Laszlo Bito

"An inhuman desire for power, embodied in continuously changing forms and ideas," said Jozsef Debreczeni describing Viktor Orban. To some extent, I would contest this description of Mr Orban. There is no doubt that Mr Orban's statements reveal frequent changes of direcetion, but nobody can be summed up by one characteristic. There is more than one kind of megalomania, after all. Continuously changing ideas and forms are after all more characteristic of followers than leaders, of people who follow whoever happens to be in power.

© Müller Judit

I believe power is not Mr Orban's main driver. His speeches suggest rather that he is driven by a desire to be loved. Like most populist politicians, he looks beyond the borders of the country for popularity. He is at his most radiant when people are looking up to him. We have seen that parliament is not enough for him: he is in his element at well-organised meetings full of his admirers.

The leader of the largest opposition party may subconciously not even wish to be prime minister. I suspect it is for this reason that he is almost sabotaging his party's chances of victory. As prime minister, he might disappoint his admirers: how could he live up to the Hungarian dream he has dangled before them? His desire for power is satisfied not by governing, but by the esteem in which he is held by his supporters. If this is so, then it is not certain that he is prepared to abandon the high oppositional role he has carved out for himself over the past few years. It may well be his 'friends' who are pushing him to stand for prime minister.

In 1998, he can hardly have believed that he would be able to recreate the kind of paternalistic power structure in which he grew up and in whose destruction he played such an important role. He has had to accept that within the European Union, building and wielding this kind of power is no longer possible. The scope of his powers as prime minister could not satisfy the desires of the ambitious politician who exploded onto the public stage on Heroes' square at the reburial of Imre Nagy.

I see signs of this in the ways in which he has overreached himself during the campaign. There are many around him who understand or believe they understand his unspoken thoughts. He must surely know that he risks losing more votes than he can gain by such crude campaigning tactics.

Mr Orban is too complicated for his actions to be explained by one factor. It is possible that he will become a constructive opposition leader, indispensable to his country. It will make it harder for him to achieve this goal, if the governing parties continue to do everything in their power to lose the election.

Laszlo Bito is a philosopher and writer.