Orbán, Putin and the electoral autocracies
The European Union remains on the defensive against the United States, which has excluded it from any crucial discussions on continental security. Offering support but solicitous. Angry but without a voice of its own. The EU's credibility in Ukraine is being decided at home, with the 27 member states divided on how to finance their aid to Kyiv and with the maverick Viktor Orbán defying the European agenda once again. The Hungarian prime minister is one of those who take offense in Brussels and are sought after in Moscow.
Orbán's visit last Friday to Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek economic support and long-term energy supplies from the Kremlin has been seen as a double challenge to the Union.
On the one hand, Hungary is under pressure from the EU to end all imports of Russian energy before 2027. The country still receives more than 80% of its oil and gas, and 100% of its nuclear fuel, from Russia. After securing an exemption from US sanctions in Washington for using Russian oil and gas—contrary to the EU's policy of limiting its imports—Orbán traveled to Moscow to finalize the agreement. But above all, the visit comes at a time of geopolitical weakness for an EU that is trying to have its own distinct and audible voice in the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Furthermore, the Hungarian leader's meeting with Putin has also had a regional side effect: it has sabotaged the revival of the Visegrad Group, in its new sovereignist version, which Polish President Karol Nawrocki, the ultranationalist, intends to lead. A meeting of the presidents of this regional group—comprising Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—was scheduled for December 3, and Nawrocki was to travel to Budapest the following day to meet with Orbán, but he has canceled the meeting with the Hungarian leader.
Ukraine has become a source of deep division among countries that we often observe as a blog, but which face the security pressure they feel on their eastern border in very different ways.
On Monday, at a meeting of diplomats and experts from the countries of the 2004 major enlargement, held in Prague to discuss the lessons learned from that event big Bang In a political and institutional context, a Hungarian political scientist criticized the homogenizing tendencies of an EU that does not respect the "diversity" of its member states. "Going to Moscow to shake hands with the person responsible for the murder of thousands of people, turning your back on European values and breaking with the EU's position, is not diversity, it's something else," retorted diplomat Pavel Telicka, who was the chief negotiator for Czech accession.
The Visegrad Group reached the height of its power during the migration crisis a decade ago, when its four prime ministers resisted EU efforts to introduce a mandatory quota system for redistributing asylum seekers across the bloc. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ended that cooperation—at least at the intergovernmental level—and now Nawrocki wants to "restore strength." However, Orbán's agenda is different. The Fidesz leader is beginning to feel the political strain of reigning unchallenged until becoming the longest-serving prime minister in the EU. There are still months to go before the general elections scheduled for April of next year, but the internal pre-campaign has already turned sour. Orbán is trailing his rival, Péter Magyar, in the polls, and his trip to Moscow aimed, among other objectives, to achieve concrete results to counter his opponent. Therefore, the more the infallibility of the EU's most internationally oriented illiberal leader has begun to waver, the more he has cultivated a "special relationship" with the Kremlin, which began as an ambiguous repositioning and has hardened into the EU's dissenting voice on Ukraine. Back in the 2022 elections, Fidesz exploited the war, claiming that the opposition wanted to send Hungarian soldiers to the front. Since then, Ukraine has become a central target of Hungarian political communication, as has the "Brussels bureaucracy" for the past fifteen years. Propaganda portrays Volodymyr Zelensky as an EU puppet and an ally of the opposition leader, Péter Magyar. AI-generated videos depict coffins, bloodied Hungarian soldiers, and apocalyptic images of a devastated country if Orbán is not re-elected. The Hungarian leader is attempting to salvage his "electoral autocracy," as the European Parliament has labelled it, by further squandering his contempt for international law, truth, and European integration.
