Commentary
Review
The War in Ukraine’s Donbas — Past, Present, and Future
8 July 2022
25 June 2020
Stefano Bottoni’s book offers an in-depth investigation of Viktor Orbán’s political career and a multi-layered depiction of the foundations and trajectory of the regime he has come to build in Hungary since 2010.
A widely published and internationally respected contemporary historian and public intellectual, Bottoni has arguably been ideally positioned to write such an interpretative history of Hungary, its democratic decline and the emergence of its self-styled “system of national cooperation.”
Based at the University of Florence, Stefano Bottoni is a former employee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and has been a resident of Budapest. Next to his broad horizons and detached analytical perspective, he thus also qualifies as a cultural and political insider.
Orbán. Un despota in Europa not only presents plentiful relevant data on Hungary but also embeds its own interpretation in a broad variety of secondary literature to develop a complex and nuanced interpretation.