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Of all Russia’s useful idiots, few have proved as helpful as Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister met Putin in Moscow.
- Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban traveled to Russia to Wladimir Putin to talk about an end to the Ukraine war
- Strong criticism from the rest EU-Members: Hungary as an extended arm of Russian foreign policy
- Orbán is looking for allies in Russia because he believes the West has let him down
- Orbán among new right-wingers in Europe – from Nigel Farage in Great Britain to Marine Le Pen in France
- This article is available in German for the first time – it was first published on July 11, 2024 by the magazine Foreign Policy.
Moscow – In 19th-century Russia, Nikolai Gogol’s “dead souls” were deceased serfs who were nonetheless valuable. For 21st-century Russia, the dead souls are not serfs, even if they often behave like one. Rather, they are a band of useful idiots who dance to Moscow’s tune in Washington, London, Paris – and Budapest. Of all of Russia’s useful idiots, few have made themselves as useful as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
The Hungarian leader, who only last week took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union – a job that somehow carries even less weight than its name suggests – immediately flew to Moscow for his first trip in his new ceremonial role. There, Orbán behaved more like an ambassador summoned for consultations than a European statesman.
Orbán as a friend of Putin: Trip to Moscow receives strong criticism from other EU members
He parroted the Kremlin’s arguments and did his best to undermine Ukraine’s desperate fight to keep its territory, its sovereignty and even its children’s hospitals. He then traveled to Beijing to cozy up to the main supplier of key military technology for Russia’s meat-grinder war.
Orbán has stirred up a hornet’s nest in Brussels, not only by travelling to Moscow and Beijing pretending to represent the 27-nation bloc, but also by regurgitating Russian propaganda. In a letter to EU President Charles Michel, Orbán claimed that Russia was winning the war so much that it wanted to start peace talks immediately. The starting point for peace talks would be the permanent occupation of parts of Ukraine that Russian troops do not even occupy or hold. Condemnations of the trip from EU officials have been so fast and furious that they could form a new series of films.
The question is not so much what Orbán is doing, but rather why he is doing it at all. Hungary is a member of both the NATO and the EU. Both blocs are, by and large, trying to prevent Russia from terrorizing Ukraine any further. But Orbán, whether in his stolen European guise or his more comfortable nationalist guise, is not letting up.
“Hungary is the extended arm of Russian foreign policy. At the moment, Orbán is Putin’s most useful idiot,” says Peter Kreko, a longtime member of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
What use is Orbán’s friendship with Putin and Russia in the midst of the Ukraine war?
On the surface, one might think that Orbán is a simple mercenary. After all, Hungary seems to be getting preferential terms for energy imports from Russia. This is still of great importance, especially after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting wave of EU and US sanctions on Russian gas and oil exports, which have driven up energy prices in Europe. And for the far-right in Hungary, for whom Orbán is the dynamite, there are parts of western Ukraine that would be better suited to Hungary again, as it was before the First World War, when the maps were redrawn and modernity took hold.
The problem is that they are not getting good offers, and they are not going to get any new land. Although Hungary is heavily dependent on Russia for natural gas and even some nuclear power plants, Orbán has not managed to turn its vassalage to Putin into even a discount like the one China enjoys for importing blacklisted energy from Russia.
“The numbers don’t add up. The terms of the contract are not published, but you can find out the price of gas and it seems that Hungary paid a huge amount,” Kreko said. Add that to all the other EU money that Budapest has given up because of Orbán’s disregard for the rule of law and various other quirks, and it becomes clear that his friendship with Putin is now bearing less fruit than Gazprom. “It hasn’t done him any good so far – nothing,” Kreko said.
Orbán doesn’t love Putin but hates the West – From liberal to authoritarian politician
To understand why a European head of state, a permanent member (if not a lifetime member) of two of the world’s most exclusive clubs – the EU and NATO – would grovel to Moscow in the midst of the continent’s worst war in three generations, you have to go back just as far. It’s not that Orbán loves Putin. It’s that he hates the West.
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Russia’s original Vladimir and first puppet master – Vladimir Lenin – happily took German money to cause mischief inside and outside Russia, a pattern that continues merrily to this day. But Orbán has instead adopted German ideas and added a homegrown grievance.
No one in the West today reads Oswald Spengler, the German Cassandra of the early 20th century, whose The Decline of the West was a tribute to peasant life, the common people and an indictment of scheming, rootless cosmopolitans. But Orbán seems to know, and he has kept the receipts. (One of Orbán’s goals for his six-month EU Council presidency is to promote a “peasant-oriented” agricultural policy.) With his chameleon-like transformation from a reform-minded liberal politician after the fall of the Berlin Wall to a textbook authoritarian politician, the Hungarian leader has made the world safe for “illiberal democracy.”
“I really believe he is channeling Spengler,” Kreko said. “You can read Spengler and it sounds like an Orbán speech. He really believes in the downfall of the West.”
Historical background explains Orbán’s differences with the West
But Hungarians of Orbán’s ilk have a different grudge, one that seems academic and dusty but explains much of the animosity on display. When the Allies won World War I, they signed peace treaties with the losers, like the infamous Treaty of Versailles that gave an Austrian watercolorist so much to talk about in German beer halls and bunkers.
If Trump can make Reagan’s party pro-Russian, Orbán can also make Hungary pro-Russian, even though we have had more bad experiences with Russia.
Hungary had its own treaty, Trianon, which is still criticized. The treaty reduced Hungary’s territory and decimated its population by ceding much of its land and expelling many of its inhabitants. US President Woodrow Wilson, the famous champion of self-determination and moral values, did not lift a finger to help. A generation later, in 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress the smallest beginnings of resistance, Washington and the West were nowhere to be found.
Patriotic Hungarians were appalled last week that Orbán would go to Moscow hat in hand, given the historical memories. But from his point of view, the West has brought nothing good; Russia has brought a lot of bad, but that was then.
“If Trump can make Reagan’s party pro-Russian, Orbán can also make Hungary pro-Russian, even if we have had more bad experiences with Russia,” Kreko said. “History is short-sighted and can easily be rewritten.”
The new right in Europe as Putin friends: From Farage to Le Pen
This points to Orbán’s larger problem: he is not alone in Europe, but stands first among unequals. His far-right group has just reoccupied the European Parliament, with strong support from France’s own pro-Russian far-right movement, which flirted with control of the French National Assembly last week; the movement’s figurehead had vowed to cut off French aid to Ukraine. The new power bloc has not gone down well with other European leaders.
In Britain, Nigel Farage, the famous Brexiteer, founded a new party bent on destruction, but this time he targeted the Conservative Party as much as Europe or migrants, and was almost as successful: the Tories suffered their worst election ever, and Farage finally won a seat in Westminster. One of Farage’s biggest supporters in the election was the Russian Foreign Ministry. Germany has its own far-right Russophiles, but Moscow conquered Berlin years ago.
Trump and Orbán: Two with similar attitudes towards Russia?
The biggest elephant in the room remains overseas, in the United States. Trump and Orbán have not only a fusion of minds – Orbán’s cancelled speech to the European Parliament was literally titled “Make Europe Great Again” – but also a tactical collaboration. While Britain has long been the bridgehead for American transatlanticists, Hungary is the landing zone and inspiration for the American far right.
Case in point: Orbán will head to Mar-a-Lago in Florida to meet with Trump right after the NATO summit this week, less than a week after his meeting with Putin. In spy novels, at least, the excerpts are meant to obscure the connection.
Russia has always had its followers, especially since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago; some of them were useful idiots who spread the Kremlin’s line around the world, while others were more idiots than useful. Today, it is alarming that the idiots in many cases occupy a key position.
About the author
Keith Johnson is a reporter at Foreign Policy and reports on geoeconomics and energy. Twitter (X): @KFJ_FP
We are currently testing machine translations. This article has been automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on July 11, 2024 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com“ was published – as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.
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