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Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán is set to meet Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, in a rare sign of support from an EU leader for the Republican frontrunner.
The Hungarian leader cuts a lonely figure in the EU as he openly supports Trump, a sceptic of the US’s transatlantic alliances, for a second term in the White House. The prevailing view in the rest of the bloc is that Trump would be unpredictable and difficult to deal with and increase security risks in Europe if he forced Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia on Moscow’s terms.
“The only serious chance for peace now is if he’s able to come back — that’s my only hope,” Orbán said of Trump last week. “Otherwise, the war between Ukraine and Russia will be long, getting closer and closer to Hungary and creating more and more strong dilemmas for European politics.”
Orbán’s contrarian views have held up EU sanctions against Russia, Finland and Sweden’s Nato accessions and more recently, a €50bn aid package for Ukraine. He also broke ranks with western allies last year when he met with Vladimir Putin after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes in Ukraine.
The Hungarian premier has had tense relationships with Democratic administrations, including that of President Joe Biden, whose officials have called Orbán out for his erosion of democratic standards in Hungary and said his more recent conduct posed a direct risk to US security interests in Europe.
Orbán has rejected the accusations and said he was not Putin’s “Trojan horse” in Europe.
Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine “in one day” and threatened Nato members who don’t meet the alliance’s defence spending targets with allowing Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” with them.
The former US president has met Orbán multiple times, with the Hungarian leader also being a guest at Republican events.
“Viktor Orbán [is] a very great leader, very strong man,” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire earlier this year. “Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s nice to have a strong man running your country.”
The US ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, said it was regrettable that Orbán chose to engage with the US on a partisan basis.
The Hungarian PM identified the current US government as one of his top “adversaries” of Hungary and has accused the Biden administration of “trying to ‘defeat’ him or overthrow him”, Pressman told the Financial Times. “These are all very concerning statements.”
The ambassador said it was clear that Budapest’s strategy was to “wait out the current administration”.
“It’s not a foreign policy. It’s a foreign fantasy,” Pressman said. “Hungary should have a bilateral relationship with the United States of America — not a particular party in the United States of America.”
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