Viktor Mihály Orbán (Hungarian: [ˈviktor ˈorbaːn] ^{ⓘ[contradictory]}; born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian lawyer and politician who has been the 56th prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has also led the Fidesz political party since 2003, and previously from 1993 to 2000. He was re-elected as prime minister in 2014, 2018, and 2022. On 29 November 2020, he became the country's longest-serving prime minister.

Orbán was first elected to the National Assembly in 1990 and led Fidesz's parliamentary group until 1993. During his first term as prime minister and head of the conservative coalition government, from 1998 to 2002, inflation and the fiscal deficit shrank, and Hungary joined NATO. After losing reelection, however, Orbán led the opposition party from 2002 to 2010.

Since 2010, when he resumed office, Hungary has experienced democratic backsliding, weakened judicial independence, increased corruption, and curtailed press freedom. During his second premiership, which is also known as the Orbán regime, several controversial constitutional and legislative reforms were made, including the 2013 amendments to the Constitution of Hungary. He frequently styles himself as a defender of Christian values in the face of the European Union, which he claims is anti-nationalist and anti-Christian. His portrayal of the EU as a political foe—as he accepts its money and funnels it to his allies and relatives—has led to accusations that his government is a kleptocracy. It has also been characterized as a hybrid regime, dominant-party system, and mafia state. Orbán defends his policies as "illiberal Christian democracy".

In March 2019, Fidesz was suspended from the EU's Christian Democratic party, the European People's Party (EPP). In March 2021, Fidesz left the EPP over a dispute over new rule-of-law language in the latter's bylaws. While shifting Hungary towards what he has called "illiberal democracy", he has also promoted Euroscepticism, opposition to liberal democracy, and the establishment of closer ties with China, Russia, and Turkey.

Viktor Mihály Orbán was born on 31 May 1963 and has two younger brothers, both businessmen, Győző Jr. (born in 1965) and Áron (born in 1977). Their paternal grandfather, Mihály Orbán, a former dockworker and a war veteran, farmed and worked as a veterinary assistant in Alcsútdoboz in Fejér County, where Orbán first lived while growing up. In 1973, the family resettled to neighboring Felcsút, where Orbán's father headed the machinery department at the local farm collective. Orbán attended school there and in Vértesacsa. In 1977, the family moved to Székesfehérvár, where Orbán had secured a place at the prestigious Blanka Teleki school. In his first two years there, he served as local secretary of the Hungarian Young Communist League (KISZ), in which membership was mandatory for matriculation to a university, Additionally, his father happened to be a patron of the KISZ.

After graduating from high school in 1981, Orbán completed his military service alongside Lajos Simicska, whom he had befriended in high school. Orbán was jailed several times for indiscipline, which included a failure to appear for duty during the 1982 FIFA World Cup and striking a non-commissioned officer during a personal altercation. His time in the army also coincided with the declaration of martial law in Poland in December 1981, which his friend Simicska criticized. During that period, Orbán recalled, he expected to be mobilized to invade Poland. He would later remark that military service had shifted his political views radically from the previous position of a "naive and devoted supporter" of the Communist regime. Nonetheless, a state security report from May 1982 still described him as "loyal to our social system".

In 1983, Orbán went to study law at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. There, he joined Jogász Társadalomtudományi Szakkollégium (Lawyers' Special College of Social Sciences), a residential college—established in 1983 by István Stumpf and modeled on English universities—for law students from outside the capital. Its members were permitted to explore social sciences beyond the socialist canon and the "new" field of "bourgeois" political science, in particular. There, Orbán met Gábor Fodor and László Kövér.

Orbán became chairman of the executive committee of the college's 60 students in 1984. He also went on a series of trips to Poland with his classmates and a lecturer, Tamás Fellegi, during the 1984–1985 school year and again in 1987, during the third pastoral visit of John Paul II. Their lead Polish contacts were Małgorzata Tarasiewicz and Adam Jagusiak, who would become members of the anti-Communist student movement Freedom and Peace [pl], beginning in 1985.