Orbán’s gambit to revive his election hopes: A battle against the EU

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has decided a showdown with Brussels is exactly what his flagging election campaign needs. 

Orbán is on the back foot at home — trailing his rival Péter Magyar by some 8 percentage points in polls ahead of the April 12 election. So he’s gone on the attack against two of his favorite bogeymen abroad: Brussels and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

In doing so he’s trying to set a trap for Magyar, the 44-year-old member of the European Parliament who is on track to beat him.  

Magyar has built his poll lead through a laser-focus on the corruption, mismanagement and cronyism that he says has defined Orbán’s 15 years in power. The last thing he wants is an election race in which he is typecast as the pro-EU or pro-Ukrainian candidate.  

But that’s exactly where Orbán is now trying to shift the campaign. On the international stage, Orbán’s government has taken the highly confrontational step of blocking the EU’s €90 billion financial lifeline to Ukraine — agreed at a European Council meeting in December — accusing Kyiv of slow-walking repairs to the Druzhba pipeline that supplies oil to Hungary. 

The timing of Orbán’s move is hardly coincidental, given his troubles in the election race. Having engineered a conflagration with Brussels over Ukraine, he upped the ante this week by accusing Magyar’s Tisza party of being traitors, of taking the side of the EU and Zelenskyy in the standoff.  

Orbán on the attack

It’s Orbán himself who is leading the offensive. He is styling his clash with Brussels and Kyiv as one and the same as his fight with the Tisza party, which he accused of remaining “shamefully silent” about the problems with the oil supply from Ukraine. 

“In line with Brussels and Kyiv, instead of a national government, they [Tisza] want to bring a pro-Ukrainian government to power in Hungary. That is why they are not standing up for the interests of Hungarian people and Hungary,” Orbán argued in a Facebook post on Monday. 

He followed up with another post saying Tisza would wreck the country’s energy sector, and insisted his ruling Fidesz party was “the safe choice in April.” 

“[The opposition’s] goal is chaos, fuel shortages, and gasoline price increases before the elections. That is why they have sided with Zelenskyy, against the Hungarian people,” Orbán said.  

Sidestepping the trap, Magyar hit back against Orbán’s accusations — not by defending the EU or Zelenskyy, but by claiming economic mismanagement by the prime minister was stoking the high prices and insisting fuel was cheaper in Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. 

Péter Magyar has built his poll lead through a laser-focus on the corruption, mismanagement and cronyism that he says has defined Orbán’s 15 years in power. | Bállint Szentgallay/NurPhoto via Getty Images

“Orbán does not govern effectively and shows no interest in the continuously deteriorating situation of Hungarian citizens or businesses. Instead, he chooses to lie, incite hatred, and burden the country with some of the highest taxes in Europe,” Magyar said.

Tisza declined to comment.  

How pro-EU is Magyar, really?

For the EU, the big concern is how long Orbán, the EU leader closest to the Kremlin, will drag out this fight. Kyiv desperately needs the now-blocked €90 billion cash injection, and six weeks of uncertainty due to the Hungarian election would inflame geopolitical tensions over the war in Ukraine.  

While much of Brussels is holding out for a Magyar win — largely to end Budapest’s obstructionism on Ukraine — the irony of Orbán’s attacks is that Magyar is hardly an unalloyed pro-EU politician, and far less a pro-Ukrainian one. Indeed, he is outdoing Orbán with his some of his more nationalist campaigning. Tisza, for example, voted against the €90 billion loan to Ukraine in the European Parliament and Magyar has strongly opposed plans for Kyiv’s accelerated membership in the European Union.  

In an interview with POLITICO in 2024, Magyar said Tisza was pro-EU but was candid about the EU’s shortcomings. He expressed opposition to a European “superstate” and said he didn’t have “friends” in the European Parliament. That followed his first press conference in the Parliament, in which he opposed sending weapons to Ukraine.

Earlier this year, Orbán’s Fidesz party sought to corner Magyar over the EU’s giant Mercosur trade deal with South America, which it opposes on the grounds it would harm Hungarian farmers. In Budapest, Orbán accused Magyar of backing the agreement and undermining farmers because Tisza sits with the center-right European People’s Party grouping in the European Parliament, which supported the trade pact. 

So Orbán’s gone on the attack against two of his favorite bogeymen abroad: Brussels and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. | Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Ultimately, however, Tisza voted in January to freeze ratification of the EU-Mercosur accord, breaking with the EPP line — a move that triggered a “shitstorm” against the Hungarian delegation at a subsequent group meeting, according to an official who was present.

Calibrated messaging

Magyar’s awkward relationship with Brussels was on full display at the Munich Security Conference this month. He used the event to initiate a tentative outreach to European heavyweights including Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil, as well as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb. 

The messaging was cautiously calibrated. Magyar said he wanted to undo the damage Orbán had done to democratic and judicial norms, but with the chief goal of restoring Hungary’s access to EU funds and standing up “for Hungarian interests.” His language on Ukraine was far cooler.  

“The top priority of a future Tisza government will be to secure the EU funds Hungary is entitled to. To achieve this, we will immediately introduce strict anti-corruption measures, restore judicial independence, and safeguard the freedom of the press and higher education,” he said on X after meeting with Merz Feb. 14.

While that was music to EU mainstream ears, Magyar also said he had used his talk with Poland’s Tusk to stress he didn’t support a fast-track EU membership for Kyiv. 

Conspicuously, Magyar did not meet with any leader of the EU institutions. The optics would admittedly have been hard to navigate given that the Fidesz camp has flooded the streets of Budapest with AI photos of Magyar conspiring against Hungary with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Mystery man

All in all, Magyar remains an enigma to observers in both the EU and Ukraine.

An MEP from the liberal Renew group in the European Parliament said: “We feel anything is better than Orbán but, honestly, I’m not sure what they are, content wise, what are the things they concretely want to do, for example in Europe and geopolitically.”

While that was music to EU mainstream ears, Magyar also said he had used his talk with Poland’s Donald Tusk to stress he didn’t support a fast-track EU membership for Kyiv. | Thomas Kienzle/AFP via Getty Images

Even inside the ranks of Magyar’s center-right EPP grouping, the jury remains out. “We need to see, if Magyar wins, how he will organize the government and distribute power,” said an EPP official. “But once you are in power the question is whether he will have the strength to overcome temptations or fall [to them] as Orbán did.”

On Ukraine, it’s already clear that a Magyar victory would not signal an overnight thaw in ties with Kyiv. But the hope among diplomats from the EU and Kyiv is that he won’t deliberately wreck EU efforts, as Orbán has done. 

“We don’t know the consequences [of the election] so we have to be careful,” said a Ukrainian government adviser, who noted they were communicating with Magyar’s team. “But by following his public speeches, it seems he is a little bit more flexible and we will expect this.” 

Swedish European Affairs Minister Jessica Rosencrantz told POLITICO she was still holding out hope for a more emphatic change in Budapest’s position. 

“I hope for a shift in the Hungarian approach toward Ukraine because we need to stand united for European security. Given Hungary’s own history I think it’s unbelievable that they did not show solidarity,” she said. 

Ketrin Jochecová contributed to this report.