Trump and Putin Are Trying to Rescue Hungarian Strongman Orbán from Electoral Defeat
It is unclear if they'll succeed but they show that the world's autocrats are working hard to keep each other in power
Hungary is five months away from its most meaningful electoral contest in a decade and a half.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who won the last four elections in landslides and is seeking his fifth consecutive term (and sixth overall), has been in power since 2010. But the country’s poor economic performance and punishingly high food prices, growing popular resistance to rampant corruption and cronyism under Orbán’s tenure, and, perhaps most importantly, a formidable political challenger in Peter Magyar, have left Hungary’s strongman leader the most vulnerable he has ever been. Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party who left it in early 2024, and the ex-husband to Orbán’s former minister of justice, has built an opposition party from scratch that is consistently topping the polls. All of that means Orbán is now in the uncomfortable—and largely unfamiliar—position of having to actually run a real campaign to win reelection.
But the good news for Orbán—and bad news for supporters of liberal democracy—is that he has Donald Trump on his side.
Birds of a Feather
The partnership makes total sense as the two have considerable ideological overlap—they’re both openly contemptuous of liberal democracy, obsessively anti-immigrant, actively committed to patterning society after Christian nationalist and nativist ideals, and all too willing to wield government power to control the information landscape.
Neither has been shy about publicly acknowledging these governing affinities. Orbán has been a long-time admirer of Trump and even endorsed him during his presidential contest against Hillary Clinton in 2016, well before many others who are now in Trump’s orbit. In 2024, after once again endorsing Trump, the Hungarian prime minister visited Mar-a-Lago—but conspicuously skipped out on meeting anyone in the administration actually in office at the time. Now Trump is repaying the kindness by using the power and influence of the United States to lift Orbán’s chances next year.
Orbán has not merely concerned himself with wooing Trump individually—he’s also worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump’s MAGA movement, even becoming an entry point for CPAC’s incursion into Europe. After that Mar-a-Lago meeting in March of last year, Orbán spoke at a Heritage Foundation event alongside its president, Kevin Roberts—and, following the event, Orbán held a meeting with Steve Bannon at the Hungarian embassy in Washington, D.C. After Trump’s victory last November, Orbán made another pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, taking time to meet and pose for pictures with Elon Musk. Orbán has been interviewed many times by Tucker Carlson.
Trump and MAGA to Orbán’s Rescue
Orbán’s overtures to MAGA have not gone unrewarded.
Recently, Kari Lake, who leads the U.S. Agency for Global Media, announced the U.S. government would stop funding the Hungarian services of Radio Free Europe. This has meant shutting down Szabad Europa, a news portal which used to provide quality Hungarian-language journalism. Hungary ranks near the bottom in Europe on the world press freedom index, and Freedom House rates the country as partly free. Forged by 15 years of political harassment, independent journalism in Hungary has grown lean, tough, and persevering. It will carry on without American help. The real significance of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine Hungary’s free press is what it reveals about the alignment of the United States with authoritarian regimes.
That realignment was on full display during Orbán’s latest meeting with Trump, when he and a large Hungarian delegation visited Washington last month. They were treated to a bilateral lunch at the White House. Orbán sat on the American side of the table, between the U.S. president and vice president, and was introduced by Trump as a “friend.” When the meetings were over, Orbán announced that he had reached a wide-ranging set of agreements with the Trump administration that included an exemption from the most recent batch of U.S. sanctions against Russia—and governments buying banned items from it—and a promise to provide Hungary with a “financial shield” against European Union revenue cuts. That Trump would give Orbán a reprieve from the sanctions regime shouldn’t surprise anyone given that he has long been squishy on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin.
The precise content of these agreements, however, has been hard to pin down. A press release from the State Department mentions neither the sanctions exemption nor the so-called financial shield, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio, responding to a reporter’s question on Nov. 12, stated that Hungary had indeed been granted a one-year exemption from sanctions on Russia. That is not as significant as it sounds, however, as Trump’s recent sanctions concern Russian oil, not natural gas, which Hungary and other European countries rely on heavily for heating and electricity. Moreover, the new sanctions are only directed against two Russian companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Hungary is now free to buy oil from these companies, but as one Hungarian economist pointed out in an interview with Klubrádió (a radio station that Orbán shut down which now operates exclusively online), Hungary could just as easily purchase oil from several non-sanctioned Russian companies or a Turkish company. Although some reports suggest the exemption is a major win for Orbán, it is unlikely to provide a significant boost to Hungary’s ailing economy. It is, nevertheless, symbolically indicative of the U.S.’s willingness to mark out Hungary under Orbán as worthy of special consideration.
Potentially more significant is the “financial shield,” although as yet no one knows for sure what it is. In comments delivered on the plane back to Europe, Orbán boasted, “The fact that we now have a financial shield eliminates quite a few of Brussels’ plans against us. ... The notion that the Hungarian currency can be attacked, that the Hungarian budget can be put in a difficult position, that the Hungarian economy can be strangled from the financing side, can now be forgotten.” Reporters speculated that Orbán might be referring to a currency swap agreement between the Federal Reserve and the Hungarian National Bank. According to the independent Hungarian news outlet Válasz Online, Hungary may be trying to negotiate a swap agreement modeled on the U.S. bailout of Argentina, which demonstrated the Trump administration’s willingness to export American resources to assist the electoral prospects of ideologically like-minded world leaders.
But unlike Argentina, Hungary’s economy is not in danger of financial collapse, which makes the rationale for an Argentina-like swap agreement obscure. What is true is that Orbán’s government is running high budget deficits, and an important part of Orbán’s campaign strategy is to dole out tax cuts and social benefits running up to the election. A “financial shield” from the United States might give Orbán room to increase Hungary’s indebtedness without risking a run on the Hungarian currency. Perhaps this is what the deal is about. Still, reports about a swap agreement should be treated with caution. They have yet to be confirmed by U.S. government sources.
Whatever the case, Trump’s warm reception handed Orbán a big boost at home. Shortly after returning to Hungary, Orbán gave a lengthy interview with a semi-independent television network in which he presented himself as a great statesman and political genius. Bragging that he has known and worked with every American president since George H.W. Bush, except for Joe Biden, Orbán explained how one needs to deal with each president differently: “Politics is a practical artform. You can produce theories—that’s important; you can produce studies—very important ... but the moments that count are the ones you’ve experienced. That’s the real knowledge; that’s what’s valuable.” He then went on to describe how he skillfully negotiated with Trump.
The reporter inquired about differing accounts of the deal. Orbán has claimed that he secured a permanent exemption from U.S. sanctions, whereas, as I noted above, the State Department has said the exemption is only for one year. “We shook hands,” Orbán explained. He went on:
How does this work? The president said he had listened. He said, ‘I understand, I’ll grant the exemption.’ And we shook hands on it. That means that as long as he’s the president and I’m the prime minister, the agreement will last. If conditions change, we’ll need to renegotiate.
The clear implication is that, should Orbán lose the election in April, Hungary’s economic situation will worsen.
Thanks to Trump, Orbán has scored a clear communications victory in the middle of an important election campaign. Indeed, this is the first time Orbán has been able to drive the news cycle since Peter Magyar appeared on the scene almost two years ago. Two recent polls taken after the trip to Washington show that Orbán’s party has closed the gap on Magyar’s. Nevertheless, to what extent, and in what direction, Orbán’s friendship with Trump will influence Hungarian voters is still unclear. The deep structural problems in Hungarian society which contributed to Magyar’s rise are unchanged. Orbán’s “Trump deal”—and, again, we still don’t know how much substance it has—won’t improve the state of Hungary’s economy, although perhaps it will allow Orbán to indulge in a little more social largesse.
Authoritarian Axis
But Orbán isn’t just getting help from Trump. He’s also getting help from Vladimir Putin. The Russians are known to interfere in European elections through disinformation campaigns. In Hungary’s case, they can coordinate their efforts with the Hungarian government. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has issued statements about Magyar that follow Hungarian talking points exactly. They assert that Magyar is working as an agent of interests in Brussels seeking “regime change” in Hungary.
On top of that, there are reasons to worry about more direct Russian interference in Hungary’s election—a possibility that is suggested, though not proven, by recent attacks on Magyar’s political party. A large part of Magyar’s strength comes from his skill in organizing a ground game. This past fall, for example, his Tisza party launched an app designed to help supporters connect, communicate, and organize. In late October, the app was hacked. Allegedly the personal information of 200,000 Tisza supporters was stolen. Almost immediately, government news outlets started disclosing the stolen information, in blatant violation of the law. The clear purpose was to frighten people away from associating with Tisza, and put them on notice that supporting Magyar’s party comes with personal risk. According to a report by the independent newspaper Magyar Hang, the prime minister’s Cabinet Office collected the names of all public employees who had downloaded the Tisza app. At least one person in Hungary’s foreign ministry claims to have been fired after his supervisors discovered he had the app on his phone.
In a public statement, Magyar indicated that the Tisza app had been subjected to persistent attack from international hackers since its launch, “clearly backed by Russian services.” Although he provided no evidence, the scale of the hack, and most importantly, the way the hack was coordinated with Hungary’s government-funded news outlets, suggests the involvement of state actors—if not the Russians, then the Hungarians.
These sorts of authoritarian tactics certainly don’t hurt Orbán’s standing with the Trump administration—led, as it is, by a figure who once actively courted illegal hacking as a campaign strategy against his presidential opponent. And, of course, one shouldn’t rule out the possibility that Trump or Vance could visit Orbán in Budapest sometime before the election. Many commentators in Hungary think there’s a chance. After all, as we all know, birds of a feather flock together.
Whether or not Trump and Putin will succeed in keeping Orbán in power, the fact that they share a common aim makes clear that today’s illiberal strongmen aren’t sitting back to watch international affairs unfold—they are actively consolidating their efforts in furtherance of their shared ideological principles. No matter what happens in Hungary, this is the world’s new reality, and a forceful liberal coalition will need to emerge in order to stop it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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An electoral defeat of Victor Orban would be as big a disaster as Ukraine defeating Russia.
They all must hang together or surely they will all hang separately.