CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Twilight of the Strongmen

Photograph Source: kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0

“You should write about Viktor Orbán,” a close English friend told me before heading back to the Himalayas.

Orbán? I wondered. As leader, he has “ceased to be,” “expired,” and is “no more,” to borrow from Monty Python.

Then I saw his point. Orbán is not yesterday’s story so much as a figure already ripe for perspective. A proper valediction might do more than mark the end of one career. It could help frame the twilight of a political generation.

For Orbán belongs, perhaps, with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and even JD Vance—leaders whose instincts were formed in the late twentieth century, though they believe themselves to be the exact opposite and are now straining against the realities of the twenty-first.

The late E. J. Thribb, that indefatigable fictitious house elegist of Private Eye, would have marked the moment in his own way:

So, farewell then, Viktor Orbán Many people said you were off And now that you really are off Only Keith’s Mum really likes you.

So, farewell then, Viktor Orbán Many people said you were off And now that you really are off Only Keith’s Mum really likes you.

For such is the fate of strongmen once the spell breaks. When Viktor Orbán is no longer the victor, even old friends grow forgetful.

The Kremlin, with trained nonchalance, insisted it was never especially close to him—while expressing polite interest in engaging his successor, Péter Magyar.

There would, of course, be more talk of dialogue, of pragmatism, of water under both the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky and Széchenyi Chain bridges.

To Orbán’s credit, he took defeat far more gracefully than Donald Trump ever managed.

And if Orbán and Trump were tub-thumpingly close, Orbán’s deeper affinity lay........

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