Europe’s patience with Viktor Orban starts to wear thin

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, kicked off the new year with the stirring declaration that his country had just enjoyed its most successful decade of the past century, “and the next 10 years could be even better”. A couple of months into 2021, the outlook for Orban and his abrasive brand of conservative nationalism is more uncertain than he predicted.

Orban’s ruling Fidesz party broke last week with the centre-right European People’s party, the European parliament’s largest political group. This rupture is about more than reshuffling factions in a legislature to which most EU citizens pay little attention. It is symptomatic of a widening gulf in values and policies between western European governments and some of their counterparts in central and eastern Europe, of which Hungary is the chief example.

For western European leaders, the danger is that these rifts may open up opportunities for non-EU powers, such as China, Russia, Turkey and the UK, to disrupt EU influence in central and eastern Europe. This problem extends farther afield into the Balkans. Serbia, for instance, imitates Hungary in keeping a certain distance from Brussels and cultivating warm relations with Beijing and Moscow.

However, if there are risks for the EU, there are risks for Hungary, too. Until last week, Orban benefited from the political protection and respectability that membership of the EPP group conferred on him. In particular, he counted on the restraint of the German chancellor Angela Merkel, her Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union, their Bavarian sister-party.

Now, the German centre-right’s patience with Orban’s corrosion of democracy and the rule of law is wearing thin. What is more, broader European and worldwide trends are not necessarily working in Orban’s favour. In Washington, there is less sympathy for him in the White House under President Joe Biden than under Donald Trump, who shared Orban’s contempt for liberal democratic norms.

In Europe, Germany’s Bundestag elections in September may produce a coalition government uniting the CDU and CSU with the Greens, a party sharply critical of Orban. Equally interesting are developments in Italy. Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-right League and a former Italian deputy premier, often lined up with Orban in attacking the EU. This enabled the Hungarian leader to portray himself as having like-minded friends in high places in western European capitals. But now Salvini has thrown his support behind Mario Draghi’s strongly pro-EU government in Rome, leaving Orban even more isolated in western Europe.

A useful insight into Orban’s predicament comes from a statement he issued on his party’s break with the EPP. He labelled it “Samizdat No 6”, associating himself with Soviet human rights campaigners who published samizdat, or underground, documents. But Orban is no Andrei Sakharov or Lyudmila Alexeyeva, as he showed in his attack on the EPP. “We must build a European democratic right that offers a home to European citizens who do not want migrants, who do not want multiculturalism, who have not descended into LGBTQ lunacy, who defend Europe’s Christian traditions, who respect the sovereignty of nations,” he wrote.

In his efforts to block EU punishment for alleged Hungarian infringements of the rule of law, Orban may rely on support from leaders in Bulgaria, Poland and Slovenia. But it cannot be ruled out that his deteriorating ties with western Europe will prompt him to double down on his close ties with Russia and China.

Under Orban, Hungary has not only built a privileged gas and atomic energy relationship with Russia, but has exploited the issue of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority to disrupt Kyiv’s co-operation with the EU and Nato. Similarly, Hungary has expanded economic and cultural ties with China. It hosts the telecom group Huawei’s largest supply centre outside China, just when other EU countries are reconsidering their reliance on the company.

Yet in some respects Hungary’s flourishing relations with China go against a recently emerging trend in central and eastern Europe. EU countries such as Lithuania and Romania are less keen on a close Chinese connection than they used to be.

For all these reasons, Orban may struggle to continue his double act of snuggling up to Moscow and Beijing while expecting all the rewards of membership of the west’s main alliance systems. If this act stops, the next 10 years may indeed go well for Hungary, though probably less so for Orban himself.

tony.barber@ft.com