Orban's Putin-Lite Act Gets a Dutch Echo

It’s been almost a decade now since Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban boldly declared his goal of turning the country into an “illiberal state” founded on “national” values and modeled on countries such as China, India, Russia and Turkey. He’s been true to his word. Hungary is no longer a democracy in a meaningful sense, the sole European Union member that the US nonprofit Freedom House rates as only partly free.

There was another portion of the agenda Orban launched with the speech he made to ethnic Hungarians in Romania that day in 2014. He has since made clear that his goal is to make his illiberal nation a model for other current and future EU members. If successful, that would change the bloc’s post-World War II design from one aimed at precluding the reemergence of nationalist autocracies to one that embraces and funds them. This is where Orban had less success until now, and it’s where the EU can and should do all it can to ensure he fails, a task made more urgent by the stunning victory of far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders in Dutch elections.