Despite being a member of Nato and the European Union, Hungary has refused to provide military aid to Ukraine. That was the choice of Viktor Orban, the prime minister, and it is part of a disturbing pattern that is taking him out of the western mainstream and into the sticky embrace of Vladimir Putin. Mr Orban, it seems, views himself as a floating voter between West and East. It is a dangerous position to take in troubled times.
This month Mr Orban became the first western leader to sit down for intensive talks with the Russian president since the invasion of Ukraine 21 months ago. It was an obvious snub to Hungary’s allies, who were not consulted in advance. He had no mandate to talk on the behalf of the alliance. Moreover, Hungary is a member of the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for Mr Putin’s arrest on a war crime indictment.
This was not a gaffe. Shortly after the meeting in Beijing, Russia promised to top up the 1.3 billion cubic metres of gas that has already been supplied to Hungary by Gazprom this year. “We will supply additional volumes on an ongoing basis in the autumn-winter period,” Alexei Miller, the sanctioned Gazprom chief, said. A warm Christmas, then, for Hungarian households. At the meeting there was talk, too, of co-operation on nuclear energy.
Although much of the European Union has made efforts to reduce consumption of Russian energy and stifle the Kremlin’s cash flow, Mr Orban is happy to keep the gas taps open. He has voted in favour of some EU sanctions packages, but remains a sceptic about economic warfare. Within Nato, the Orban veto has been delaying Swedish membership. Petr Pavel, a former Nato general who is now president of the Czech Republic, sees the Putin-Orban love-in as a way to break up the unity of the European Union. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, calls it “very, very unpleasant.”
Mr Orban is not in the business of competing for popularity among his supposed allies. Rather, he imagines that his brand of “illiberal Christian Democracy” — his phrase — has a place in a non-decadent, family-valued new world order in which Russia and China play leading roles. That’s quite a jump from his position in 2007, when he told colleagues that “oil may come from the East but freedom always comes from the West”.
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Now, as Hungary’s longest serving prime minister, he faces criticism for weakening judicial independence, democratic backsliding and nepotism. As long as there was a like-minded partner in the form of Poland’s Law and Justice government, Mr Orban could count on flanking cover in arguments with Brussels. But after this month’s Polish elections, his fellow populists are likely to be replaced by the more liberal-minded and, in EU terms, collaborative government of Donald Tusk, former president of the EU council.
Mr Orban will be an increasingly isolated figure in the western alliance at a time when Russia is stepping up its sabotage, surveillance and disruption operations. The bloody war against Ukraine is accompanied by a drumbeat of cyberattacks, assassinations and strikes against vulnerable undersea cables. That demands a thoughtful response from a unified western leadership, not opportunism from a rogue leader desperate for Mr Putin’s approval.
