Re-elected Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the shaggy-haired student dissident turned clean-cut strongman, hates coming second.
"He doesn't like losing," Aniko Levai, Orban's wife and cookbook-writing mother of his five children, confided to a women's magazine recently.
And while his beloved Hungarian football team seldom wins, Orban usually does - as was the case on Sunday when his party cruised to victory.
A former semi-professional player, Orban, 50, wants the national side to return to the salad days of the 1950s - and Hungary to the glory of centuries gone by.
The country boy first became politically active in the final days of Communism, co-founding as a student in 1988 a political movement called the Alliance of Young Democrats, or Fidesz.
The following year he became a household name with a speech demanding Soviet troops leave Hungary, becoming an MP in 1990 after the country's first democratic elections.
In 1993 he became boss of Fidesz, and set about ditching the party's student image and forging in its place a potent political force of the centre-right.
Demonstrating an ability to strike a chord with ordinary voters, he was elected prime minister in 1998, aged just 35, stressing conservative values like family and the Church.
But it was a bumpy four years and Orban was defeated by the Socialists in 2002, relegating him to the opposition for eight long years.
But after this first political defeat - losing again in 2006 - Orban came back stronger, returning to power in 2010 with a two-thirds majority in parliament.
And he was determined not to lose again, creating a slick campaigning machine and using his parliamentary majority to change the electoral system - in his favour, critics say.
Creating unease abroad, Orban brought about sweeping changes to the media and the judiciary that critics say have removed vital checks and balances on democratic institutions in the EU member state.
Adorning Fidesz in national symbols and aligning the party's fate with that of the country, he has angrily denied being an autocrat, saying he merely loves his country.
This new term, Orban says, is about "finally closing the era of post-communism".
At the same time, despite receiving billions of euros in development funds from Brussels, he has railed against the "imperial bureaucrats" of the European Union.
He has pilloried bankers, multinational corporations and imposed special "crisis" taxes on certain sectors. Before the election, he ordered utility firms to cut power and gas prices by over 20 per cent.
"Viktor", as he is mostly known, remains liked.
"There are multiple reasons but the determining factor for me is his charisma. He knows how to make people like him, he speaks the language of the people," Igor Janke, a Polish biographer of Orban, told AFP.
For Laszlo Lengyel from think-tank the Penzugykutato Institute, Orban is "a real political animal," who accepts neither defeat nor opposition.
But for author and Orban critic Jozsef Debreczeni, this popularity relies on "intimidation", saying the prime minister resembles the leader of another former communist country, Russia's President Vladimir Putin.
"Viktor Orban is moving Hungary towards the Russian model of Putin," Debreczeni said, keeping only a "semblance of democracy".
