Orbán’s fiasco: Europe is not disappearing anywhere

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The main conclusion that the United States administration could draw from the results of the parliamentary elections in Hungary and Viktor Orban’s stunning fiasco is that Europe is not disappearing anywhere, and citizens of the European Union countries want to be Europeans.

For many years, the Hungarian prime minister has exploited precisely this anti-European idea, and perhaps that is why he has earned such respect from both US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Putin. After all, strangely enough, Washington, Moscow, and even Beijing are almost equally interested in weakening the European Union.

Of course, it is easier to deal with each individual European country than with a united bloc of European states. But it seems to me that such logic should be inherent primarily to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, and the largest democratic country in the world – the United States – should be interested in cooperation with democratic European states that are united in an effective union.

During his tenure as Prime Minister, Orban did everything possible to undermine the unity of this union and, as we see, did not hide his intentions from Putin. Among his last decisions in office was the blocking of European aid to Ukraine, although this aid was in the interests not only of Ukraine itself, which needs support for its war-torn economy, but also of Europe, which simply needs to contain Russia’s ambitions.

It is simply paradoxical that the prime minister of a country whose freedom has been taken away by the Russians so many times would act as a politician at the behest of the Kremlin. It is simply paradoxical that the president of the United States, who publicly supported Orban on the eve of the election and even sent his own vice president to Budapest to campaign for Orban’s party, did not use this support and personal relationship with the Hungarian prime minister to convince him to abandon this veto.

And it is amazing that the president of the United States, who for years has been persuading Europeans to abandon Russian oil and gas, has always turned a blind eye when it came to Hungary’s purchase of Russian energy resources. Although it is now obvious that Putin exchanged this supposedly cheap Russian oil for political support and promotion of the corruption mechanism in the Hungarian state itself.

Orban’s rule has indeed cost Ukraine dearly. There was no reason for the deterioration of Hungarian-Ukrainian relations, except for one thing – Budapest’s readiness to support Moscow. There was no reason to accuse Ukraine of not respecting the rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians. But Orban did not just make such statements, but also invested resources in creating an appropriate political atmosphere in the border region of Ukraine. And this despite the fact that Transcarpathian Hungarians remained one of the few national communities in Europe that managed to preserve their native language, national traditions, education, and political representation – and all this on Ukrainian soil.

I once advised the Hungarian Prime Minister to inquire about the fate of two other Hungarian peoples – the Khanty and the Mansi, who live in Russia. During the Putin era, they have completely lost their own language, the ability to read poetry and prose by their own writers, and even the apparent attributes of their own national statehood – although these peoples live on land that is comparable in wealth to the United Arab Emirates and could therefore provide the indigenous peoples with at least some conditions for development.

But instead of defending the Hungarian peoples before Putin, Orban tried to speculate on the problems of Transcarpathian Hungarians before Poroshenko or Zelensky. And this once again illustrates the insincerity of a politician who was more pro-Russian than pro-Hungarian. And, of course, more pro-Russian than pro-American.

Trump would also have to draw conclusions from this, if he could open his eyes: people who work against European unity will never really think about the global interests of the United States. Such politicians are much closer to Moscow than to Washington.

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