Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban sought to rally American conservatives in his defense.
The crowd gave Orban the welcome he might have expected. After all, the prime minister was recently reelected with a massive parliamentary majority. This reflects a popularity that Western critics too often exaggerate as the product of domestic repression. The truth is that Orban’s policies on immigration and LGBT issues are broadly supported by most Hungarians. And while the European Union has raised legitimate concerns over the rule of law in Hungary, the EU remains a hypocritical and largely undemocratic institution divorced from those it supposedly serves.
Nonetheless, Orban is no friend of America. Instead, he is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest partner in the EU and one of China’s closest partners in the West.
Orban hypocritically sought to play down these concerns at CPAC.
Claiming solidarity with Ukraine over Russia’s invasion, Orban left out how he had offered tacit support to Putin shortly before the Russian president launched the war. But rather than condemn Putin, Orban used his CPAC speech to complain about refugee flows from Ukraine. Then came the kicker: He called on the United States to compromise with Russia. As Orban put it, “without American-Russian talks, there will never be peace in Ukraine.” This is music to Putin’s ears, reflecting the exact opposite approach to that which would best serve Ukrainian and Western security: the reinforcement of Ukraine’s military with longer-range weapons.
Imploring the audience to demand that politicians speak the truth, Orban presented himself as a committed anti-racist who simply wants to secure Hungarian borders. He suggested that those who claim otherwise are “simply idiots” who serve “industrial fake news corporations.” The problem? Even some of Orban’s own allies disagree. Following a speech last month in which Orban warned against the intermingling of races, one of his longtime advisers resigned over what she said was his “Nazi” rhetoric.
More absurd was Orban’s rhetoric on communism.
He rightly hailed his fellow citizens for how they had “defeated communism” during the Cold War. This is an important message. After all, the story of Hungarian resistance to Soviet communism is truly heroic. But Orban added that the rise of new wave communists meant “We have to defeat them again.” Unfortunately, Orban left out the fact that he is a close friend of Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party. Orban’s government is frequently praised by Beijing and opposed efforts at the most recent NATO leaders summit to identify China’s challenges to the alliance.
This relationship isn’t simply rhetorical.
Orban welcomed a $1.5 billion campus for China’s Fudan University in Budapest. In 2019, Fudan’s charter was stripped of a commitment to “freedom of thought.” As I noted last October, the “charter instead gained a commitment to ‘arming the minds of teachers and students with Xi Jinping’s new era of socialist ideology with Chinese characteristics.’ It remains unclear how these values comport with Orban’s Christian nationalism.” I guess money talks louder than Christian nationalism and sovereignty.
Orban is his people’s democratically elected leader. He retains support that most Western politicians can only dream of. But an American friend?
Forget it.
