony of revolutionaries executed by İmre Nagy and the communist regime.
03:07His speech attracted appreciation across the country.
03:11It became well-known internationally.
03:14In his speech, he asked for the withdrawal of the Red Army troops in the Hungarian People's Republic
03:20and for free elections to be held.
03:24In the first democratic elections held in 1989, he was elected deputy and entered parliament.
03:32In the summer of 1989, he represented Fidesz with László Kovács
03:37at the Round Table Meetings, which were held after the one-party communist regime
03:43and the discussions about how the new democratic order would be.
03:50On April 18, 1993, he became the first and only president of Orban-Fidesz
03:56with the change in the structure of Fidesz, which has been jointly managed since the day it was established.
04:04Under his leadership, Fidesz turned from a liberal student collective to a center-right party.
04:12He was able to exceed 5% in the 1994 elections.
04:17In this election, Orban again entered parliament as a deputy from Feyer.
04:24Between 1994-1998, he became the president of the European Integration Committee.
04:35Fidesz gained majority in parliament in the 1998 elections,
04:40and Viktor Orban was elected prime minister for the first time.
04:45Orban and Fidesz lost their general elections in 2002-2006 to the Hungarian Socialist Party by a small margin.
04:55For eight years, he was the main opposition leader.
05:00Over time, support for the socialist government decreased.
05:04Even the socialist prime minister of the time, Ferenc Gürsani,
05:09admitted that bureaucrats lied to the public in a press conference
05:15and that this speech was leaked to the press.
05:19After the process, he lost the support of the Socialist Party.
05:24And then Fidesz won the 2010 general elections with a crushing majority.
05:31Orban's second term as prime minister began.
05:36Fidesz Party, which maintained its superiority in parliament in the 2014-2018 elections,
05:42and Orban made some radical changes in the constitution.
05:48Viktor Orban won the parliamentary elections on April 3, 2022 with a crushing superiority.
05:56Opposition leader Peter Markizay accepted defeat shortly after Orban's speech.
06:03Reuters described the election result as a crushing victory.
06:09Orban won the title of the longest-serving prime minister in Hungarian history,
06:16while being elected for the fourth time in a row.