Hungary is looking to join forces with Czechia and Slovakia to form a Ukraine-skeptic alliance in the EU, a top political adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told POLITICO.
Orbán is hoping to team up with Andrej Babiš, whose right-wing populist party won Czechia’s recent parliamentary election, as well as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to align positions ahead of meetings of EU leaders, including holding pre-summit huddles, the aide said.
While a firm political alliance remains some way off, the formation could significantly impede the EU’s efforts to support Ukraine financially and militarily.
“I think it will come — and be more and more visible,” said the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, when asked about the potential for a Ukraine-skeptic alliance to start acting as a bloc in the European Council.
“It worked very well during the migration crisis. That’s how we could resist,” he said of the so-called Visegrad 4 group made up of Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland at a time when the Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party was in power in Warsaw following 2015.
Then-Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki led the charge as the alliance’s biggest member, with the “V4” group promoting pro-family policies as well as strong external borders for the EU, and opposing any mandatory relocation of migrants among member countries.
The Visegrad 4 alliance split after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as Poland advocated hawkish positions toward Moscow and Hungary took the opposite stance.
A new Visegrad alliance would count three rather than four members. Poland’s current center-right prime minister, Donald Tusk, is staunchly pro-Ukraine and is unlikely to enter any alliance with Orbán.
Fico and Babiš, however, have echoed the Hungarian leader’s viewpoints on Ukraine, calling for dialogue with Moscow rather than economic pressure. Babiš has been criticized for his public skepticism on supporting further European aid to Kyiv, with Czechia’s current foreign minister warning in an interview with POLITICO that Babiš would act as Orbán’s “puppet” at the European Council table.
Even so, it might take some time for any version of the Visegrad alliance to reform. While re-elected as Slovakia’s prime minister in 2023, Fico has stopped short of formally allying with the Hungarian leader on specific policy areas. Babiš has yet to form a government after his party’s recent election victory.
Beyond the Visegrad 3
Hungary’s push for political alliances in Brussels goes beyond the European Council, Balázs Orbán said.
The Hungarian prime minister’s Fidesz party — part of the far-right Patriots for Europe group — could expand its partnerships in the European Parliament, he said, naming the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group and “some leftist groups” as potential allies.
Mainstream parties such as the center-right European People’s Party could sooner or later turn against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, destroying the centrist majority that supported her re-election, the adviser said.
“So this reconstruction of the [Visegrad 4] is going on. We have the third-largest European parliamentary faction. We have a think tank network, which is widely here [in Brussels], and it has a transatlantic leg as well. And we are looking for partners, allies on every topic.”
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a think tank that receives most of its funding from allies of the Hungarian leader and is chaired by Balázs Orbán, has expanded its presence in Brussels since its launch in 2022.
The Hungarian prime minister, who has been in power for the past 15 years, faces a re-election battle next year. Opposition leader Péter Magyar’s Tisza party is currently more popular than Orbán’s Fidesz party, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.Asked about the coming election campaign, the aide said it would be “tough, just as always,” blaming Brussels for what he called an “organized, coordinated effort to try to push out the Hungarian government” which included “politically supporting the opposition.”
The European Commission states that measures to withhold funds from Hungary stem from Budapest’s defiance of EU law rather than a political agenda.
Asked whether Budapest continues to back Hungary’s Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, who’s been alleged in media reports to have led the recruiting of spies in EU institutions when he was working as an EU diplomat, Orbán said the commissioner was “doing a great job.”
“They are just … issues which are used to portray Hungary as some country which is not loyal to the institutions,” he added. “We want to be inside. We are part of the club.”
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