WASHINGTON — Even as other European leaders rushed to back Ukraine’s efforts to repel the invasion Russia launched in late February, Hungary’s nationalist, authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán remained defiantly aloof and unwilling to end his longstanding relationship with the Russian president Sacrificing Vladimir Putin over a neighboring nation trying to assert its independence from Russia, as Hungary once did.
Like his peers across the continent, Orbán has been the subject of an impassioned appeal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the case of Orbán, Zelenskyy invoked Hungary’s 1956 uprising against communism, which was ruthlessly crushed by Moscow. “There is no time to hesitate. It’s time to make a decision,” Zelenskyi told Orbán.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses European Council leaders via video from Kyiv on March 24. (Press Office of the President of Ukraine via AP)
The man, who is sometimes called “Viktator” – which intentionally rhymes with “dictator” – remained unmoved. “Our moral responsibility is not to Ukraine, our moral responsibility is to our own people,” he said in a radio interview last Sunday, noting that Hungary is heavily dependent on Russian energy.
He also distinguished himself from his liberal opponents, who he said were ready “to sacrifice our interests on the altar of Ukrainian interests and to do what the President of Ukraine asks of us.”
These liberal opponents are hoping for a big victory in Sunday’s general election, which will serve as a referendum not only on Orbán’s self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” – a cousin of the “managed democracy” his friend Putin introduced in Russia – but also on the endangered future of democracy in Eastern Europe.
“Hungary is a cautionary tale in many ways,” David Koranyi, an Atlantic Council staffer and critic of the Orbán regime, told Yahoo News. He laments how, under Orbán, the “promising, newly minted democracy of the 1990s” has degenerated into a repressive regime in which, like in Russia, independent media have been suppressed and democratic institutions pushed into submission.
The story goes on
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Friday at the last election rally before Sunday’s election. (Petr David Josek/AP)
Hungary, too, has become something of a fixation on American conservatives under Orbán; in January he received endorsement from his ally Donald Trump, who hailed him as a “strong leader”.
Many on the right seem to admire Orbán for winning victories in the same culture wars they have waged for decades. Since returning to power in 2010 (he had previously served a single term as prime minister, between 1998 and 2002), Orbán has promoted what he calls a “pro-family agenda” similar to that supported by American evangelicals. He was also a staunch opponent of allowing migrants from Syria and North Africa into Hungary, and he built a border fence similar to the one Trump promised to keep migrants from Latin America out of the United States.
That earned Orbán a visit from Tucker Carlson in the summer of 2021. The Fox News host hosted a week of his primetime program from the capital, Budapest, which culminated in a one-on-one interview with Orbán. Hungary, Carlson told his American viewers, is a “small country with many lessons for the rest of us.”
Orbán’s fandom on the American right “was related to his efforts to ban abortion or same-sex marriages or otherwise limit LGBTQ rights in Hungary,” journalist Sarah Posner, who has covered Hungarian politics, told the radio show ” on point”. last year. “They liked that. They also liked his appeals not only to ethnic nationalism but also to Christian nationalism, which they have promoted here in the United States.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks during the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt in Hungary in 2021. (Janos Kummer/Getty Images)
Hungary is a completely different cultural battleground than the United States. About 62% of Hungarians are Catholic today. The country’s once large and thriving Jewish population was nearly wiped out in the final murderous months when the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp operated during World War II, while Muslims have never been nearly as welcome in Hungary as they are in Western European countries like Germany and Great Britain.
Opponents of Orbán hope the mutual admiration will be broken with Sunday’s elections, which they hope will be the culmination of years of political organizing in extremely unfavorable circumstances. Liberal and centrist opposition groups have united behind Peter Marki-Zay, a young mayor from a southern town near the Romanian border. Bordering a total of seven countries, Hungary has historically served as an imperial power and as a vassal at various times. Today it is both a member of the European Union and an ally of Russia – “a weak link in the chain” of NATO, as Koranyi put it.
Marki-Zay envisions a different future for Hungary, one more closely linked to the West. “Putin and Orban belong to this autocratic, repressive, poor and corrupt world. And we have to choose Europe, the West, NATO, democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, a whole different world: the free world,” he recently told the New York Times.
Hungary’s joint opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, at a campaign event in Budapest on Tuesday. (Anna Szilagyi/AP)
The sad irony of the Hungarian opposition’s growing unity is that it is up against an authoritarian ruler who is as determined as ever to remain in power. After the resignation of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Orbán is the longest-serving head of state in the European Union. Never particularly shy about wielding state power to improve his own chances of reelection, he recently went so far as to use a coronavirus alert service to make a pitch ahead of Sunday’s election. With the cross-currents of fear and propaganda shaping public discourse in Hungary, Marki-Zay’s chances of victory are “less than they should be,” Koranyi lamented.
Orbán has recently attempted to walk away from Putin without angering him, a tactic to save Hungary from consequences an embittered Kremlin could unleash. The contrast is particularly stark in Poland, where a nationalist and conservative government has aligned itself with supporting Ukraine. It is very unlikely that a similar move will come from Budapest if Orbán stays in office.
“There are really alarming similarities” between Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, media scholar Eva Bognar of Hungary’s Central European University told Yahoo News. The two countries are not identical, she warned, but the war in Ukraine can only accentuate the similarities. “Orbán was very proud to be friends with Putin,” Bognar said.
The special relationship between the two strongmen makes Sunday’s election a broader referendum on Hungary’s future. “Orbán has really subordinated the country to Putin,” Hungarian politician Katalin Cseh recently told former Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes on the Pod Save the World podcast. “If Orbán stays in power, we will be the pariahs of the EU for a very long time.”
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