Ahead of a special European Council meeting on March 6; where does Hungary stand?

HUNGARY - In Brief 04 Mar 2025 by Istvan Racz

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Amidst the political whirlwind of recent days, created and actively fuelled by the US president around Ukraine/Russia/Europe and a potentially destructive trade war due to his new penalty-level tariffs on various items in various directions, it may be useful to establish where Hungary's government stands, in terms of known facts, rather than at the level of hearsay and media speculation, which are unfortunately richly present in the current, uncertain circumstances. So, after the truly disastrous televised meeting of Messrs. Trump and Zelenskiy the other day (which in our view did not change anything of content but let the world know clearly how far apart the two leaders' views stand), PM Orbán took sides with Mr. Trump, as one would have expected, but not in a 100% clear-cut way. First, his foreign minister appeared enthusiastic about Mr. Trump's performance, but Mr. Orbán himself only posted, in a somewhat cryptic fashion, that "strong men make peace, weak men make war". And then he appeared on television on Saturday (which is not his usual way), in which he expressed concern about the fact that the presidents of the US and Ukraine could not agree, to put it mildly, which "may affect us as well," he said. In second phase, Mr. Orbán, once again unsurprisingly, was not invited to Mr. Starmer's emergency meeting of European leaders: obviously, he is not regarded as a natural candidate for participation in the newly formulating European (plus Canada) "coalition of the willing", for his well-known special relationships with Mr. Trump and Russia, and his usual outlier position on a large number of foreign policy issues. To this meeting, Mr. Orbán's summary comment was: "Th...