Putin Praises Hungarian Orbán After Election Win

Having scored an electoral victory, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, wasted no time in excoriating the European Union. “We have won a victory so great that it can be seen from the moon, but certainly from Brussels!” Mr. Orbán said to supporters in a victory speech Sunday evening at Budapest.Mr. Orbán added that the night’s victory would be a memorable one “because we had to fight the biggest overwhelming force,” which in his estimation included “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”While the anti-Brussels barb was widely reported and Mr. Orbán’s animosity toward the EU is no secret, some might also read more into those comments: both George Soros, who is very wealthy, and Volodymyr Zelensky, who is still very much the president of a war-torn Ukraine, are Jewish.Less open to interpretation is Mr. Orbán’s electoral win, which secures his party’s fourth term in office and will allow him to continue his autocratic style of governance for another four years. Despite polling and analyst predictions, he and his ruling Fidesz party were able to preserve the two-thirds majority they have held in the Hungarian legislature since 2010, Euractiv reported. With 98.96 percent of votes counted on Monday morning, Fidesz was set to win 135 of the 199 seats in the national assembly, up by two from its victory in 2018.While some analysts warned that Hungary’s elections could not be considered fair as a result of changes to the electoral law, campaign finance transparency issues, and the overwhelming dominance of Fidesz in the media, the sheer size of the victory tends to belie that easy assumption. “It is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of Hungarian society wanted Fidesz to win and let them take control of the country again,” a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Andrea Szabó, told the opposition online channel Partizán.Mr. Orbán can gloat in a shattered opposition at home but he faces an increasingly isolated position abroad, where his flouting of democratic standards and approach to the war in Ukraine has rankled the European Union and other nations. It is not at all clear that he cares, though. “The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics, and patriotic politics have won. We are telling Europe that this is not the past, this is the future, our common European future,” Mr. Orban told his supporters.His ties to Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, seem to have alienated almost everybody except for Mr. Putin, who wasted no time in extending his congratulations. In a statement, the Kremlin said, “The head of the Russian state expressed confidence that, despite the difficult international situation, the further development of bilateral ties of partnership fully meets the interests of the peoples of Russia and Hungary.”Diplomatically, Mr. Orban fell into line with EU support for Kiev despite his longstanding closeness to Mr. Putin, but at home Mr. Orban has struck a neutral and even anti-Ukrainian tone at times, refusing to let weapons for Ukraine cross Hungarian territory, AFP reported. During Hungary’s election campaign, a Western-looking coalition of opposition parties challenging Mr. Orban called for Hungary to support its embattled neighbor and act in lockstep with its EU and NATO partners.Yet Mr. Orban, considered to be Mr. Putin’s closest ally in the EU, insisted that Hungary remain neutral and maintain its close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on favorable terms.President Zelensky has leveled criticisms at various European leaders over policy issues that affect Ukraine, but has singled out Mr. Orban for criticism over his reluctance to take a harder line against Moscow. “He is virtually the only one in Europe to openly support Mr. Putin,” Mr. Zelensky reportedly said just ahead of Mr. Orban’s big win.

Putin Praises Hungarian Orbán After Election Win

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