Hungary’s Viktor Orban relishes his role as Trump’s favorite European ally

BRUSSELS — Some European leaders might be quietly dreading a possible Donald Trump comeback, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban can’t wait.

“We will open several bottles of champagne if Trump is back,” Orban declared to reporters this week during a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

Since Hungary took up the rotating presidency of the European Council in July — with the slogan “Make Europe Great Again” — Orban has tried to make the most of that elevated platform. He has asserted himself as the standard-bearer of a resurgent right wing across the continent. And, eschewing standard diplomatic protocol, he has unabashedly championed Trump’s reelection campaign.

In Strasbourg this week, Orban told reporters that Trump would immediately act “to manage a peace” between Ukraine and Russia if he is elected president, “so we don’t have as European leaders any time to waste.”

The Hungarian prime minister is trying “to sell himself as an important Trump whisperer, as a crucial interlocutor or liaison for the next U.S. president,” said Daniel Hegedüs, a regional director at the German Marshall Fund think tank.

“He is trying to still increase his influence or just his visibility in the last moments [before the election], because he knows very well that the result in November is also in some respect a make-or-break moment for him,” Hegedüs said. “He bet everything on Trump.”

The former U.S. president, who has often embraced strongman leaders, has praised Orban on the campaign trail. During last month’s presidential debate with the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump cited support from Orban as the prime example of how much he is respected by world leaders.

“Viktor Orban said … ‘the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, who has been critical of the Hungarian government for its muzzling of independent media and civil society voices, expressed concerns about such personalized overtures.

The United States has “alliances with countries, not personalities within them,” Pressman said. “We should be wary of foreign leaders who seek to convert their alliance with the United States into something between big personalities instead.”

For Washington, Orban’s latest declarations and his deepening relationship with Putin were “reflective of a country that has chosen a path of isolation from its allies and its partners in Europe, and for no good reason,” Pressman added.

“I would say that Hungary has never been more isolated from its allies and partners, including the United States,” he told The Washington Post.

If Hungary is playing an outsize role in Europe, it’s largely because Orban has become the European Union’s disrupter in chief. Assuming the customary honors of an address to the European Parliament on Wednesday, he said he had come to convince lawmakers that “the European Union needs to change.”

But while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been touted as an example of how a far-right leader can work from within the establishment, Orban’s strategy has been to stand in the way.

Orban and the E.U. have been at odds for years, but his moves to hold up aid for Ukraine have become a recurring headache for Brussels.

It is largely because of Orban that the United States has expressed reservations about moving forward on a deal to provide loans to Ukraine using windfall profits on frozen Russian assets. Washington wants assurances that Moscow-friendly Hungary wouldn’t soon be in a position to thwart E.U. sanctions and unfreeze those assets.

Orban has also clashed with E.U. leaders over refugee policies — to the point of threatening to bus migrants to the E.U. headquarters in Brussels. He used his address Wednesday to press for stricter border controls on people coming into the 27-nation bloc. He called for “hot spots” outside the E.U. to process asylum claims, an idea of outsourcing that has drawn support in some countries but criticism from human rights groups.

In an unusually fiery rebuttal in the European Parliament on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the E.U.’s executive branch, lambasted Orban over his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. She went through a tally of grievances with Budapest and called Hungary’s move to ease visa rules for Russian nationals a “security risk” for all E.U. countries.

E.U. officials have tried to deny Orban a wider platform, refusing to go to Budapest for informal meetings as would be customary after Hungary assumed the council presidency.

The six-month rotating presidency typically involves shaping the bloc’s agenda and convening meetings. E.U. observers have said the nature of the job limits what Hungary can do. But for some European leaders, the optics were even worse than they had expected — right off the bat.

Orban immediately undertook a self-appointed peace mission, presenting a cease-fire proposal in Kyiv before continuing on to Moscow, Beijing and, finally, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla.

In Strasbourg this week, Orban called the E.U. approach to the war in Ukraine “stupid,” because “you cannot win on the battlefield,” adding that discussions with Russia over a cease-fire would be in Europe’s interests.

Orban has broken with other E.U. and NATO leaders by calling on Ukraine to consider making concessions to Russia.

The Washington Post previously reported that Trump has privately suggested he could end the war by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory.

Orban also suggested that individual E.U. countries should decide whether to keep providing aid to Ukraine. “Those who think that what we are doing as the European Union is good and strategically right, let’s support the Ukrainians. Those who disagree with that, like Hungary, we don’t. That belongs to the national governments,” he told reporters.

In addition to aligning with Trump, Orban may be trying to score political points at home, Hegedüs said. “It very rarely happens that the Hungarian prime minister really has an influence on a global political stage,” he said, “and he tries to sell his message to a domestic audience, that Hungary is really punching above its own weight with Orban.”

Beatriz Rios in Strasbourg and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.