For months, Hungary’s media apparatus pumped out stories lionizing Donald J. Trump and deriding Kamala Harris, described in one headline as “extremely unpleasant.”
In October, the country’s leader vowed to “open several bottles of Champagne if Trump is back.” And then, as U.S. voters went to the polls, scores of his supporters gathered for a celebratory party in Budapest before the results were even called.
No foreign leader gambled so heavily or publicly on a Trump victory as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. A fervent fan of the U.S. president-elect, Mr. Orban has greeted the election results with unrestrained glee.
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Orban said he had “only partly delivered on his promise” about Champagne: He was in Kyrgyzstan when the result came through, and mostly drank vodka to “share our joy at this fantastic result.” He told his followers on X that he had already spoken with the president-elect, adding: “We have big plans.”
For Mr. Orban and like-minded populist European politicians in Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia and elsewhere, this week’s election not only returned a fellow believer in tough immigration policies to the White House. It also sent a message to their own constituencies that history is moving in their direction and that political rivals they revile as woke, out-of-touch elitists are on the run.
“Politically this is a big win for Mr. Orban: He gambled and he won,” said Zsombor Zeold, a former Hungarian diplomat. More broadly, he said, the election of Mr. Trump “definitely puts wind in the sails of Europe’s populist right.”
Among those likely to get a lift, he said, are European parties affiliated with the Conservative Political Action Conference, an American pro-Trump organization that holds an annual gathering in Budapest.
The group has cultivated close ties with European politicians like Geert Wilders, a Dutch far-right leader who won the most votes in an election last year but was shunned by establishment parties whose support he needed to form a government.
“Trump’s success is an encouragement and a boost for populist forces in the world,” said Csaba Lukacs, the managing director of Magyar Hang, a conservative media outlet that is critical of Hungary’s governing Fidesz party, which Mr. Lukacs supported for many years but turned against because of what he considers Mr. Orban’s intolerance of criticism and tolerance of rampant corruption.
Mr. Orban, hungry for a success after a series of domestic and foreign setbacks, needed a Trump victory, Mr. Lukacs said. “He can and will exploit this in the short term.”
Mr. Trump has described Mr. Orban, whom critics accuse of muzzling the media and overseeing a broad system of patronage politics that has enriched his associates and family, as a “very great leader, a very strong man,” whom some dislike only “because he’s too strong.”
Many hard-right parties in Europe have a complicated relationship with the United States, which some see as an arrogant hegemon that promotes values at odds with their own. Deep currents of anti-Americanism run through the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen in France and Alternative for Germany, or AfD, for instance.
But they have cheered at the prospect of having Mr. Trump back in power.
The AfD leader, Alice Weidel, swiftly claimed common cause with Mr. Trump on Wednesday, saying, “He is of course a model for us.” His slogan of Make America Great Again, she told Deutschlandfunk radio, was no different from her party’s program of “making Germany great,” because “we as the AfD stand up for the national interests and for the people” of Germany.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wilders and President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, a strongman leader who has in the past accused the State Department of working of working to topple him, enthusiastically welcomed Mr. Trump’s win.
When Hungary assumed the European Union’s six-month rotating presidency in July, it stirred dismay by mimicking Mr. Trump and adopting the motto “Make Europe Great Again.”
How much Trumpism can be transferred to Europe beyond MAGA-like slogans remains to be seen. But its style and, on issues like immigration, its substance have already taken hold.
That is thanks in part to Mr. Orban, whose determination to keep migrants out by erecting high fences patrolled by sometimes brutal security forces drew widespread condemnation during Europe’s 2015 migration crisis. But Austria, Italy, Slovakia and many other countries have since emulated his tough stance on the issue.
In Italy, the right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has long cultivated ties to Mr. Trump’s camp, and has praised him. Her party, which traces its roots to postwar fascist groups, has advocated controversial measures to control immigration, including a plan, stalled by Italian courts, to send would-be asylum seekers to detention camps in Albania.
On Wednesday, Ms. Meloni said she had spoken to Mr. Trump by telephone and congratulated him. The next day, she posted a message on X saying she had also congratulated Elon Musk, the billionaire supporter of Mr. Trump whom she referred to as a “friend.”
While Europe’s nationalist right is united in its admiration for Mr. Trump’s opposition to immigration and his disdain for establishment conventions, there are also differences.
Ms. Meloni’s robust support for NATO and its aid to Ukraine against Russia could put her at odds with Ukraine-skeptic strains of the MAGA movement. And neither Hungary nor Serbia shares Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on China, which they have both embraced as an indispensable economic partner.
“China could be a source of tension,” said Gergely Szilvay, a writer for the Mandiner newspaper, which is part of a media apparatus controlled by Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party, adding: “But China can be handled, because there is friendship and a close ideological alignment.”
The American election came at a difficult time for Mr. Orban. Hungary’s economy has slipped into recession for the second time in three years, and Fidesz is being challenged by an upstart opposition political party.
Mr. Orban had banked on a Trump victory to show that he and Hungary are not isolated, analysts said.
“Everything is about framing our prime minister as an influential figure on the global stage,” said Mr. Zeold, the former diplomat.
Mr. Orban has been working for years, with mixed results, to establish himself as the standard-bearer of a pan-European movement committed to protecting national sovereignty through tough border controls and resistance to what he sees as meddling by European Union officials.
He had hoped to achieve that goal in June when Hungary and the European Union’s 26 other members elected a new European Parliament. But his predictions that he and his allies would “take over Brussels” fizzled, leaving mainstream politicians in control.
Last week, Mr. Orban sent his political adviser, Balazs Orban — no relation — to Arizona to attend a Trump rally with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter. “Peace, border protection and economic development — this is the new American agenda,” the adviser said on Facebook.
On Tuesday evening, scores of Mr. Orban’s conservative allies gathered for a party co-hosted by the Center for Fundamental Rights, a government-funded research group whose president said a Trump win was “crucial for the preservation of Western civilization.”
Some of the guests, nearly all Hungarians with no right to vote in America, wore red MAGA hats. The hosts handed out red lapel pins pitching “Woke Zero,” a play on Coke Zero, and displayed pictures of a shrieking Kamala Harris being blasted by “Woke busters.”
The United States ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, a Biden administration appointee who has often criticized the transformation of a once-vibrant democracy into what often looks like a one-party state, on Wednesday lambasted Mr. Orban’s all-chips-on-Trump approach as “a reckless gamble on an election that could have gone either way.”
It may have won its bet on Mr. Trump, he added, but “Hungary’s government has a gambling problem” that erodes the trust of its allies in NATO, an alliance of countries not political parties. “Win or lose the hand, it comes with a cost.”
Soon after the election was called, pro-government media outlets began publishing articles calling for Mr. Pressman’s swift replacement as ambassador.
Mr. Orban, said Tamas Magyarics, a professor at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and former director of the Hungarian foreign minister’s North America department, considered that American foreign policy under Republican presidents tended to be less intrusive, and “believes that the Democrats want to destroy his government.” But, Mr. Magyarics added, Mr. Orban had perhaps exaggerated Republicans’ interest in and support for Hungary.
“The United States has 350 million people. Hungary is a country with less than 10 million far away in Central Europe — and has zero strategic influence.”
Mr. Orban himself acknowledged on Thursday that “size matters,” saying that the president-elect “has bigger things to do than dealing with the sufferings of Hungarians.
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