NEW YORK — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is enjoying an unusual moment as the rare NATO ally leader beloved by both American conservatives and the Chinese Communist Party.
Orban’s status as an icon of international conservatism was burnished last month by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who touted the Hungarian leader’s tough border security policies as a victory for national sovereignty. And yet Orban has also drawn applause from Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping — and protests from some Hungarian citizens — due to his enthusiastic economic partnership with Beijing, a relationship maintained in defiance of U.S. warnings that those ties leave Hungary vulnerable to surveillance and even coercion.
“I have made a lot of deals with them, and I can tell you that there were no political issues attached to an economic deal, so far,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the Washington Examiner on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. “So it’s very unfair to say that if you deal with China as a small country, then you sell yourself, because in our case, at least, this is definitely not the case.”
Many other governments are not so sure. Xi acquired a reputation as a “predatory” lender when Chinese officials gained long-term control over a port in Sri Lanka as the impoverished island government struggled to repay its debts. That experience informed officials in Lithuania, when they refused to allow China to purchase a controlling stake in a major Baltic port; the economic stalemate contributed to Lithuania’s withdrawal from the erstwhile 17+1 format that Xi used as a forum for engagement with many southern and Central European states.
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“Regarding the Lithuanians move: we do consider the . . . now 16+1 format as useful — really useful,” Szijjarto said. “It’s absolutely unfair to characterize this relationship as something that would hurt the European unity, because on none of the meetings, China have mentioned anything about that issue.”
Even so, Szijjarto protested the imposion of human rights sanctions on four Chinese earlier this year, although Hungary declined to veto the European Union’s adoption of those measures.
“Certainly, with regard to China, they are very sensitive, so sometimes it is difficult to get a unified view on one or another issue concerning China,” said a European official from another country that gained independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “It’s all about [the] economy. [Orban] thinks that he needs to deliver to his people on economic cooperation and he doesn’t care that much about the rest of the issues.”
Szijjarto emphasized that China is Hungary’s largest trading partner, outside the European Union, with the United States following in second place, as he cautioned against exacerbating the U.S. competition with China.
“We are members of the European Union, members of NATO, which both indicate our stance, but we are not interested in the new Cold War,” Szijjarto said. “We hope that there will be some, let’s say, more pragmatic cooperation between the two superpowers.”
In any case, Szijjarto and other Hungarian officials seem most comfortable arrayed against Western European liberals, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed about a million Syrian refugees into Germany during the 2015 crisis. Szijjarto, likewise, dismisses foreign misgivings about China’s economic influence in Budapest with sharp elbow at western European hypocrisy.
“When it comes to our cooperation with China, the Western European countries are jealous,” he said.
And yet, Lithuania’s pronounced wariness of China could portend a new dynamic on the eastern flank of NATO and the European Union. Lithuanian defense officials reported this week that certain Chinese-made smartphones carry surveillance technology that allows China to censor communications about sensitive topics such as Tibet.
“Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible,” Lithuanian defense deputy minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters.
Hungary, by contrast, hosts the regional hub for Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which U.S. officials and lawmakers regard as an asset for Chinese spy services who seek to “erode freedom” in Western democracies. And Szijjarto defended Orban’s interest in other Chinese funding for other projects, including a Fudan University satellite campus in Hungary — which reportedly depends on a $1.5 billion loan from Beijing — and a $1.9 billion loan to finance the construction of a railway to Belgrade, Serbia.
“These projects make our country richer and stronger,” Szijjarto said. “When it comes to the reconstruction of the railway line between Belgrade and Budapest — with that, we’re going to offer the quickest delivery route for the goods which are shipped into the harbors in Greece, and then delivered on the rail to the western part of Europe.”
That plan gives Orban a central role in China’s plan to link the ancient Greek port of Piraeus, where Beijing gained a controlling stake in 2016, to Hungary’s wealthier neighbors. “It’s not like it’s benefiting only Hungary . . . Hungary is hosting a Huawei hub that is working throughout many European countries, including Germany,” the other European official said.
Orban’s domestic political opponents, after a three landslide defeats to his Fidesz party, sense that Hungarian voters are souring on the prime minister’s affinity for China. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony backed protests that forced Orban to put the Fudan University project to a referendum, and the controversy might fuel a bid to challenge Orban for national leadership.
“We didn’t protest against the Chinese people but against the underhanded sale of Hungary’s sovereignty,” Karacsony said in June.
Those protests may seem to offer hope to American and Western European critics of Orban, who regard him as a threat to democracy in Hungary. Reporters Without Borders denounced him as an “enemy of press freedom” earlier this year, arguing that “oligarchs close to Fidesz” now dominate the information space, while “the remaining independent media” are blackballed by the government.
“Their journalists are systematically denigrated in pro-government media, which call them purveyors of ‘fake news,” RSF’s denunciation said. “This charge was made a criminal offense during the Covid-19 crisis, with the effect of self-censorship on journalists and their sources.”
Hungarian police cautioned last year that “a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime,” after they arrested a man who wrote a Facebook post referring indirectly to Orban as a “cruel tyrant.” (The man, who was not charged, said afterward that the experience “would probably shut me up.”)
Szijjarto maintained that Hungary’s record on press freedom has been distorted. “Reporters Without Borders has an easy task here, because they can say anything about the Hungarian media system because no one speaks Hungarian, so you can’t check,” he said. “All market leaders of the certain sectors in the media are all anti-government media outlets . . . So these kinds of reports are politically biased.”
His team is very willing to run against the international left. “Liberals hate us,” Szijjarto said. “No question that our policy is very well based on Christian democracy. It’s a conservative and patriotic foreign policy.”
Orban has benefited, according to some of his more conservative critics, from the tendency among liberals to make no distinction between policies that appeal to social conservatives and Orban’s tactics to remain in power. Those policy disputes could obscure the points of agreement between Orban and, for instance, Merkel — and the salient problem that their concord presents to U.S. foreign policymakers.
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“If Germany would share more of the U.S. view towards China, in which we have to use our economic cooperation as a tool to put more pressure on China . . . we would have much a stronger EU position and our view would be closer to the one in the United States,” the other European official said.
