Almost three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, tensions are again threatening to divide Europe. Anti-immigrant, socially conservative movements have roiled politics in places as different as Britain and Italy. But they’ve made their greatest gains in Hungary and Poland, where populist leaders are reshaping their countries in ways that challenge what had seemed like settled norms of democracy in the European Union.
The key figure is Viktor Orban, who as Hungary’s prime minister has turned against the ideals of his former benefactor, the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, to champion what Orban calls the “illiberal state.” French President Emmanuel Macron has called the struggle over values a kind of “European civil war.”
