Between Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, it is only a series of pleasantries and exchanges of good and loyal services. They compliment each other, look to each other as role models, and send each other messages of support before their elections. This week when the conspiracy host Tucker Carlson, close to Trump and Christian conservatives, is on duty with Vladimir Putin to offer him a teleguided interview, we are told that the former presenter of the Trumpist channel Fox News had broadcast in 2021 an interview of the same ilk with Orban. The Hungarian Prime Minister received him in Budapest and took him by helicopter to visit his border wall with Serbia, from which he returned with a documentary glorifying Hungary’s anti-immigration policy. Pro-Trump America thus offered Orban a global platform at a strategic moment in his campaign, a few months before being re-elected for a fifth term. The American president himself, who had already welcomed his counterpart to the White House in 2019, hailed “a strong leader and respected by all” who “did powerful and wonderful work” against illegal immigration and the rights of LGBT people, in particular.
Trump often mentions Orban in his campaign speeches. He has no idea of the country at the head of which he is, but for the former and perhaps future American president, who has made disinformation and used fake news the basis of one’s policy, there is no harm in impressing one’s audience by inventing hyper-powerful allies. “There is a man, Viktor Orban. Has anyone ever heard of him?” said Donald Trump at the end of January to his fans during the New Hampshire primaries, before asserting without embarrassment: “He’s probably one of the most powerful leaders in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.” Viktor Orban is only the Prime Minister of Hungary, a country of 10 million inhabitants very far from reaching the demographic, economic, military and strategic capacity of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Why so much love and public outpouring from a megalomaniac American towards the leader of a tiny country that he doesn’t even know how to locate on a map?
As with Putin, Trump shares with Orban several main ideological lines: nationalism, cult of the leader, white and Christian supremacism, traditionalism, “illiberal” democracy by bringing counter-powers into line and the establishment of autocracy, even of dictatorship. They have the recognition and respect for each other that thugs have. Donald Trump is seeking a new term while facing 92 charges grouped into at least four criminal proceedings. Viktor Orban is the subject of a new infringement procedure by the European Commission, for undermining the rule of law. Trump also knows that he can count on Orban as a friend to destabilize this European Union which benefits from the protection of NATO while the strength of the single market prevents him from exporting his products there on his own terms. The first appreciates in the second his good relations with Putin, his resistance to support for Ukraine and his power of nuisance inversely proportional to his size within the EU, even if the Hungarian Prime Minister ended up bowing to to the 26 member states at the last two European summits.
For Donald Trump, Viktor Orban is the model European of the hard right and the missing link in a national-populist axis from Washington to Moscow. In 2023, Budapest hosted for the second time the Conservative Political Action Conference, an American political event intended to forge links between radical rights on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, the Hungarian leader is considering in the European Parliament integrating his party into one of the two growing Europhobic far-right groups. The former aborted attempt by Steve Bannon, this ex-Trump advisor who dreamed of a populist international, is experiencing a second wind at a time when the European Union, weakened by the war in Ukraine, faces crucial elections. Like Putin, like Le Pen, Orban is banking on Trump’s re-election to make it a reality.
* Marion Van Renterghem is a senior reporter, winner of the Albert-Londres prize and author of “Piège Nord Stream” (Arènes)
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