Rising East-West tensions do not suit Hungary at all and place its government in a most uncomfortable position. A loyal member of NATO since 1999, Viktor Orban’s Hungary has relied heavily on its diplomatic and commercial doctrine of“opening to the east” and categorically refuses to question the flourishing Hungarian-Russian relations.
“No one has the right to ask us that”, swept away the Prime Minister, who maintained his trip on Tuesday 1is February in Moscow, no offense to his political adversaries. The latter portray him as a lackey of the Kremlin, believing that he was summoned by Putin to be exhibited as a symbol of the divisions of the West.
Relationships better than ever
“When East and West are in conflict, the losers are always the central Europeans”, was recently moved by the head of Hungarian diplomacy, Peter Szijjarto, in the pro-government newspaper Hungarian Nation. “Those who use the rhetoric of war once morest the Russians are also those who make huge deals behind the scenes with Russia, he charged. Since the sanctions were imposed on the Russians, the Germans and the French have increased their own exports to Russia by billions of euros. »
The subjects of discussion will not be lacking, this Tuesday in Moscow, between the Hungarian and Russian leaders. Russian natural gas supplies were secured last fall for fifteen years with Gazprom, but Orban intends to obtain more. The start of the construction of two new nuclear reactors using Russian technology at the Hungarian Paks plant is imminent. The Russians are also ready to build and finance a railway line through Hungary to transport Chinese freight. And there is talk of producing the anti-Covid-19 Sputnik V vaccines locally, which Hungary is the only one to inoculate in the EU.
Russia’s Trojan horse?
The timing of Orban’s visit to Moscow raises the question, nagging since he announced in 2014 that he wanted to break with the model of liberal democracy: is Budapest Moscow’s Trojan horse in Europe? Hungary’s opposition leader, Peter Marki-Zay, openly claims that the Kremlin bribed or blackmailed the Hungarian nationalist leader, without any evidence to back it up.
→ PORTRAIT. Peter Marki-Zay, the right-wing alternative to Viktor Orban
Last November, Viktor Orban appeared alongside the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Milorad Dodik, then at the center of European concerns because he was accused of preparing the break-up of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Budapest warned at the same time that it would oppose any European sanction once morest it and announced the payment of 100 million euros to the Serbian entity, under its good neighbor policy.
Band apart on Ukraine
In early January, Orban offered his help to Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who was facing a revolt in his country, while pro-government media echoed the Kremlin in seeing the hand of the West behind the unrest. On the Ukrainian file too, Budapest stands apart. Blocking any rapprochement of Kiev with the EU and NATO for several years, Hungary is taking advantage of the current crisis to assert the linguistic rights of the Magyarophone minority in Ukraine, which it considers to be flouted.
At the beginning of the XXe century, in the context of the growth of a powerful anti-Western so-called “Turanist” movement, valuing the Eastern origins of the Hungarian people, the journalist and poet Endre Ady wrote of Hungary that it is a “country-bac”, which crosses the river from one bank to the other according to the winds and its interests. Under Orban, it chose to anchor itself – at least temporarily – to the eastern shore.