FELCSÚT, Hungary — The whitewashed peasant-style cottage that belongs to Viktor Orbán is Hungarian picture-perfect, with wooden shutters and a garden water well. It speaks to the humble origins of the country’s long-serving, globe-trotting prime minster, the son of a Communist collective farm foreman.
Of course, that’s exactly what the village house is meant to signal — that despite his success, his 16 years dominating Hungarian politics and his alliances with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Orbán is still a down-to-earth man of the people, who hasn’t forgotten his past and remembers what it was like as a young boy to harvest beets and dig up potatoes.
Never mind that four kilometers away the Orbán family has a sprawling manor house and farm estate once owned in the 19th century by Archduke Joseph of Austria. The family insists the estate, which includes a zoo and palm house, is owned not by the prime minister, but by his father. No, indeed, they say, the modest cottage facing me is Orbán’s real country retreat.
I look over the picket fence into the yard. Strangely, there are no guards protecting it this spring day, and with the cherry blossoms starting to bud, the place seems inviting. I resist the lure to click open the gate to get a closer peek and to lounge in the MAGA ally’s garden chairs.
I’m also cognizant of the many CCTV cameras attached to the football stadium on the other side of the street overshadowing Orbán’s cottage. Best not to trespass.
I’ve traveled west over the hills for 40 minutes from Hungary’s capital, where national election campaigning is in full raucous mode. With polling days away, Orbán’s political dominance is in serious question for the first time since he took power in 2010. His foes hope April 12, Election Day, will mark the day of his downfall.
Orbán continues to trail in the opinion polls behind Péter Magyar, a defector from Orbán’s own ruling Fidesz party. Magyar’s center-right Tisza party has been on average 10 points ahead of Fidesz and last week three independent polls suggested the gap between the two is widening.
A majority of Hungarians seemingly are losing patience with Hungary’s struggling economy, high prices, dilapidated hospitals and the chronic underfunding of the country’s railway networks which has left normally loyal Fidesz villages feeling abandoned. That explains why Magyar has remained laser-focused in his campaigning on bread-and-butter issues while hammering Fidesz over corruption, noting how Orbán’s business cronies and his inner circle have grown ever richer as ordinary Hungarians get poorer.
In fact, the 45-year-old Magyar is sounding a lot like Orbán did in 2010, when he campaigned on economic issues and pledged to improve the lot of ordinary Hungarians. Since breaking with Fidesz in 2024 over the cover up of a sex abuse case in a children's home, Magyar has been combative; to illustrate Orbán’s absence and how inaccessible the “man of the people” has become, he sometimes carries with him a cardboard cutout of Orbán as a prop as he tours the countryside.
Orbán has been campaigning on the risks of Hungary being sucked into the neighboring war in Ukraine and has portrayed Magyar as a stooge of both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the EU. His message is that only he can keep Hungary safe. Young voters on the whole are unpersuaded and Magyar’s promise of building a “modern, European Hungary” is resonating with them.
Many older voters though, especially in Fidesz strongholds outside the big cities, still seem spellbound by him.
Not, however, 76-year-old clothing store owner Júlia. She frets that without an economic uplift there will be nothing for the young and their future lives and that they will continue to leave the country in droves for job opportunities elsewhere in Europe. Standing outside her storefront in the northeastern town of Nyíregyháza where more than half the population is over 50 years old, she told me: “My main criterion is that my kids and my grandkids get to stay here. And that they can make a living, and I don’t think that will happen unless things change. We are the second poorest country in Europe! We are lagging behind.”
But like many Tisza supporters across the country, including in the opposition stronghold of Budapest, she remains fearful that the opinion polls will turn out to be wrong, as they were in 2022, and that Orban will be reelected.
The heat of electoral battle seems far away here in Felcsút, which is set in rolling countryside a short drive from a motorway linking Budapest to Vienna. It has a population of 1,700 and boasts a timber merchant, a couple of grocery stores, a retirement home, a coffee shop, a gas station, and, thanks to that football stadium looming over Orbán’s cottage, a 35-room luxury hotel.
In fact, it is the stadium I’ve really come to see.
The extraordinary Pancho Arena seats 3,800 — more than twice the population of the village. It’s the home stadium for Puskás Akadémia, the professional soccer team Orban founded in 2007, and has been described as one of the most iconic stadiums in the world. And indeed it is stunning with its church-styled, beam-lined ribbed interior, slate shingle roof and flower-like copper turrets.
Cited as an example of Hungarian organic architecture, it is meant to blend with its surroundings. But, elegant though it is, it feels out of place in this quiet village and more in keeping with 18th or 19th century architectural follies seen in Britain — those decorative towers and mock-Gothic ruins put up to indulge aristocratic flights of whimsical fancy.
But unlike Britain’s follies, Pancho Arena does have a function, aside from being an arena for football. It is a demonstration of power, a testimony to political success and a childhood dream realized all rolled into one.
In fact, football plays an outsized role in the hybrid political order Orbán has shaped over the past decade-and-half. How Hungary’s sports sector, including soccer, is managed and controlled and fused with Fidesz casts an interesting light on the running of a government that the EU parliament has dubbed an "electoral autocracy."
Sports and soccer in particular are key ingredients in the branding of Orbán and Fidesz, which began life as a center-left party until he dragged it over to nativist illiberalism. And sport fills important roles in the vertical power structure Orbán has painstakingly built to entrench Fidesz in all walks of Hungarian national life and endeavor — from higher education to agriculture, from the defense industry to media, from transport to the energy sector.
All have been fused with Fidesz to some degree or other, part of a national governing system based on political patronage and clientelism, and not dissimilar to the “managed democracy” his friend Putin has shaped in Russia, although Orbán’s is much more nuanced and thankfully free of assassinations and defenestrations.
“Soccer and sports are useful in rewarding the pyramid-shaped clientele Fidesz has built and to enrich friends, business cronies and so on, and to keep them loyal,” Márton Tompos, an opposition lawmaker, told me over coffee in downtown Budapest just before I set off for Felcsút.
“If you look at all the sports associations, from chess through volleyball, and, of course, football, all of them are run or chaired or operated in some way by business cronies, political allies, friends and family. For example, Orbán’s dentist is a huge triathlon enthusiast, so he became the chairman of the Hungarian Triathlon Association,” Tompos added.
Soccer, though, also brings in a personal passion of Orbán’s. If he had been a better footballer, Hungary may have been spared his populist political leadership — or deprived of it, depending on your view.
Here in Felcsút, like other local lads, Orbán was brought up on tales about Hungary’s Golden Team of the 1950s.
Captained by Ferenc Puskás, the Mighty Magyars secured an Olympic Gold in 1953 and became the first continental European side to beat England at Wembley Stadium. They lost in a surprise defeat to West Germany in the World Cup final of 1954. For Hungarians, the Mighty Magyars are symbols of national pride and unity — “Magyar” refers to the major ethnic group that settled the territory that is now Hungary. After the failed 1956 revolution, many of the players chose exile.
“Orbán dreamed of being a professional player,” Kele János, a football podcaster, told me. “He was quite talented, a good striker,” he added. Orbán got into the youth side of a professional team but clearly wasn’t skilled enough to earn a living as a full-time top-tier footballer. He settled for playing as a semi-professional while studying law at university in Budapest, still dreaming of going into coaching and becoming the national coach. Even during his first term as prime minister he would trot out for 10 minutes or so towards the end of a game to play for Felcsút, the forerunner of his beloved Puskás Akadémia.
As a law student, he’d play five-a-side soccer with his classmates — many of whom became founding members of Fidesz — in the gardens of their university dormitory. “I remember I kicked the ball through the window of a neighboring building, ending the game,” said Péter Molnár, a fellow student at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University. “He got so cross, [he] shouted, ‘Fuck it, Peter,’ and stormed off to study,” Molnár told me over dinner on Easter Monday near Budapest’s St. Stephen's Basilica.
As the Easter bells tolled and tourists scurried by, I asked him if Orbán was an aggressive footballer. Molnár pondered. “Not so much aggressive but very tough, very competitive. I remember him once jumping backwards to try to head the ball and he fell flat on his back hard. He didn’t stop, he just got up and played through the pain.” Molnár quit Fidesz when Orbán dragged it away from its liberal roots. As we parted company he stood up and proudly showed me his T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Dissent is Patriotic.”
Personal fandom aside, as Orbán gained control of Fidesz in the 1990s, football also helped pave his path to power. As he looked to political role models, he alighted on Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, an early conservative populist who used his ownership of AC Milan to boost his political image as a winner. Berlusconi named his party after the football chant, “Forza Italia.”
“Orbán was fascinated by Berlusconi,” said political journalist Pál Dániel Rényi, who wrote a 2021 book on Orbán and football. “The way he did conservatism, the way he shaped the party he founded around him, the colloquial language and the language of the football stands he adopted so the average man and woman could understand him. All of this caught Orbán’s fancy, as well as his fusion of football and politics and the political instrumentalism of the game,” Rényi told me. How Berlusconi started to build his political party also caught Orbán’s eye — namely, by encouraging AC Milan supporters to self-organize and form cells as seeds for the growth of his political movement.
After 2002 Orbán copied that playbook and encouraged Fidesz cells of support across the country. The official fan associations of Hungary’s main soccer clubs have been “dragooned to serve political purposes,” Zoltán Németh, a fan of Ferencvárosi, Hungary's top football team, told me. “Who can become a member of the official associations is strictly controlled,” he explained. “And at the stadiums, fans are encouraged and paid to display banners supporting Fidesz or a political message Orban’s regime wants to amplify. They’ll chant Fidesz slogans too. So the football supporters are used as propagandists,” he added.
Németh, who runs a blog and group of Ferencvárosi fans who want politics out of the game, says splits have been emerging over the past year among fans over how the owners exploit the clubs and align them with Fidesz interests. Last Sunday at a game in Debrecen, east of Budapest, some Ferencvárosi fans blocked a Fidesz-loyal group called the Green Monsters from entering the stadium. “The police and stadium security could do nothing and neither could the Green Monsters,” said Németh.
Notably, among the fans who blocked the Green Monsters were black-clad Hungarian Ultras, a far-right, and nationalistic group of football supporters who traditionally have been supportive of Fidesz. “But the Ultras have been turning away from Fidesz,” said Németh. “They just see the owners getting richer and richer and they don’t like how the Hungarian football teams are packed with foreign players and not Hungarian ones.”
To be sure, Puskás Akadémia is no powerhouse like AC Milan. Last season it was the runner-up in Hungary’s top-tier national league, and this year it has been lackluster and stuck in the middle of the division.
Even so, Orbán has gone one better than his role model Berlusconi. The Italian instrumentalized a single soccer team for political and commercial gain — Orbán has utilized the whole of Hungarian football and slotted it neatly into his vertical power structure.
He frequently talks up the importance of football prowess and sports success for the nation, how important it is for Hungary’s identity and how it can make Hungary great again as it helps to nurture national pride, discipline and advance Hungarian prestige.
While in Qatar in 2022 to watch some of the World Cup matches, Orbán lamented how Hungary had failed to qualify for the competition but insisted under his guidance by 2030 it will have “regained its old glory,” referring to the Mighty Magyars.
Over the last 16 years, Orban has done much to turn Hungary into a one-party state — as much as anyone could without using violent repression and ditching elections. Armed with a two-thirds majority in parliament, he’s been able to dismantle the checks and balances written into the Constitution, pack the top courts with his loyalists and appoint his adherents to head key public institutions who will be difficult to sack if he indeed loses the election and who will be able to thwart the budgets and legislation of any non-Fidesz government. His cronies — many of whom have business interests in Hungary’s football industry — control 80 percent of the private media sector. Meanwhile the state broadcasters trot out Orban’s narratives.
For the opposition Tisza party, the main worry is that Orban has also been able to game the election system making it extremely hard to defeat him at the ballot box. His tactics have not been as brazen as Putin’s — Orbán doesn’t ban opponents from running or imprison them. But his rivals say he has still engineered a massively unfair edge through gerrymandered constituencies, a captive media landscape and outright vote-buying.
And he has refined the system as political circumstances have dictated and the nature of the opposition has changed, all to give Fidesz a systemic advantage. It reflects “his will to win at any price,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Fidesz lawmaker, who like Molnár broke with Orbán when he shifted the party rightwards.
But for all that accumulation of power and fusion of party and state, Orban is being undermined by some of the same failures that have weakened strongmen the world over — rampant corruption and cronyism, a kleptocratic ruling class and deteriorating infrastructure and services for those outside the system have all helped to strengthen Magyar’s hand and intensify his challenge. In the meantime of course, for the people willing to play ball with Hungary’s “Viktator,” as opponents dub him, there’s money to be made all along the politico-business spectrum.
Which is why the elegant, extravagant stadium in Felcsút is such a potent symbol.
Pancho Arena — it is named for the Golden Team’s captain, who was dubbed “Pancho” by Spanish fans when he played at Real Madrid — wasn’t built using government funds directly. Instead, it was paid for by businesses who sponsored the construction, and in turn, have done exceptionally well since with bids for public procurement contracts and privatization deals.
In 2011, the Fidesz-controlled parliament approved substantial tax and opaque financial benefits specifically to companies that invest in soccer teams, football teaching academies and sports generally. Businesses can divert tax payments to sports clubs instead of the state treasury and it is estimated, for example, that Puskás Akadémia itself has benefited to the tune of €100 million.
In all, the tax-deduction scheme, known as TAO, has channeled an astonishing 1 trillion Hungarian forints (nearly $3 billion) into sports, with a large proportion of those funds funneled to soccer. That’s around 20 percent more than the country’s entire annual budget for education from primary school through university. As well as funding football academies and youth training schemes, new stadiums have been built with TAO cash, including Hidegkuti Nándor, the 5,000-seat stadium of MTK Budapest, another top team.
Retired Hungarian international footballer Zoltán Váczi is a rarity among top-flight players or retired footballers in campaigning for Magyar. He told me he has doubts that much of the TAO money earmarked for the youth football academies and the training of kids actually goes to them, likening the system to money-laundering.
“With the money they get, you could raise international players, but it's not happening. That's because the money goes somewhere else, not to the kids,” he said. He notes that parents pay for the children’s equipment and lots of other costs and some money goes to coaches and then the money runs out. “But the leaders get richer and richer,” he added.
On top of all that money, there is also direct state funding. The 24,000-seat Groupama Arena, Ferencváros’ stadium in Budapest, cost $73 million, and the 20,000-seat Nagyerdei Stadion in Debrecen slightly less. Both were paid for by the government. So too was the Pancho Hotel in Felcsút. That was originally meant to be a youth sports accommodation complex — it is built in a similar style to Pancho Arena — but is now an adult-only hotel focused on "wellness." It cost the Hungarian taxpayer €28 million euros to build, even as Hungary ranks as one of Europe’s poorest countries.
“Ten of the 12 top league clubs are owned by Orbán’s business cronies and political allies,” said János. They include Tamás Deutsch, an early member of Fidesz, who runs MTK. (Deutsch did not respond to a request for an interview; neither did the owner of Ferencvarosi, Gabor Kubatov, also a Fidesz politician.)
The formal chairman of Puskás Akadémia is a onetime mayor of Felcsút and childhood buddy of Orbán, Lörinc Mészarós. Back in 2010, Mészarós was a struggling local heating contractor, but in leaps and opaque bounds he has become Hungary’s richest man, with a net worth of more than $3 billion. He has interests in construction, media, agriculture, tourism and finance. He has famously credited his meteoric success to “God, luck and Viktor Orbán.”
János thinks that list is in the wrong order. “We know some details about sports funding and TAO but it is all very complex and murky, without any proper disclosure,” he told me. “It is hard to follow where the money comes from and who gets it and for what. Of course, that’s deliberate,” he added. That’s been Magyar’s line too. On the campaign trail he has been calling for greater transparency and accountability, although notably he has not pledged to end TAO.
In Felcsút, I went in search of Mészáros to discuss sports funding and his astonishing business success, but alas didn’t have his kind of luck. Nor in finding a cab for that matter. Having been assured by the manager of my Budapest hotel I’d have no trouble getting a ride back to the Hungarian capital, it turned out that Hungarian taxi apps don’t work in Felcsút.
Stranded, the kindly Dominika, who runs the coffee shop, eventually understood why I was loitering anxiously and managed to find a taxi driver in Budapest willing to come rescue me. In the hour I waited, there were no customers — the village is that sleepy. Except as chance would have it, two youth coaches at Puskás Akadémia popped in for ice cream. They explained their teenage teams were doing well but bewailed the poor season of the senior team.
Did they think that was a bad omen for Orbán’s chances come election day? They feigned not to understand the analogy. And politely took their leave.
Hoisting your political fortunes to sports successes has it risks, said János. “If the national team fails to qualify for the World Cup, as it did last autumn, it is a huge national disappointment and people start questioning whether the government is wasting money.” Last November Orbán felt obliged to explain on television why the national soccer team failed yet again to qualify — Hungary hasn’t got into the final stage of the tournament since 1986.
“Back when the economy was doing better some of his opponents complained about Orbán wasting money on football. But it was a niche gripe. With real wages going up and up, most people would shrug and say, ‘He spends a lot on football but he loves football’,” said János. “But now with people struggling and our economy ailing — you know, we have not had any GDP growth in 4 or 5 years — it has become a serious political issue and is being linked with corruption.”
But as with the flagging economy, so with football and sports. With another term, Orbán promises, he can indeed make Hungary great again.
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