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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an FT contributing editor, the chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna
“There’s a man — Viktor Orbán — did anyone ever hear of him?” Donald Trump asked in one of his recent rallies, referring to the Hungarian prime minister. “He’s probably . . . one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.”
Trump’s slip of the tongue attracted ridicule, but in a curious way he was right. The Hungarian leader’s ambitions go far beyond ruling a country of 10mn people. Orbán wants to be the leader of a new Europe. And this desire was on full display in Brussels on Thursday night and in the early hours of Friday.
In the run-up to the latest summit of EU leaders this week, there was a growing concern that Orbán would veto the opening of accession negotiations with Ukraine, while agreeing to endorse the EU budget, which included a €50bn aid package for Kyiv. In the end, it worked the other way round.
After aggressively attacking Kyiv, Orbán left the room when the decision on EU enlargement was taken. This allowed for a unanimous decision from the European Council. Some hours later he vetoed the adoption of the requested budgetary support for Ukraine.
Although the summit was a further demonstration of the Hungarian premier’s isolation, it also showed that while Orbán might occasionally leave the room, his ambition is not to exit the EU. And if the EU cannot solve its Orbán problem, there will be a growing risk of further fragmentation and political paralysis. It is long past time for European leaders to re-read the history of the disintegration of the Habsburg empire and the pivotal role that the Hungarians played in it.
European leaders are now misreading Orbán in the same way they misread Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022. They assumed Orbán’s hardline positions were basically a bargaining strategy — a way of winkling more money out of Brussels. However, this time around it was not primarily about money, it was about the future shape of the EU.
Orbán is looking to 2024 as a revolutionary moment when a combination of factors could change the trajectory of Europe. After a decade of crises, Europeans are demoralised and mistrustful of their governments. The far right is on the rise. Migration is back on top of the political agenda. The failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has fed doubts that Kyiv will be able to regain territory occupied by Russia.
Orbán hoped to exploit the EU’s crisis of leadership. And his ploy seemed rational, with Ursula von der Leyen approaching the end of her term as president of the European Commission and Germany paralysed by the rigidity of its institutional culture. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron suffered a major political defeat this week when his migration legislation was voted down in the National Assembly. As for the traditionally crucial Franco-German relationship, that has become a toxic cocktail of annoyance and depression.
It’s customary in politics for politicians to repeat policies that once brought them success. Orbán’s challenge to Ukraine’s potential EU membership resembles his confrontation with Brussels over migration in 2015. But this time the strategy failed and he finds himself more isolated than before. His calculation that eastern European leaders would fear losing money to Ukraine, while those from western Europe would balk at integrating another large country from the east, turned out to be wrong.
It is crucial to understand the reasons behind Orbán’s defeat. European leaders realise that blocking Ukraine’s road to the EU would have been a symbolic victory for Putin. Only strong security guarantees and a promised European future could persuade Ukrainians to accept territorial concessions at some point.
Paradoxically, the fact that some of Orbán’s ideological allies on the right are now in government has weakened his claim to speak on behalf of the people against the elites. Leaders such as the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seek to increase their influence inside the EU by showing a willingness to co-operate with rather than paralyse the bloc.
Orbán’s machinations also coincided with Donald Tusk’s return as prime minister of Poland. This is more bad news for Orbán. Tusk’s presence means the Hungarian leader can no longer claim to speak for eastern Europe, as well as reminding him of his own political vulnerability. For many, the defeat of Orbán’s allies from the Law and Justice party in the recent Polish election was also a defeat for Orbán.
In a recently published book on his government’s grand strategy, the Hungarian PM’s namesake and close adviser, Balázs Orbán, describes Budapest’s preferred strategy as the “hussar cut”. Traditionally, the task of the hussars was to strike first, typically against a much larger enemy. Their success, Balázs Orbán argues, depended on whether there was an opportunity to deploy this tactic. Otherwise, superior numbers would eventually grind them down. That is exactly what happened in Brussels this week. But it is unclear whether the defeat of Orbán’s “hussar cut” was temporary or permanent.
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