What is the point of Boris Johnson’s meeting with Viktor Orban?

The prime minister’s decision to meet with his controversial Hungarian counterpart has not been universally well received. Sean O’Grady considers what Johnson has to gain from it

Boris Johnson greets Hungarian PM Viktor Orban at Downing Street (Getty)

It would be amusing to suppose that there was a chorus of liberal voices in Budapest objecting to their prime minister, admittedly a bit of a populist himself, collaborating so openly with Boris Johnson – someone who has voiced extremist views on Muslims, is militantly anti-European, and has been responsible for much democratic backsliding in his time in power, in his attempts to suspend parliament and to limit the freedom of the broadcast media and the courts. And yet, so far as can be judged, Viktor Orban’s populist summit with Johnson seems to have attracted, in his home country, little of the outrage that it has ignited in London.

Less amusingly, Orban’s apparent acquiescence, and worse, to an upsurge of antisemitism in Hungary seems to be no barrier to a warm welcome in Downing Street. It is no coincidence that one of the main hate figures for conspiracy theorists is the Hungarian Jewish emigre George Soros. Johnson, who is certainly no antisemite, nonetheless seems happy to pursue his cynical, dangerous liaison with Europe’s second most successful authoritarian – verging on totalitarian – leader (the most successful being Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus).