A nation's rise or fall hinges on the choices of its leaders. At critical junctures, a turn left or right can determine the entire fate of a country.
Twenty years ago, I had dinner with a pan-democratic Legislative Council member. He complained bitterly that Hong Kong's opposition had no chance to govern. In Eastern Europe, he noted, after the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1990, politicians of his own generation had already taken power — in places like the Czech Republic and Hungary, some had even completed their terms and stepped down.
His words left me in deep thinking. I wondered at the time whether Eastern Europe's wholesale embrace of Westernization was right or wrong — a question that could only be answered decades later.
The most dramatic figure in this story is Hungary's Viktor Orbán. He and that Hong Kong opposition politician were both born in 1963. Orbán graduated from the Faculty of Law at Eötvös Loránd University in 1987. On the eve of the Iron Curtain's collapse, during that era of great upheaval, he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1989 to 1990 to study politics. He then returned home to enter politics.
Hungary ended one-party rule in 1990. Shortly after returning, Orbán was elected to parliament. The Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz), which he founded, quickly rose to prominence. In the 1998 election, Fidesz became the largest party, and at 35, Orbán became Prime Minister for the first time.
After losing the 2002 election, Orbán stepped down. His party alternated between opposition and power in the years that followed. In 2018, Orbán was elected Prime Minister for the fourth time. This year, he lost the election and stepped down again.
The most striking shift in Orbán's political career is his transformation from a left-leaning liberal democrat — the same pro-American political persuasion as Hong Kong's opposition — into a right-wing nationalist. Today, the West labels him a "far-right politician."
That transformation laid bare the full extent of American and Western intervention in Eastern European politics. It can even be argued that U.S. forces drove color revolutions across the region, directly contributing to the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
It turns out that Orbán's political godfather was Hungarian-born American financier George Soros. Early in Orbán's career, Soros funded his political studies at Oxford — an arrangement that can just as readily be seen as political grooming by Western forces.
After Orbán returned to Hungary in 1990, his political rise was smooth, backed by Soros-linked Western networks. But when Orbán concluded that liberal democracy could not save Hungary and began shifting toward the center-right, his rift with Soros became impossible to ignore.
By 2017, Orbán's government moved to expel the Soros-backed Central European University from Budapest, arguing it was a hub for color revolutions in Hungary and across Eastern Europe. Soros escalated the fight to the European Parliament, triggering a fierce confrontation with Orbán.
Only then did many begin to grasp the depth of American influence behind Eastern Europe's revolutions — with financier George Soros as the most visible public face of that operation.
Politico even framed the episode as "Orbán's rebellion against paternal authority." Orbán, the report noted, had been strictly disciplined and even physically abused by his father in childhood, leaving him deeply resistant to any form of patriarchal control. Soros, as his political godfather, became precisely that kind of figure — and Orbán chose to oppose him just as fiercely, insisting instead on forging Hungary's own path.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, it fractured into 14 countries. Yugoslavia broke into seven, and Czechoslovakia split into two. Hungary, by contrast, remained unified under Orbán's right-wing nationalism and achieved relatively stable development.
The 1989 Tiananmen incident in China was, in this view, a derivative of the American-orchestrated wave of color revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe. Zhao Ziyang was China's Gorbachev.
Had that movement succeeded and Zhao consolidated power, China might have followed the Soviet path — fragmenting into many small, weak states. The United States could then have dominated the world without a rival. Fortunately, China had Deng Xiaoping at the helm, steering the country onto a path different from the Soviet Union's.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
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