BUDAPEST — On a recent trip to Strasbourg, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vowed to pop several bottles of Champagne if his friend, Donald Trump, won the U.S. presidential election.
Now he has a chance to do just that — right in the faces of European Union leaders who are converging on his capital city, Budapest, on Thursday for two days of meetings.
The conservative populist has long insisted that he and a growing number of his European allies would ultimately find themselves on the winning side of history with agendas that are hostile to immigration and Ukraine and committed to traditional Christian family values.
Trump’s victory now delivers an emphatic boost to those countries that have been seeking to stand up against the EU mainstream and wrest more sovereign powers away from bureaucrats in Brussels. Perhaps most importantly, they will increasingly feel they have greater political cover to thwart Brussels over policies ranging from sanctions against Russia to green reforms.
With France’s fragile government hobbled by a budgetary black hole and now that Germany’s governing coalition has collapsed, the EU’s traditional engine room is stalling, offering more space for Orbán’s conservative buddies in Central Europe and Italy to set the political tone in the EU.
“It’s obvious that right now it’s the big moment for the [Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia] Melonis and the Orbáns of this world. We [France] don’t have any control over the big international issues of the day,” said one senior ally of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron was severely weakened at home following a snap election that saw the far-right National Rally party win the most seats in parliament earlier this summer.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is in the midst of a ballooning leadership crisis that has seen his ruling coalition collapse.
Getting the band together
The timing of the summits, which was decided by Orbán thanks to Hungary’s role at the helm of the EU’s rotating presidency, could not have been worse for leaders wary of Trump’s return.
It makes them captive to Orbán’s agenda, on his home turf, and exposes them to surprises from their host; he could even try to patch Trump into the leaders’ dinner via video-link (Brussels asked that the meeting be restricted to official guests only).
In addition to Orbán, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer are both ideologically close to Trump — although Meloni does not share Orbán’s pro-Russian stance. The Dutch ruling coalition is backed by Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam, anti-immigrant, populist politician. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico is locked in a rule-of-law dispute with Brussels, like Orbán, and shares the Hungarian’s pro-Russian leanings. That cadre of potential wreckers is likely to be joined next year by Andrej Babiš, who is expected to return to power in the Czech Republic in elections next year.
For Andrea Di Giuseppe, the member of the Italian parliament from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party representing Italians in North America, Trump’s victory strengthens Meloni personally, “because today in Europe, Meloni will have a primary role. When it comes to working with Trump, she is the only conservative among the founder members of the EU and large economies in Europe and her approach is very similar to Trump’s.”
Trump’s victory represents “a new approach in policy for the U.S. and its European allies,” added Di Giuseppe.
“Europe must adapt and understand that force has come from the people.”
Orbán’s agenda
Soon after Trump triumphed in the U.S., the Hungarian prime minister looked for ways to gel their respective leanings into a cohesive ideology.
After the election result “we can have good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak, as we share similar views on peace, illegal immigration and the protection of families,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó wrote on Facebook.
Indeed for Orbán, Trump’s election represents an opportunity to redefine the “West” — from a U.S.-led coalition based on liberal values to a looser organization in which conservative values hold sway.
“It underscores his narrative about a renewal of a different West, where Trump is the leader and the West follows,” said Nicolai von Ondarza, head of research at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik think tank.
Orbán, who has cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and met with him in recent weeks, also called for a “new European strategy” on Ukraine. European leaders will have to wrestle with their continued financial and military support of Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion if Trump cuts off U.S. aid.
Macron and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski argued on Wednesday that Trump’s return to the White House should push Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security. A few days before the vote, the Polish prime minister wrote on X that the era of “geopolitical outsourcing” was coming to an end.
Leaders were “more focused than panicked” at the idea of Trump returning to power, said one EU diplomat, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about non-public talks. They pointed to how quickly Macron set up a call with his German counterpart after the U.S. election result as proof of unified action.
But other experts and diplomats were skeptical, arguing that instead of drawing EU powers closer together, Trump’s election would prompt countries to try to curry favor bilaterally with Washington — and increase divisions among mainstream politicians.
“Expect Europeans to flock to Mar-A-Lago in droves to demand preferential treatment over their neighbors,” tweeted Gérard Araud, former French ambassador to the U.S.
