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Shkruar nga Bruno Waterfield
Hungary's right-wing prime minister is talking up his strategy to cultivate ties with both leaders as his popularity at home plummets ahead of the 2026 elections...
The holding of the next meeting between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Budapest has been interpreted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as support for his "pro-peace" stance.
Orban is known as President Putin's closest friend in the European Union, as well as an ardent fan of the US leader.
Viktor Orban, 62, who has seen his domestic popularity decline in recent years, boasted that he had lobbied Trump to meet at the Gaza peace summit in Egypt on Monday.
While the US president proclaimed a "historic dawn" of peace in the Middle East, his attention was already shifting to the war in Ukraine. Orban, considered an outcast by some EU leaders because of his tough migration policies, hostility to LGBT people and an unusually close 14-year friendship with Putin, could not resist a mockery of the union.
"Everyone in the EU is pro-war except us," he said on Friday, adding, "The EU should not be absent from peace. Like the American president, we should talk to the Russians, not just crawl behind American diplomacy as an auxiliary force."
"If this peace in the Middle East is achieved, if the Trump-Putin meeting is realized, why not believe that Europeans can walk the right path," said Orban, a right-wing nationalist.
As a former dissident under the communist dictatorship, which ended in 1989, Orban's friendliness towards Russia is unusual in a country previously occupied by Soviet troops, who only left in 1991. But Hungary is still dependent on Russian fossil fuels via the Druzhba ("friendship") oil pipeline that dates back to the 1960s.
Putin, who is openly nostalgic for the expanse of the former Soviet Union, uses the Russian “ty” for Oban, a term usually reserved for close friends or family, instead of the formal form of address “vy.”
The Russian leader could visit Budapest as the Hungarian capital marks the anniversary between Oct. 23 and Nov. 7 of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, when Soviet troops and tanks were deployed to crush pro-democracy rebels, killing thousands. Orban appeared to expect a mixed reaction as he appealed for public support for the meeting.
"This negotiation will not be about us," he said on Friday, adding "there has not been a diplomatic event like this for a long time. I ask everyone to show restraint, because this negotiation is not about us, but about peace."
"It is in the interest of every Hungarian family that the Trump-Putin meeting brings peace," he said.
Orban has been prime minister for five non-consecutive terms since 1998. But he faces a potentially tough test in next year's general election in April, as his Fidesz party falls in the polls.
He needs a good result to show voters that years of isolation due to his stance on Russia, Ukraine, and support for Trump have borne fruit.
Putin’s trip to Hungary should be fairly straightforward, traveling across the Black Sea. He is safe from arrest under an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant unless he lands on EU territory outside Hungary. In June, Orban announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the ICC because of the court’s arrest warrant for Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who visited Budapest in April.
In addition to the 1956 anniversary, a summit in Budapest has a bitter historical resonance for Kiev. The 1994 “Budapest Memorandum,” in which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, Britain and other nuclear powers, was signed in the Hungarian capital.
The guarantees proved worthless when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and then launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. /Adapted from The Times/
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