Between the Sandor Palace and the former Carmelite convent in Budapest, a simple door separates the official residences of Katalin Novak and Viktor Orban. The President of Hungary and the Prime Minister meet for one hour, once a week, at one or the other’s place. Dubbed just before the last Christmas holidays by Orban, his 44-year-old protege, the first woman to take up this position and, by far, the youngest holder of the post in national history, has been in office since May 10.
His first trips reveal a strategy of appeasement and ripolining of the country’s reputation. While his predecessors had started their mandates in Vienna, Novak first joined Warsaw to reassure Poland, angry at Orban’s complacency towards the Kremlin at the start of the war in Ukraine. In Prague, she extolled the importance of the Visegrad group (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia), fractured by the Russian invasion. In Bucharest, she praised peace and security, while Budapest prohibits the delivery of weapons to Ukraine via its territory.
Operation ripolinage
“After far-right or anti-abortion seminars under the guise of defending the family, Katalin Novak has transformed to put on the clothes of head of state, points out journalist Viktoria Serdült, from the liberal weekly LVH. In addition to the gestures of rapprochement made towards its neighbors, it also called for the examination of war crimes in Ukraine. Increasingly isolated in Europe, the Magyar government is trying to use this communication to its advantage.”
Novak owes most of his rise to Orban. A graduate in economics and law, the forties native of Szeged, a large city in the south, embodied the family values dear to the national-populist leader throughout his political career: first as Secretary of State for Family and Youth from 2014, then as vice-president of her party, Fidesz, then as a deputy and, finally, minister of the Family.
Ambassador of the pronatalist policy of the executive, she woke up the amorphous Magyar demography with subsidies, advantageous credits and tax gifts in order to push the Hungarians to pamper. Maintaining an image of working girl powerful, Novak hit the headlines in December 2020 by affirming that women “should not always compete with men”, then urging them to consider themselves “happy to be able to give life” and “dare to say yes to child”.
Dubbed by ultraconservatives
Mother of two boys and a girl, the Hungarian president had put her career on hold for seven years in order to follow her husband to Germany and raise her young children in the Frankfurt region. “I am proud that my wife is the first citizen of Hungary, because I know that she is worthy of her mission, confided the first gentleman, Istvan Veres, at the magazine chuck. She is as much of a perfectionist at home as she is at work. In the evening, when the children and I are in bed, she often prepares pastries for breakfast the next day…”
When she is not entertaining her family, Katalin Novak seduces the ultra-conservative galaxy, from the Trumpist movement in the United States to the far right in Europe. Italian Lega and Spanish side Vox admire his defense of the father-mother model. In the documentary Hungary versus Soros, broadcast on Fox News, the famous presenter Tucker Carlson devotes a laudatory passage to the Hungarian pronatalist method, which rejects immigration. In France, Marine Le Pen’s presidential manifesto took up measures introduced by Novak.
The linchpin of the rapprochement between Emmanuel Macron and Viktor Orban, this French-speaking person received the Legion of Honor in 2019, before supervising the arrivals of Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen in Budapest during the fall of 2021. Today, the president advocates a “smiling” Hungary to “understand each other better” and “open doors”, in an overplayed contrast with the sulphurous image of Orban. Because even if she claims her autonomy, Novak remains a political product of the one who has reigned supreme over the country for twelve years.