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Viktor Orbán will visit the White House on Friday as Hungary’s far-right prime minister tries to broker another summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that Orbán’s advisers claim could help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Orbán, who has proposed hosting the summit in Budapest, will also seek an exemption from US sanctions against Russian energy in what will be a major test of Trump’s tougher line on the Kremlin after he accused Putin of slow-rolling negotiations to end the conflict.
Yet Orbán’s priority, insiders say, is to get Trump to visit Hungary as he faces an unprecedented domestic challenge from a new opposition leader ahead of the parliamentary elections in April. A visit by Trump would reinforce Orbán’s role as a statesman and energise his conservative base, his advisers believe.
“Orbán wants Trump to come to Budapest before the elections,” said a source working for a Hungarian government foreign policy institution. “This is a top priority. They will discuss the Russian gas issue, but the thing Orbán cares about the most is the elections.”
Zsuzsanna Végh, political analyst and program officer at the German Marshall Fund, said such a visit would be “a major political favor” from the US president. Trump has been notably absent from all major international events in Budapest, including a string of CPAC conferences.
Often referred to as Putin’s Trojan horse in the EU by his critics, Orbán has been cultivating ties with Trump since his first presidency while building an international far-right network from South America to Europe. The US president and his circle have long praised Orbán’s Hungary, depicting it as a model to follow, a “conservative Disneyland”.
Gergely Gulyás, Orbán’s chief of staff, told a press conference that Friday’s meeting was an “opportunity for the two heads of state to … determine the roadmap that could lead to a US–Russian meeting and, through that, to a Russian–Ukrainian peace agreement”.
A previous meeting collapsed after the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, took a hardline position during a phone call with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Yet Orbán was likely to raise the issue again, observers said, as he seeks to feed into Trump’s desire to play peacemaker in international conflicts around the world.
Holding a summit between Trump and Putin – who has been indicted by the international criminal court – would “really stick it in the eye of the other European leaders” to see Putin “being housed and greeted warmly in the EU”, said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Yet Orbán so far had played less of a role as spoiler in Europe since Trump’s re-election, Bergmann added, as the administration had worked more closely with other European leaders than expected.
US officials have said that Trump had clearly stated his desire for all of Europe to cut energy ties with Russia and noted that the US had punished other countries like India for continuing to buy Russian oil.
But European officials are skeptical about the White House’s intentions. One senior European diplomat said the US demand that Europe stop buying Russian oil in order to levy sanctions against the Kremlin was never supposed to be enacted.
“There was no expectation that Hungary or Slovakia would ever cut its energy ties with Russia … and as a result the United States would not have to do anything,” the diplomat said.
The Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, told the Guardian on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly that Hungary cutting energy ties with Russia was a “dream world”. Gulyas last week said that Hungary’s goal was to “get an exemption from US sanctions so the purchases of Russian gas and crude oil could continue in a steady manner”.
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Following the US announcement of sanctions against Russian oil majors Lukoil and Rosneft, observers said that the meeting will serve as a litmus test of the administration’s commitment to increasing pressure on Russia by enforcing sanctions abroad.
“The meeting will give us an indication of how seriously Trump is taking the efforts to sanction Russian energy,” said Bergmann. “If it doesn’t come up, then we clearly don’t care … If it is a major topic, then maybe it is something that sends a signal that we’re willing to take a harder line.”
Orbán and his delegation of ministers, business executives and pro-Orbán influencers in self-styled Mega (make Europe great again) hats are flying on a rental Wizz Air plane this time. The far-right leader has been frequently criticized in the past for using private jets to travel to football games and other non-official events.
At a press conference in Budapest on Wednesday, Szijjártó described the Trump presidency as the “golden age” of US-Hungary relations, emphasizing: “Everything changed when Donald Trump took office. Instead of hostility, Hungary is now viewed as a friend in Washington.”
“He definitely wants to capitalize on the visit politically, and this is already evident from the social media coverage,” Végh said. “I can’t remember any recent bilateral meeting that has received this much attention online.
“No matter the outcome, domestically it will be framed as a huge success, with Orbán posing as an internationally respected leader,” she added. The campaign of Orbán’s Fidesz party is partly built on the Hungarian leader’s “international influence, which helps to divert attention from the domestic governance failures of Fidesz”.
Végh said a key question is whether Orbán will be able to speak privately with Trump. “It would be in Orbán’s best interest to show that he was able to talk to Trump one-on-one,” she said. “Such a meeting may cause concern for Ukraine and its international allies.”
