Orban Outbound

The Hungarian prime minister’s trip to Moscow was not the anomaly that the EU says; globally, the real outlier is the EU

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, whose country has just started holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, has made waves by meeting with Russia’s president Putin. Or to be precise, there is really only one wave of monotonous tut-tutting and outright condemnation. And also, it’s not really Orban who made that wave but his critics. The resonance from Western, especially EU political leaders and mainstream media has been, as so often, depressingly dull. It really all boils down to one simple-minded cry: “How dare he go and meet THE RUSSIANS?! And also, he does not speak for us!!”

Orban has been, moreover, very uncouth and treated what is clearly a merely rhetorical question as if he were talking to adults, that is, seriously. His answer is straightforward and can be summarized thus: The war in Ukraine should end, current Western and EU approaches show no sign of working, and there is, to say the least, no possible harm in talking to the other side.

So far, so reasonable, but there are, of course, two problems: First, much of the EU elite hates Orban’s guts only a little less than those of Putin, and second, the EU elite has adopted the odd ideology that the best diplomacy is no diplomacy. Hungary also has, to make things worse, a highly intelligent foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó. That, as well, in a bloc where narrow-minded ideological doctrinaires and intellectual ultra-lightweights, such as Josep “Jungle-Fighter” Borrell, Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock, and Kaja “Let’s dissolve Russia” Kallas set the tone, is really rather unsporting of the Hungarians. (That, by the way, is the real backdrop to Hungary dis-inviting Baerbock; there is just no appetite in Budapest for offering her a platform for her rude and self-righteous platitudes among leaders whose (other) politics I, a socialist, for instance, very often heartily disagree with, but who at least use their brains on a regular basis.)