President Macron smoothed over differences yesterday with Viktor Orban, the man he has defined as his European adversary, and won Hungarian support for French goals for EU defence, nuclear power and agriculture.
The Hungarian prime minister, who was long cast by Macron as his nationalist bête noire, struck a relatively friendly note with the French leader, who was visiting Budapest to push his plans for an ambitious French turn in the rotating six-month presidency of the European Council.
Four months from an election in which he hopes to win a second term, Macron is treating the usually routine EU role as a moment for France to shine on the global stage.
“Hungary’s relation towards President Macron is that of respect,” Orban said. Referring to Macron’s definition of himself as an adversary, he added: “France is the home of encyclopaedists. They are the best when it comes to definitions, so we accept their definitions: what we heard lately from Mr President is that we are political opponents and at the same time European partners.”
Macron said: “We have political disagreements, which are well known, but we have the willingness to work together for Europe and to be loyal partners.”
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He has used harsher language towards Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister than he has to any other EU leader and Orban has courted Macron’s far-right election opponents Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour.
Macron has said that Orban is the ringleader of Europe’s populist nationalists. In a typical jibe this year he rejected claims by anti-vaccination protesters that he was behaving like a dictator. “We are not an authoritarian state. We are not Hungary, Turkey or some-such,” he said.
His conciliatory tone yesterday reflected Macron’s need for broad support for his aim of using the council presidency to promote his vision of Europe as a sovereign economic and military power “free in its choices and in charge of its own destiny”. It was also designed to appeal to far-right voters in France who admire Orban’s tough nationalist, anti-immigrant line.
Orban supported three of Macron’s pillars: the creation of an autonomous EU military capability, the promotion of nuclear power as a non-carbon source of energy and the strengthening of the union’s common agricultural policy, a system originally designed to benefit French farmers. “We will agree for sure on three things. Firstly that we both love our countries, secondly that we are both working to make Europe stronger, and also agree that Europe needs strategic autonomy,” Orban said.
Macron nevertheless broached the issues that have caused conflict between Brussels and Budapest: limits to the rule of law and democracy and Hungary’s restrictions on gay rights, French officials said.
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Opponents of Orban criticised Macron for his gestures towards the prime minister. “Monsieur Macron, the Hungary that you are visiting is a country government by the far right,” Gabor Eross, the mayor of a Budapest district wrote to the president.
Macron’s chance of pushing the grand, but so far unfulfilled, EU agenda that he proclaimed in 2017 has been helped for the moment by the arrival of Olaf Scholz, the new Social Democrat German chancellor, who has little public European profile. Angela Merkel, his predecessor, was always reserved about Macron’s grandiose schemes for the bloc but Scholz suggested that he was more open to French thinking when he visited Paris on his first trip abroad as chancellor last week. “We want to reinforce Europe, work together for European sovereignty,” he said, using language that found favour with the Élysée Palace.
A big overhaul of the bloc to reinforce French sovereignty is being demanded by Le Pen and Zemmour, as well as by Valérie Pécresse, the Republicans party candidate, and by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the radical left-wing candidate.
