Hungary celebrates its legislative elections this Sunday, a key event not only for them, but for the European Union, since for the first time, the opposition has real options to win the elections, thus ending 16 years of government by the far-right Viktor Orbán.
Orbán, who came to power in 2010, has become the “Trojan Horse” of Russia and Vladimir Putin in the European Union, Donald Trump’s friend in Brussels and the godfather of the European extreme right. The World Order explains in Julia in the wave everything that Hungary is at stake in this very important electoral event.
Russia’s “Trojan Horse” in the European Union
With these elections, “we risk having a window of opportunity to build a fairly well-established foreign policy” because, beyond these elections, there are no other major electoral events in the main European powers in the near future. Therefore, if Orbán leaves, the main European powers may find themselves very aligned in foreign policy.
Eduardo Saldaña and Blas Moreno say that the Hungarian president is the “Trojan Horse” of the Kremlin at the European level. In fact, it was recently discovered that the Hungarian Foreign Minister was in frequent contact with Lavrov and had told him that if they needed anything, he (Orbán), being inside Europe, could convey information to them.
“It is not only that the Orbán Government is problematic due to its relations with Russia, but it is the main driving force of the entire extreme right at the European level. It has helped build the structures of national parties, it has helped give them financing (Vox in Spain), it has helped align the extreme right at the European level and it has become a symbol of that liberal model,” they explain.
What is at stake for the European Union with these elections?
These elections are very important for the European Union because they would imply a victory for democracy within the European project and, above all, they could serve to align the main European powers over the next 10 months, until the electoral cycles begin next year.
Viktor Orbán finds in both Putin and Trump two important allies to oppose the European project because they are three governments hostile to him from within and from without. In fact, US Vice President JD Vance himself, who traveled to Hungary to support Orbán before going to Pakistan to negotiate the peace agreement with Iran, said this about relations between Hungary, the United States, the European Union and Ukraine:
“We would never do it, but do you know how easy it would be for the US to threaten Hungary with economic sanctions like the EU does? We would never do it because we respect our allies and what they decide to do democratically. What is happening in Brussels with these foreign influence operations is a scandal.”
“Destroy the European Union from within and without”
In the opinion of The World Order, Vance “does not understand how the European Union works because Brussels has sanctioned Hungary because it has deviated from community norms, not because Brussels wants to interfere in Hungarian democracy.”
But, despite this, what statements like this one from Vance reveal is that “there is a project from within and from without to destroy the European Union, which is instigated by Orbán, but which finds support in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA. So we are at risk for European continuity.”
Therefore, this Sunday’s elections may be the “last chance to save democracy” and, in fact, the opposition led by Péter Magyar has a lot of hope. But we should not take anything for granted because Orbán can lose, but “he controls many structures of the State and is going to try to retain the power of some of them and blow up any room for maneuver that the opposition has.”
