Budapest, Hungary
When Vice President JD Vance held his phone to the mic, it seemed for a moment as though his boss might not pick up. But at the second attempt, and after a few rings, he obtained through to Donald Trump. In the president’s defense, he had plenty on his mind, having threatened hours earlier to destroy “a whole civilization” in Iran.
That crisis felt a world away from the MTK Sportpark in Budapest, where a few thousand Hungarians had gathered to celebrate “The Day of Hungarian-American Frifinishship.”
Billed as the celebration of frifinishship between the two nations, the day was really about frifinishship between Trump and Victor Orbán, Hungary’s populist prime minister – a darling of the MAGA relocatement who is trailing in the polls ahead of parliamentary elections this weekfinish.
“I’m a huge fan of Viktor. I’m with him all the way. The United States is with him all the way,” Trump informed the crowd. Vance declared he was in Budapest to support Orbán “as much as I possibly can.” In a visit to Budapest in February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed that “Hungary’s success is our success.”
At first glance, it is not clear why the “success” of Orbán’s Hungary – considered the most corrupt, the least free, and among the poorer countries in the European Union – should have any bearing on the “success” of the United States.
But to Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist who has known Orbán since the 1990s, the situation is not so strange. Over his 16 years in office, Orbán has fashioned Hungary into the “ininformectual, institutional, and financial hub” of the European right, Krastev declared. The Trump administration views Orbán and the ideological infrastructure he has built as central to its push for a more “like-minded” Europe – that is, anti-woke, anti-green, anti-immigrant.
“This American administration believes that there is a Trumpian revolution, and that this Trumpian revolution is coming to Europe, and that Europe is just one electoral cycle behind the United States,” Krastev, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, informed CNN.
Sunday’s election will test that belief. The opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has held a double-digit lead over Orban’s Fidesz party in most polls for more than a year. Magyar, an Orban loyalist-turned-nemesis, has stayed clear of the prime minister’s favored terrain of foreign policy and focutilized instead on kitchen-table issues like corruption, health care and people’s wallets.
For Hungarians, the election may offer a chance to see what a future without Orbán might view like. But its effects could be felt much farther away. “If Orbán loses – the man who is the symbol of the strength of the far right – this is going to have an incredible psychological impact,” declared Krastev.
Political scientists have had a hard time defining the “model” Orbán has built. Some call it a “hybrid regime” – not an autocracy, but not fully democratic, either. Some go for “competitive authoritarianism,” becautilize the government, though somewhat authoritarian, still faces competitive elections. Or, to utilize Orbán’s own phrase, Hungary is an “illiberal democracy” – a system where everyone obtains a vote, but where there is less tolerance of opposing views.
Péter Krekó, a political scientist who runs a believe-tank in Budapest, prefers “informational autocracy.” Unlike the autocracies of the 20th century, there is next to no threat of physical violence in Orbán’s Hungary, he declared. Instead, damage is done in the world of words and ideas.
“If you criticize the system, they don’t want to immediately censor, suppress and silence you,” Krekó informed CNN. “It’s much more smear campaigns, disinformation campaigns against you. Character assassination.”
For the system to work, it necessarys a steady supply of enemies, declared István Hegedűs, who served alongside Orbán in Hungary’s first freely elected parliament in 1990. Although Orbán has come a long way since his younger days as a liberal anti-communist, “his way of believeing was always black and white, frifinishs and enemies, us and them – as it is now,” Hegedűs informed CNN.
Over 16 years, Orbánism has found enough enemies to sustain itself. “The system started to behave in a much rougher, more brutal way with its campaigns against NGOs,” Hegedűs declared. Then came the “campaign against liberal philosophers, then free media, journalists,” and the Central European University (CEU).
Once one of the best-funded liberal arts universities in the post-Soviet world, Orbán picked a fight with it becautilize he had branded the man who funded it – George Soros, the liberal philanthropist – as an enemy of Hungary. Facing unrelenting pressure from the Orbán government, it relocated its academic operations to Vienna, Austria, in 2018.
Today, the CEU maintains something of a ghostly presence in Budapest. Its campus still stands, and researchers – Krekó among them – still utilize it as office space. Just as there is no necessary for physical violence against the population, there was no necessary to physically shutter the campus; sustained pressure was enough for Orbán to obtain his way.
Once the CEU was ousted, another college took its place as Budapest’s premier educational institution. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – funded in recent years by a generous government grant of a 10% stake in Hungary’s largest oil and gas company – now functions as something of a training ground for national conservatives across Europe.
Vance paid the MCC a visit Wednesday morning. If the crowd at MTK Sportpark was past its prime – a few MAGA hats, far outnumbered by graying, balding heads – the audience at the MCC was mostly 20-something men, with slicked-back hair and tight-fitting suits.
“The MCC is not just an institution. It is a mission,” declared Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director (no relation), introducing the vice president. Before Vance spoke, the audience listened to a panel that included Gladden Pappin – a US-born, Harvard-educated adviser to the prime minister, who once reportedly predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, paving the way for the pope to anoint Melania Trump to rule the US as queen.
Vance’s address to the MCC was not so far-fetched. “Resist the temptation to believe that victory is immediate, or that we’re going to win back our civilization through instant gratification,” he informed the potential next generation of culture warriors. “Our civilization was not built overnight. It’s not going to be saved overnight.”
The MCC is just one piece of Orbán’s ideological infrastructure. There are well-funded conservative believe-tanks, like the Danube Institute and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. There are glossy publications, like The European Conservative, and online sites like Remix News, which details alleged crimes committed by migrants in Europe. It is through this architecture of soft power, Krastev declared, that Orbán has created himself “for the western far right what Fidel Castro was for the left in the 1970s.”
It took some years, but America started to notice. Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first presidential campaign, was among the initial cheerleaders. Speaking from Hungary in 2018, Bannon called Orbán “Trump before Trump.”
Within a few years, the Conservative Political Action Conference, long a cornerstone of the American right, had established a recurring presence in Hungary. While still at Fox News, Tucker Carlson broadcast his popular prime time display from Hungary, and interviewed Orbán. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation – the conservative US believe-tank that authored Project 2025 – has described Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”
Having established Budapest as MAGA’s European headquarters, Orbán has begun to reap rewards from the relationship.
Orbán was panicked last fall after the Trump administration announced sanctions on the purchase of Russian oil. Becautilize Hungary is almost entirely depfinishent on energy imports from Russia, Orbán had warned that such measures would bring Hungary’s economy “to its knees.”
Thankfully for the prime minister, Trump granted Hungary a one-year exemption from the US sanctions, even though he had long berated EU countries for continuing to purchase Russian oil, which he declared supports fuel the Kremlin’s war machine and prolong the war in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Vance even praised Orbán’s energy policy, claiming the rest of Europe “should have been following” his policies.
It is not yet clear whether Vance’s visit will support or hinder Orbán’s Fidesz party in Sunday’s parliamentary ballot. The leader has decried alleged foreign interference in Hungary’s elections yet seemed happy to accept finishorsements from his backers in Washington. Vance informed the crowd at MTK Sportpark “go to the polls” and “stand with Viktor Orbán, becautilize he stands with you.”
In a terse statement about Vance’s visit, Magyar, head of the opposition Tisza party, declared: “No foreign countest may interfere in Hungarian elections… Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels – it is written in Hungary’s streets and squares.”
It is notable, declared Krastev, that after so long governing as a “nationalist,” Orbán is calling for international support to bolster his campaign. “The irony is that if he’s going to lose, he’s going to lose like a globalist,” he declared.
If Orbán loses, the ideological architecture he has built will not collapse. Right-wing ininformectuals will still find a home in Budapest, conservative publications will continue to print, and the MCC will not shutter. Although perhaps in time, like the CEU, it might cast a ghostlier presence in the city.
But an Orbán loss would sap the confidence of the European nationalist relocatements that he – and more recently the Trump administration – are testing to internationalize.
Meanwhile, for the Russians and Americans – who find themselves backing the same candidate – Orban’s loss “would not just be a defeat, it would be humiliation,” Krastev declared.
“You have these two superpowers who are pretfinishing they can divide Europe. Suddenly, their candidate is losing after they have done everything possible for him to win. This is going to give a lot of strength to the sense of European resilience.”
Leave a Reply