3. Enemy building “The boundaries of our freedom perimeter are the levels of power we are able to achieve.” So said the young Orbán in 1990, at a time when he was not only charismatic but also liberal. His movement was funded by the Soros Founda­tion – thanks to which the founder of Fidesz had also obtained an Oxford study bursary – but in the space of just a few years later George Soros had become one of the Hungarian prime minister’s favourite enemies. That sum­mer speech in Tusnádfürdő in Romania in 2014, in which he set out his‘Illiberal state’ manifesto, may seem a long time ago now. But the Hungarian leader has remained true to his unchanging obsession with power. And it is pre­cisely this obsession which explains the tangible drift to authoritarianism since his 2010 election victory. After his first, 1998–2002, period in power, Orbán experi ­enced what losing power means. So when he was re-elected in 2010 he was determined to hang on to power at any cost, even if that cost was modifying the democratic equilibria. The secret behind Viktor Orbán’s aggressive return to pow­er is, first and foremost, the‘Finkelstein Formula’, a nega­tive formula whose basis is not support for something, but opposition to something. It was excogitated by Republican strategist Arthur Jay Finkelstein, who the Fidesz party turned to on the strength of his consultancy work for Ron­ald Reagan and Benjamin Netanyahu. Together with his heir apparent George Birnbaum, Finkelstein formulated an electoral campaign strategy for Orbán from 2008 onwards which he is still using today, enemy-building. George Soros was the enemy of choice right from the start but the list of enemies has got longer as the years have gone by, in line with the Orbán power cycle. The 2019 elec ­tion posters targeted George Soros, and the then President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker. In 2023 the strategy was used once again with their heirs, Soros’ son, Alex, and Juncker’s successor at the apex of the Com­mission, Ursula von der Leyen. The strategy was reused and hybridised. It was used on the internal opposition and the 2022 election poster enemies were, first and foremost, the leader of the united opposition, Péter Márki-Zay shown alongside former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány. It was also turned against the leaders of the EU, despite Orbán’s hopes for compromise, primarily with a view to thawing the country’s frozen EU funds. The, by then, tried and tested Finkelstein formula was then employed all over Europe by Orbán’s allies, sometimes sim­ply in cut and paste version. An example is the way Lega leader Matteo Salvini imitates Orbán’s attack on George Soros, who he called an“unscrupulous speculator” seven years ago. A more recent example is Giorgia Meloni’s defence of the actions of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, during the German election campaign in which, in her capacity as prime minister, she emulated this opposition to Soros(as did Musk himself): “I have seen no evidence that Elon Musk is funding parties, associations or politicians. George Soros, for exam­ple, is doing this,” she said at her end-of-year conference, which was actually postponed to early 2025. This type of claim gets shared-playbook alarm bells ringing, as Balogová has testi­fied from Slovakia. Even prior to the Slovak president’s attack on public broadcasters“the Orbán inspiration was clear for the first time when Fico created his own anti-So­ros narrative, arguing that Soros was paying the protesters and us”, she said.“He’s been using the Orbán playbook ever since.” The use of the negative enemy-building formula cuts across all far right propaganda and is the backbone of all its rhetoric. Speeches by Meloni – since she has been prime minister and thus in power – based entirely on opposition to what she labels the‘left’, and defining herself a victim of, with a view to constant enemy-building, are too numer­ous to count.“There was a sort of cordon sanitaire around anyone not on the left, a conventio ad excludendum,” she said in her 2024 Atreju speech, for example. “But we, dear friends on the left, will never be like you. We’re proud to be the antithesis of you. We’re here to prove you wrong, to shock you.” In this December 2024 speech alone, the word‘left’ was used 13 times:‘the left’,‘the global left’,‘the Brussels left’. If the arguments of the Orbán milieu at conferences all over Europe, including Rome, are to be believed – with Balázs Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister’s political manager a prime example – the left would be on the rise 6 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V.