The peoples of Central Europe have a habit of being indigestible to great continental empires. By the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union had become exhausted by its restive European satellites, a feeling Habsburg rulers had known decades earlier—and that’s just the twentieth century. So it was inevitable that this region would prove a thorn in the side of the liberal superstate project headquartered in Brussels.
The latest blow came last Thursday, when President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed the next U.S.–Russia “peace summit” will occur in Budapest. Orbán is reaping the fruits of the “considerable political capital [he put] into making Hungary a peacemaker in the conflict,” as Mason Letteau Stallings wrote in The American Conservative last week. It is an explicit rebuke to the European governing class that has clamored for a martial foreign policy it cannot support unaided, groveled before Trump when necessary, and attempted to silence Orbán at every step.
To date, the European Commission has withheld from Hungary over €19 billion in investment and Covid-19 recovery funds over what European officials call concerns over “rule of law” and “judicial independence.” Though Hungary has experienced the superstate’s worst financial and diplomatic penalties, EU bodies have similarly punished Poland, prior to its 2023 change of government, and threatened Slovakia.
Despite it all, Orbán remains generally popular among Hungarian voters—distasteful behavior from the longstanding opposition camp helps—and his reelection prospects next year are fair-to-promising, depending on whom you ask. The Hungarian leader has often been isolated on the European stage, but regional allies, particularly in the informal regional foursome known as the Visegrád Group (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), are increasingly emboldened to accompany him in European-liberal iconoclasm.
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