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The Washington Post

Outlook Perspective
Trump loves a strongman, so of course he fawns over Hungary’s Viktor Orban

How Washington pivoted from finger-wagging to appeasement.

By Heather A. Conley and Charles Gati May 25

About the authors +

Two important American visitors showed up in Budapest on Wednesday. One was Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House adviser who is an admirer of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban; he addressed a conference on “Europe’s Future ” organized by Mária Schmidt, an Orban counselor with Bannon-esque ideas about maintaining a Christian culture in Europe. Bannon had called Orban “a man of principles” as well as “a real patriot and a real hero” earlier this year. The two spent an hour together Thursday.

The other visitor was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs A. Wess Mitchell, the highest-ranking American official responsible for U.S. relations with Hungary. Mitchell came to usher in a new era of accommodation between the Trump administration and the Orban government. This policy dispenses with the traditional foreign policy practice, followed by previous Republican and Democratic administrations, of conveying benefits for cooperative behavior and disapproval for abandoning American interests and values. Instead, this administration believes that offering high-level contacts and withholding criticism will improve an authoritarian regime’s behavior. For those who know Hungary’s politics, this is appeasement — the victory of hope over centuries of experience.

Orban’s odyssey began in 1998 when, during his first term as prime minister, he started to flirt with nationalistic, anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments to try to win reelection in 2002. When Istvan Csurka, the head of an anti-Semitic party, blamed the United States for the 9/11 attacks (it got what it deserved, he said), the premier declined to dissociate himself from Csurka, despite a White House request to do so. Orban lost his reelection bid and did not return to power until 2010. He has since managed to change the Hungarian constitution five times to reduce judicial independence, restrict press freedoms and modify the electoral system to ensure that no viable opposition could ever form against him and his coalition. He has placed pliant and corrupt loyalists in positions of authority. And he still embraces anti-Semitism as a political tool, praising a Nazi-allied wartime leader of Hungary and using stereotypes to cast Jewish emigre George Soros as an outside puppeteer.

In the past, U.S. administrations kept a certain distance from countries that espoused such policies and attitudes. During Orban’s first premiership, for example, President George W. Bush sent the Hungarian leader a hard-hitting, confidential “non-paper” — essentially a list of complaints — that was never answered, so the White House decided not to invite Orban to the Oval Office. The Obama administration denied visas for six Hungarian government officials because of corruption (and it certainly never invited the premier to the White House).

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