If there has been a spoiler at this week’s carefully curated NATO summit, then it is Viktor Orban, the conservative Hungarian prime minister who has enraged his NATO allies by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) en route to Washington in what he has called his “peace mission.”
On Thursday, Orban met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida seeking to negotiate a peace deal without consulting other EU nations or US President Joe Biden’s administration.
By contrast, he has effectively shunned Biden at last week’s NATO summit and did not request a bilateral meeting with the US president, three sources familiar with the summit preparations said.
Illustration: Yusha
Orban has been quietly seeking to negotiate a settlement to Russia’s war in Ukraine with an eye to a Trump re-election. Trump’s lead in the presidential polls has been bolstered by Biden’s blundering debate performance and questions about his mental acuity and age.
Orban, who also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv earlier this month, has sought to have Ukraine and Russia sit down to direct negotiations, talks that Zelenskiy has ruled out in the past.
Bloomberg News on Thursday reported that Ukraine was considering new peace talks that would include meetings with Russian officials.
Orban could use Hungary’s current tenure as European Council president to say he is negotiating on behalf of other EU nations, insiders in Budapest said.
Orban shared only a curt handshake with Biden onstage on Wednesday, a day after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he said led “the only country that has successfully acted as a mediator between the warring parties in the Russian-Ukrainian war.”
Observers did not expect that Biden would hold a bilateral meeting with Orban.
“Biden might not be interested in elevating Orban and rewarding him after his performance in Moscow and Beijing,” said Daniel Hegedus, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “And for Orban, who plays the long game, a meeting with Trump is certainly the most strategic choice than any meeting with Biden.”
A person familiar with Trump’s plans said the former president stayed in Florida until Friday, at which point he flew to Philadelphia for a rally. There was “no time even hypothetically” to meet with Orban afterwards. That left Thursday as the only day Orban could fly down to meet with the Republican candidate.
Trump would also be wary of Orban trying to position himself as a power broker in Europe, the person said. Bloomberg News reported that Trump had not asked Orban to negotiate the peace deal for him.
Orban has not had an official meeting with Biden for the past four years, but met Trump in March this year at Mar-a-Lago. Orban endorsed him several times throughout the past eight years and expressed support, calling him a “man of honor” after Trump was found guilty on 34 counts in a criminal trial.
Asked during a Budapest press conference on Monday last week about whether Orban would meet with Trump during his visit to the US, Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said: “It is worth meeting people who are interested in peace.”
Those on his team have made their support for Trump in the upcoming elections clear. In Washington, his political director Balazs Orban took to the stage at the right-wing National Conservatism conference, while his Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto told Reuters: “We see a chance for peace if [former] president Trump is winning. We see a chance for good Hungary-US relationship if [former] president Trump is winning.”
“I think a very strong external impact must take place in order to make them negotiate at least,” Szijjarto said. “Who has the chance for that in the upcoming period? That’s only president Trump if he is elected.”
Orban’s visit to Moscow — only the second by a European leader since Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — caused a furor in NATO and the EU, both of which Hungary is a member. In a letter to European Council President Charles Michel seen by the Guardian, Orban expressed a broadly pro-Russian view on the conflict, saying: “Time is not on the side of Ukraine, but on the side of the Russian forces.”
He also argued against the strategic isolation of Russia that has been sought by most Western nations. “The chance for peace is diminished by the fact that diplomatic channels are blocked and there is no direct dialogue between the parties who have a leading role to play in creating the conditions for peace,” he wrote.
“Political leadership provided by the US is limited, due to the ongoing election campaign … therefore we can expect no such proposal coming from the US in the coming months,” he wrote.
“I will continue my talks aimed at clarifying the opportunities for peace next week,” he added without clarification.
Hungary was among a small set of countries that opposed an annual funding pledge proposed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and opposed including language in the final NATO communique that Ukraine’s accession to the NATO military alliance would be “irreversible.”
In May, Hungary blocked a 6.6 billion euro (US$7.2 billion) aid package to Ukraine being prepared by EU countries as part of the European Peace Facility for almost a year.
Hungary was sharply reprimanded at a meeting of senior EU diplomats on Wednesday, during a discussion of Orban’s “peace missions” put on the agenda by Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies.
EU ambassadors from 25 member states — all except Hungary and its close ally Slovakia — condemned Orban’s recent visits to Moscow, Beijing and Azerbaijan, where he took part in a meeting of the Organization of Turkic States.
Some accused Budapest of being disrespectful and breaking the EU treaties; others accused Budapest of seeking to “instrumentalize” its presidency.
“It took nine days for the Hungarian presidency to lose any smidgen of trust they had left,” one EU diplomat said.
“His [Orban’s] actions are not serving the EU or peace. They play into the hands of Putin and his war project. [The] Hungarian slogan of ‘Make Europe Great Again’ is more about making Russia great again at this stage,” the diplomat added.
A second EU diplomat said: “It was quite unanimous in the way that the 25 member states took the floor and strongly criticized Hungary.”
However, no EU ambassador at this meeting mentioned removing the presidency from Hungary, although the idea was discussed more privately ahead of Budapest’s six-month stint.
While academics have argued that the EU can remove the presidency from Hungary, EU diplomats are divided on the legality of the move and are wary of setting a precedent. Officials are discussing other ways to register displeasure, such as sending officials to ministerial meetings, although the first EU diplomat said it was “too early for details.”
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