Europe’s pariah prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is jetting across the globe in search of friends.
Hungary, an EU and Nato member that has been backsliding on democratic norms for more than a decade, has become even more isolated in the western club over the past months. Orbán has irritated allies by blocking a much-needed EU financial aid package for Ukraine, while Hungary’s parliament has dragged its feet on ratifying Sweden’s bid to join Nato.
Critics say Hungarian domestic politics appears to have become a secondary priority for the longtime leader, who is spending more and more of his time on foreign policy ambitions.
Increasingly isolated from the EU’s mainstream, Orbán is filling up his schedule with courting autocratic leaders outside the bloc and attempting to befriend far-right factions within the continent.
Last year, the Hungarian prime minister spent more than 60 days travelling abroad for work, according to a Guardian analysis of Orbán’s social media posts and government communication.
Orbán’s travels took him to places as far-flung as China, Qatar, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Serbia, Egypt, Georgia and Argentina. His meetings read like a “who’s who” of global strongmen: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Ilham Aliyev, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The prime minister “is building an alternative to the western approach”, said a senior Hungarian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “His idea is that the west is in decline and Asian and South American countries represent the future,” they added.
But Orbán’s opponents say his jet-setting lifestyle shows he has abdicated responsibility for Hungary’s domestic challenges – education, healthcare, the cost of living – in favour of seeking attention on the global stage.
“He sees himself only in the international arena, he wants to be seen as one of Europe’s leading figures,” said Attila Ara-Kovács, a member of the European parliament from the opposition Democratic Coalition party. “What plays into it also are his growing failures at home,” he said.
Critics also argue that the Hungarian leader’s focus on building relationships with autocratic regimes underscores Budapest’s quest for foreign investment with little accountability.
“Orbán’s travel record is telling the story of a prime minister who is being shunned by his EU counterparts,” said Daniel Freund, a German Green member of the European parliament and outspoken critic of the Hungarian government.
“The amount of non-democratic leaders he shook hands with in 2023 is impressive. But still: in a non-democratic country Orbán will get the treatment he thinks he deserves: red carpet, the whole shebang, no negative press, no protests, no opposition. It’s just more evidence to the fact that autocrats around the globe think alike.”
Even when he’s back home in Budapest, Orbán is busy with foreign policy plans. In 2023, he hosted foreign figures in Hungary on dozens of occasions. Visitors included senior politicians from China, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Jordan and Tanzania.
Far-right figures such as Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Herbert Kickl, the leader of the Freedom Party of Austria, France’s Marine Le Pen, Spain’s Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, and Portugal’s André Ventura, president of the Chega party, also visited the Hungarian prime minister last year.
He even hosted two individuals sanctioned by the US: the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, and Rustam Minnikhanov, the head of Russia’s Tatarstan.
Orbán’s foreign relationship building has at times contradicted his own rhetoric. After the outbreak of the “Qatargate” corruption scandal, he called for abolishing the European parliament in its current form. Media outlets close to the Hungarian government also seized on the case to argue that Brussels is corrupt.
But only a few months later, Orbán himself spent several days in Doha – and later in the year even gave the emir of Qatar a tour of the Hungarian parliament.
And while in speeches and social media posts the Hungarian leader likes to portray himself as a player on the European stage, outside of official EU and Nato summits, he rarely interacts with Europe’s political heavyweights – with the exception of France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has hosted Orbán in Paris and worked to keep a conversation going with the Hungarian leader.
Asked why the prime minister rhetorically focuses on changing Europe while spending much of his time focusing on building relationships with autocrats outside the EU, Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, countered: “The claim is already debunked by last year’s record, which indicated that a majority of prime minister Orbán’s international engagements were with Nato member states.”
“Hungary, as a sovereign nation, promotes a foreign policy centred on connectivity to maintain strong relations with partners both in the east and the west,” the political director said in an email, adding that “the results speak for themselves: last year Hungary witnessed an unprecedented influx of foreign direct investment (FDI), exceeding €13bn leading to a record high of 19,000 jobs created for the Hungarian people.”
The political director also pushed back against the notion that the Hungarian leader has become isolated in the west and rejected the accusation he is focusing more on foreign priorities than domestic policy, arguing that his government has “managed to effectively maintain stability in the Hungarian economy”.
“In 2023 alone, prime minister Orbán participated in more than 100 international engagements. Additionally, he hosted over 100 guests on our national day in August,” he said, pointing also to an international press conference held at the end of the year.
“If this is what isolation looks like, so be it.”
