Orban’s Cheerleading for Putin: Follow the Money

For almost two decades, Orban remained faithful to his pro-European, anti-Kremlin stance. Yet in February 2022, 32 years after his ground-breaking speech on Heroes' Square, the same Orban - though with visibly less hair and a few extra pounds - stood idly by as Russian President Vladimir Putin lambasted the West and fantasised about turning back the clock to 1997, labelling NATO's Central European enlargement a provocation towards Moscow.

Memories must have haunted Orban at that moment. It was the Hungarian prime minister who signed Hungary's NATO accession in 1999 and who, during Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, called it an "imperialistic action of pure power politics" - a sentence he would much rather use to describe Brussels these days.

'Happiest barrack of Gazprom'

Times change, politicians too, but few have gone through such a fundamental transformation as Viktor Orban.

"During Orban's first government, between 1998 and 2002, Hungary's relations with Russia were at an all-time low," explains Geza Jeszenszky, a former Hungharian foreign minister who also served as US ambassador during the first Orban government, in a phone interview with BIRN.

Orban was the exception among Hungary's political leaders at the time, being the only one who did not strive to maintain good relations with Russia. "During the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when Russia sent a humanitarian convoy to Serbia, Orban forbade its entry into Hungary," Jeszenszky recalls.

That ban escalated into a serious diplomatic spat, with both Hungary and Russia summoning  home their ambassadors. And the anti-Russia policy was upheld when Orban's Fidesz party found itself in opposition during the 2000s. Fidesz condemned the socialist-liberal...