How will Europe deal with Hungary’s Viktor Orban?

The dual east-west agenda of Hungary’s right-wing populist is delusional, but in democratic politics that sometimes works, as Sean O'Grady explains

Viktor Orban acknowledges cheering supporters in Budapest on Sunday night (AP)

Why did a country once cruelly occupied by Russia vote for a man who wants to be friends with Vladimir Putin? That is one of the many puzzles thrown up by Hungary’s election result.

Viktor Orban, a kind of central-European version of Nigel Farage, has managed to score a fourth successive term as prime minister. Not only that, but his Fidesz party has secured a “supermajority” in Hungary’s grand neo-Gothic parliament. With that, he can alter the constitution to his liking, further trimming civil liberties and extending the advantages of incumbency (to put it politely). His suppression of opposition sentiment has alarmed the EU, of which Hungary is, post-Brexit, the most awkward member.

Orban describes himself as “Christian democratic, conservative, patriotic”, and was something of a pioneer in the wave of nationalist populists who stormed their way into power in the middle of the last decade, with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin acting as their informal leaders. Some might count Boris Johnson among them.

It is no surprise that Orban has had messages of congratulations from Farage, Matteo Salvini, and Marine Le Pen. Like them, he detests the progressive assumptions and liberal democratic values of the European Union: “We are sending Europe a message that this is not the past – this is the future,” he said in his celebratory speech on Sunday night.

It is all a bit odd. Between the end of the Second World War and the demise of the iron curtain in 1989, Hungary was mostly governed by a succession of hardline communists who only asked “How high?” when Moscow told them to jump. More obedient than Albania, Romania or Yugoslavia, but with a longer history as an independent kingdom, latterly in partnership with imperial Austria, the Hungarian People’s Republic seemed ill-fitted to the role of Soviet satellite.

When Hungarians famously staged an uprising against the regime in 1956, the heirs to Stalin sent tanks into Budapest. By the time order was restored, around 3,000 Hungarian civilians had died, and 13,000 had been injured.

The parallels with Ukraine hardly need labouring, but, in his victory speech, Orban made a disparaging reference to the war, and to Hungary’s lukewarm response to Ukraine’s pleas for help: “This victory is one to remember, maybe even for the rest of our lives, because we had the biggest [range of opponents to] overpower. The left [in our country], the international left, the bureaucrats in Brussels, the money of the Soros empire, the international media, and even the Ukrainian president in the end.” You might also catch a whiff of antisemitism and conspiracy theory there (in relation to George Soros, a Hungarian Jew by birth, who survived the Holocaust).

The official line reconciling Hungary in 1956 with Ukraine in 2022 is that Ukraine has been abandoned by the west, just as Hungary was in 1956. There’s a point there, but it rather makes it sound as if President Eisenhower was responsible for the Kremlin’s decision to crush the Hungarian uprising. More likely, Hungarians don’t want any more trouble like they got back in 1956. So Orban looks a safer bet. He won because he promised Hungarians he’d keep them out of the war, and 1956 was a long time ago.

The shifting complexities and contradictions in Orban’s political stance are perplexing, but they are typical of the modern-day hard-right populist leader. To borrow a phrase, Orban wants to have his cake and eat it. He wants Hungary to benefit from the EU’s single market and customs union, from free movement and the flows of development aid and investment Brussels pumps into the economy. But he finds the obligations of EU membership irksome.

He dislikes taking refugees, with the inevitable exception of the Ukrainians, because he regards them as a “threat to western civilisation”. He wants to continue to be a member of Nato, and to enjoy American protection – but he also likes to appease Putin, and yearns for a new “partnership” with Russia. He has been telling his people that, in central Europe, they can have the best of all worlds – and that they don’t need to make any tough choices.

It’s delusional, but in democratic politics that sometimes works – in Orban’s case, for a surprisingly long time. Even an alliance of all his opponents couldn’t unseat him. Brussels has already suspended Covid recovery funds from Hungary (and Poland) over its drift towards authoritarianism; but would the EU actually dare to expel Hungary if that meant Orban would team up with Putin, perhaps even reviving old Hungarian territorial claims on its neighbours?

It is a remote prospect, but one that has been opened up in Europe by Putin’s use of force. Similarly, Nato would find it intolerable if Hungary tried to veto the mutual defence of one of its members, were Orban to cast himself as an agent of Putin.

Hungary is not the first small central-European nation to imagine that it can play its more powerful neighbours off each other. Sad to say for the country, that strategy has never ended well.