Proximity to Moscow: Vladimir Putin (right), President of Russia, and Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, during a joint press conference after their meeting in the Kremlin in September 2018
Image: dpa
Viktor Orbán has maintained a close relationship with Russian President Putin for years – and has also benefited from this domestically. Could it now cost him the election in Hungary?
Wwill the issue of Ukraine affect the elections in Hungary on April 3? That’s what we asked Peter Marki-Zay, the Hungarian opposition’s lead candidate, when he visited Berlin in February to present his ideas to a German audience. His reply was: “Not very much, I think. Hungarians are not very interested in foreign policy.” Perhaps, he joked, thanks to Orbán’s good behavior, Putin won’t conquer Hungary after all. “But seriously: I don’t think that will have a big impact.” That was one day before the “turn of the era”: The Russian president’s began the following night Wladimir Putin ordered invasion of Ukraine.
Six weeks later, the war is the central campaign issue in Hungary, and the only question that remains is whether the majority of voters support the Prime Minister’s slogan Viktor Orbán follow or that of the opposition. Orbán says: war or peace. Marki-Zay says: East or West. One slogan insinuates that the opposition will draw Hungary into the Ukraine war, the other that Orbán wants to make Hungary a vassal of Russia.