How Viktor Orbán became Putin’s best friend in the EU

How Viktor Orbán became Putin’s best friend in the EU

From liberal dissident to MAGA darling, the transformation of the prime minister who brought Budapest back into Moscow’s orbit.

By JAMIE DETTMER
in Budapest, Hungary

Photo–Illustration by Natália Delgado/ POLITICO

Zsuzsanna Szelényi remembers Viktor Orbán was the one telling the Russians to get out of Hungary.

It was 1989. The Iron Curtain was falling, and Orbán had been tapped to give a speech marking the reinternment of the country’s Imre Nagy — the postwar prime minister who led the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviets and was executed for it. 

Szelényi, who was there as part of the reburial honor guard, recalled how the man who would become her country’s longest-serving prime minister took the stage to call for the withdrawal of the Soviet army.

“If we believe in our own strength, we are capable of bringing the communist dictatorship to an end,” Orbán said. “If we are determined enough, we can compel the ruling party to submit to free elections.”

There was no indication of what Orbán would one day become, said Szelényi, a former lawmaker of the prime minister’s ruling Fidesz party. 

From a liberal leader calling on Hungary to break away from Moscow, the Hungarian PM has become a self-styled champion of illiberalism — and the Kremlin’s best friend in Europe.

At a time when the EU is struggling to counter Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine and on the rest of the continent, the Hungarian prime minister has become the man Russian President Vladimir Putin can count on to deliver.

Ahead of a critical Hungarian election on April 12, Orbán has blocked a €90 billion EU loan package that Kyiv says it desperately needs to keep fighting. Meanwhile, the country’s foreign minister was made to explain last week why he has been back-channeling confidential proceedings to the Kremlin. 

“It happened over time with several stages and turning points,” each step logically and inevitably leading to the next, Szelényi said while sipping tea on a chilly afternoon in a cafe on the Danube River.

“The pro-Russian thing is probably the most surprising,” she added. “But he didn’t just change from one day to another.”

Making Hungary Great Again

When Hungary’s first free elections were held in 1990, Orbán and Szelényi were among the 22 members of Fidesz — then a liberal-centrist group of anti-Communist students and intellectuals — elected to the National Assembly.

Orbán’s transformation, she said, began not long after that. 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is pictured in Woodstock, England on July 18, 2024. | Carl Court/Getty Images

Elected party president in 1990, the young politician quickly gained total dominance over Fidesz. He moved to crowd out those who challenged him, or even dared to quibble over his decisions, Szelényi recalled.

Seeing the direction of travel, she and a handful of other lawmakers quit the party in 1994, when Orbán abruptly switched its ideological position from liberal to national conservative. 

“Those who remained in Fidesz were more homogeneous, more loyal to him,” she said. “Ever since, the party’s story and Orbán’s have been one.”

Orbán’s transformation came in steps: After a stint as prime minister at the turn of the century, he spent eight years in opposition, doing his best to obstruct proceedings in the National Assembly and sabotage the then socialist-liberal government.

Once he retook the country’s highest office in 2010, he set out never to lose again, rewriting the constitution, modifying major laws to reduce democratic checks and balances, weakening media freedoms and judicial independence and tilting the electoral playing field in his favor.

Szelényi believes the first stage in Orbán’s transformation — the initial ideological shift — was driven by personal ambition or, as she calls it, his “will to power.” 

He assessed that Fidesz would have a clearer route to governance and better electoral prospects on the less crowded conservative end of the political field, where the main right-wing party was in disarray and decline, she said.

Orbán’s tilt toward Russia was slower but no less marked.

A standout moment came in 2014, when Orbán signed a deal with the Kremlin for a massive loan to expand Hungary’s Paks II nuclear power plant. That deal signaled not only a pragmatic reliance on Moscow, but the start of a meeting of ideological minds.

Just six months later, the prime minister outlined his aim to build an “illiberal state” in Hungary based on national and traditional Christian values, explicitly citing Putin’s Russia as a model — a notable development considering that in 2007 “he had told party workers in a speech that Russia is basically an empire, and always wants to push other nearby countries around, and it could never be trusted,” Szelényi remembered.

Other Hungarian prime ministers had also sought to nurture closer economic relations with Russia, but under Orbán economic cooperation not only accelerated but quickly translated to stronger political ties. He spoke of an “eastern opening,” arguing it was important for Hungary to improve relations with not only Russia but also China and Turkey to balance relations with the West.

And in 2019, when most of Central Europe held major commemorations to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, state-sponsored events in Budapest, rather noticeably, were more muted.

Visitors photograph the Berlin Wall following a ceremony to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its fall on Nov. 9, 2019. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

For Péter Molnár — a fellow student with Orbán at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University and another former Fidesz lawmaker who quit in 1994 — Orbán’s journey from Russian foe to Russian friend reflects his international ambitions. 

“Orbán can’t make Hungary bigger again,” he said, referencing how the country had around two-thirds of its territory torn from it after World War I. “But maybe he thinks he can make it greater again.”

And with each clash between Budapest and Brussels, Hungary’s relations with Putin only warmed, just as they would later with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Metamorphosis

Molnár, now an academic and a slam poetry champion, highlights an unremitting drive for success in his college-mate. Over lunch in an old-fashioned Hungarian bistro near the U.S. embassy in Budapest’s historic fifth district, the 62-year-old chose his words carefully, plucking out the adjective “diligent” to describe the young Orbán’s determination, capacity for hard work and attention to detail.

Not that he couldn’t be fun in his college days, Molnár added. The young Orbán went to illicit underground dances — a form of youth rebellion frequently surveilled by the state’s security police. And despite little interest in art and literature, he was keen to get involved in a performance of German-born writer Peter Weiss’ “How Mr. Mockinpott Was Cured of His Sufferings” — a satire about an ordinary man’s struggles in an oppressive society.

Like Szelényi, Molnár said there was nothing back then to give any hint of Orbán’s subsequent political journey from liberalism to MAGA’s European darling. “Except, the overwhelming ambition was there,” he observed. 

“I think it’s what drives him to go in directions where he thinks he can gain power,” he explained. “If the political constellation had been such that the liberal route offered that, he probably would have remained a liberal.”

Political journalist Pál Dániel Rényi, who wrote a 2021 biography of Orbán, agreed. “I think he’s fascinated by power itself. I think that’s what drives him most. If we were living at a time when liberalism was on the rise, he’d be a liberal,” he said.

Instead, Orbán “realized in the ‘90s that being a nationalist, being a conservative would give him more freedom about how he could govern and control and build communities. It’s easier to build communities in Hungary if you’re a traditionalist. And in the 1990s, there was a huge socialist party and quite strong liberal party, while the conservative party, the MDF, was falling apart,” Rényi said.

“It was obvious to him that he had to move to the right in order to grab the political space.”

And along this path, Orbán studied right-wing role models overseas. During trips to the U.S. in the early 1990s he became interested in the Republican Party’s political infrastructure, Molnár said. Rényi, meanwhile, noted that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had fascinated Orbán.

“Berlusconi’s example was very important for Orbán. The way he did conservatism, the way he shaped the party he founded around him, the colloquial language he adopted so that the average man and woman could understand him, and his fusion of football and politics and the political instrumentalism of the game,” Renyi observed.

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is pictured speaking to the press in Rome on Aug. 30, 2019. | Simona Granati – Corbis/Getty Images

Much like Berlusconi, who owned the AC Milan football club, Orbán founded a youth academy in his hometown of Felcsút, which morphed into a football team with a 4,000-seat stadium — big enough to fit the entire village population twice over. 

Also, “Orbán closes out his speeches with előre magyarország — or “forward Hungary” — in a clear homage to Berlusconi, whose party [is called] Forza Italia,” said Rényi.

Evil empire

For Frank Furedi, an Orbán ally who heads the Brussels branch of the Hungarian government-backed Mathias Corvinus Collegium, it’s really “the EU that’s changed” and grown more liberal and assertive in undermining the national sovereignty of member countries.

“I think Orbán would see his journey as a seamless transition. I think that at a certain point, the hostility of the EU had an important impact on his outlook. You have to remember that the leader he replaced in Budapest was the EU’s boy. And Brussels was really upset that he lost the election to Fidesz in 2010,” Furedi said. “I think that’s the key dynamic.”

Furedi also highlighted Orbán’s response to the 2015 refugee crisis as a turning point. “Until [then], Orbán was regarded with suspicion by the EU establishment but still tolerated. However, when he clashed with the migration policy embraced by the European Commission, tolerance gave way to animosity. That many member states are now adopting Orbán’s approach to mass illegal migration means that from the Commission’s perspective, everything that Orbán does is unforgivable,” he said.

By that reading, in Orbán’s mind, Brussels has replaced Russia as Hungary’s “occupying” force.

In his election campaigns since 2010, Orbán has frequently portrayed Hungary as a country under siege, rekindling the imagery of a permanent threat from bigger neighbors, supranational powers or dark financial forces. It’s an approach that mines a thick seam of historical grievance stretching back to 1848, when Hungary rebelled against Habsburg rule and sought independence.

In a 2011 speech he said: “In 1848, we would not be dictated to by Vienna, and in 1956, we would not be dictated to from Moscow. And now, we will not be dictated to from Brussels, or from anywhere.”

It continues to be a working strategy. “In Budapest, people on the whole hate the idea of cozying up to Russia. But in the countryside, I think Orbán’s warnings about Hungary getting dragged into a war resonate,” observed Victor Sebestyen, a historian, author and Orbán critic.

However, not everybody is convinced it isn’t Orbán himself who has changed.

In one of his poems, Molnár recalls a conversation he had with the young politician — it highlights the difference between the Orbán of 1989 and the prime minister today:

What if we manage to create democracy but someone will get too much power again?

No way, you said. 

But what if it happens? I asked again. 

If someone gets too much power again, that person will be in trouble with me, you said.