When Viktor Orbán visited Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, in 2016, the Hungarian prime minister larded his speech with paeans to the special nature of the Polish-Hungarian friendship.
“I believe that no other people in the world have as high an opinion of Poland and the Polish people as the Hungarians have — and, similarly, no other people in the world have as high an opinion of the Hungarians as the people here in Poland have,” Orbán said, adding that this “does not mean that we are blind to each other’s faults; friendship means that we forgive each other for those faults.”
Less than eight years later, in a speech at this year’s Tusványos summer camp in Transylvania, Romania, he adopted a very different tone.
“The Poles have the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe,” he said, adding that he had “not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last 10 years.”
Warsaw shot back: “Why doesn’t Orbán form a union with Putin and with some authoritarian states of this type? If you don’t want to be a member of some club, you can always withdraw,” said Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski, calling Orbán’s tone not only anti-EU and anti-Ukrainian, but also anti-Polish.
“There used to be a saying: ‘Pole, Hungarian, two brothers,’ but here it’s now a big family quarrel,” Bartoszewski said.
The quarrel is escalating.
Although Orbán’s Fidesz party and Jarosław Kaczyński’s former ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party had a special friendship, the war in Ukraine drove them apart. Then, when Donald Tusk led his centrist coalition to victory in last year’s parliamentary election, the feud worsened.
Orbán drifts from Tusk to Kaczyński
In 2010, when Orbán won power in Budapest, the Hungarian PM was closer to Tusk than to Kaczyński.
Their parties were both in the conservative European People’s Party in the European Parliament, both had cut their teeth in the anti-communist opposition in the late 1980s, and both had often encountered each other as they rose through the ranks in their respective countries.
“Being in the same EU party and sharing a passion for football, Orbán and Tusk were said to have a warm relationship back then,” said Edit Zgut-Przybylska, assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“This relationship covered a lot of things,” added Zsombor Zeöld, a Budapest-based expert on Polish-Hungarian relations. “When Donald Tusk was elected president of the European Council, he still had the political support of Viktor Orbán. But then, sometime in the mid-2010s, this relationship broke down, and I think this went hand-in-hand with the fact that Fidesz’s relations with Europe, its relations with the European institutions, with so-called Brussels, also broke down.”
As Tusk moved into the center of the Brussels bubble, Orbán’s battle against the European institutions gathered force. At the same time, Tusk’s Civic Platform party lost power to Kaczyński’s PiS in 2015 — and the world views of Fidesz and PiS were much closer, even though PiS belonged to the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists.
Once in power, Kaczyński strove to emulate Orbán — at one point even saying he would turn Warsaw into Budapest. PiS followed the Hungarian model of trying to put the media and courts under tight political control, although the Polish party ran into more opposition than Orbán did in his power grab in Hungary.
That made both Warsaw and Budapest targets for EU worries about backsliding on democracy — and strengthened their alliance to resist that pressure from Brussels.
“It was forged in their rejection of migration and their unwillingness to respect the rule of law and democracy.” Zgut-Przybylska said. “They both ignored and challenged the legitimacy of the EU, especially EU law. Authoritarian-minded leaders tend to copy each other’s toolkit, and there was a lot of back-and-forth in terms of culture wars, judicial overhauls and media capture.”
But there were also some differences. Kaczyński has always been an ideologue, which made him inflexible in his dealings with Brussels, while Orbán was a realist who understood when to give way while still ensuring he kept tight control of Hungary.
“There was a telling rumor that after one of their first meetings, Orbán said, ‘I met a madman,’” Zgut-Przybylska added. Orbán’s pragmatism was on display in 2017, when he supported Tusk’s reelection as head of the European Council even though the PiS-led government in Warsaw opposed it.
The relationship between Budapest and Warsaw had long been coated in fuzzy (and often inaccurate) memories of past cooperation, although in reality most Poles and Hungarians know very little about each other beyond a common ditty: “Pole and Hungarian — two brothers, both for the saber and for the glass.”
But as Fidesz and PiS tightened links, the relationship turned sharply political.
“After a while it became impossible to separate the two: You love Hungarians as a Pole because you love PiS, or you love Poles as a Hungarian because you love Fidesz,” Zeöld said.
By 2019, the political aspect had become so prominent that Orbán invited his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, to speak at Hungary’s national holiday celebrations.That same year, Tusk was elected to lead the EPP — which suspended Fidesz’s membership. Tusk commented at the time that Fidesz had left Christian democracy “many years ago.”
Ukraine splits the brothers
It took Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to blow apart relations between Budapest and Warsaw.
While the vast majority of Poles lined up firmly behind Ukraine — including both PiS and Tusk’s Civic Platform — Fidesz went the other way.
Orbán abandoned his early anti-Russian roots and became the Kremlin’s closest ally in the EU, while Poland became Ukraine’s best friend in the bloc, hosting millions of refugees, sending crucial arms, ammunition, tanks, artillery and fighter jets, and acting as the main transshipment point for the international effort to send weapons to Kyiv.
That quickly filtered through into politics.
In 2022, Tusk campaigned for Hungary’s united opposition, urging Hungarians to “vote out the most pro-Putin government in Europe.” Despite those efforts, Orbán won the election with another landslide.
In his first post-election press conference, Orbán declined to condemn Russia for the Bucha massacre near Kyiv, saying that an investigation should come first since “we live in a time of mass manipulation.”
That prompted Kaczyński to fire back: “When Orbán says that he cannot see what happened in Bucha, he must be advised to see an eye doctor.”
Now, instead of boozing brothers with a history of fighting Russia, Poles and Hungarians were on opposite sides of the war in Ukraine.
“It was not a good time to be a Hungarian in Warsaw, as local citizens were outraged by Orbán’s pro-Russian policies,” said Zgut-Przybylska.
“I was told by Polish acquaintances, colleagues and friends that before 2022 the Poles did not understand the Hungarian position on Russia, but they accepted it,” Zeöld said, referring to business ties between Moscow and Budapest, and the cozy relationship between Orbán and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. “After February 2022, they understood the position and strongly disagreed with it.”
Tusk returns as Orbán’s nemesis
Although Warsaw and Budapest are estranged, PiS and Fidesz do retain some ties.
Last year, PiS sought the help of Hungarian advisers with close ties to Orbán for its election campaign.
“PiS really believed that Fidesz’s winning strategy would help them succeed with the populist message: ‘Tusk is the greatest possible essential threat to Poland, along with migrants from the Middle East,’” Zgut-Przybylska said.
But that help failed to move the needle for PiS. The party is now out of power — which makes it a less crucial partner for Fidesz, which still faces pressure from Brussels.
Tusk’s victory soured ties even further. Tusk has cast himself as the anti-Orbán as he tries, successfully, to move Poland back into the EU mainstream and undo PiS’ changes to the media and the courts.
“Tusk is also trying to portray himself as the opposite of Orbán: someone who will restore democracy once and for all and is capable of bringing home EU funds, unlike Euroskeptic populists,” said Zgut-Przybylska.
She added that bilateral relations are at a “historic low.” That even extends to diplomatic appointments: She called the new Hungarian ambassador in Warsaw, István Íjgyártó, a “pro-Kremlin” choice. Íjgyártó had served as ambassador in Kyiv from 2018 to 2023, but led Hungary’s embassy in Moscow from 2010 to 2014.
“The Orbán government has decided to end Polish-Hungarian friendship once and for all,” Zgut-Przybylska said.
The post Fratricide: How Poland and Hungary went from friends to foes appeared first on Politico.
