Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini June 2018. Zucchi/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Viktor Orbán’s battle against NGOs and Soros is well known, as is his admiration for some of Putin’s policies and for his model of ‘sovereign democracy’. In June 2017, the approval of a law providing for a special register for some NGOs financed from abroad, increasingly brought Orbán's Hungary closer to Putin's Russia model, where a law on so-called "foreign agents" has been in force since 2012. Both leaders see funding coming from beyond the borders as a dangerous interference in national affairs, which makes it necessary to adopt a model that Orbán himself has defined as "illiberal democracy".
