Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, one of Donald Trump’s biggest international supporters, has made overtures in recent weeks to Ron DeSantis and one of the Florida governor’s key billionaire backers.
Orbán has repeatedly voiced strong support for Trump’s policies and political style, even long after he left the White House. But meetings between a key Orbán ally and the DeSantis camp suggest the Hungarian leader is hedging his bets amid uncertainty over Trump’s electoral prospects.
Katalin Novák, the Hungarian president, met DeSantis last month. She also met DeSantis’s wife, Casey, and Republican mega-donor Thomas Péterffy, who has announced he would not be backing Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy. The Hungarian-born billionaire has called DeSantis his “favorite man” and donated $570,000 to his campaign in 2022, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.
The first female president of Hungary and a close ally of Orbán, Novak previously served as minister for family affairs. Like DeSantis, she has ultra-conservative views regarding family policies, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. She has been a key part of Orbán’s efforts to make Budapest a hub for discussions between rightwing and far-right forces from around the world, including the US right.
“For the Orbán government, bilateral relations have a strong party-politics angle. They have been contemplating whether it was worth putting all their cards on Trump. The indictment against the former president only confirmed that,” said Daniel Hegedus, a Central Europe fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Separately to the DeSantis meetings, Hungarian government officials have started to contact other Republican figures, according to a former Hungarian diplomat.
“These outreaches have increased for the past nine months, and more government officials have visited the US than before,” said the diplomat.
Hungary contacted Republican officials in Georgia and Virginia before Novak’s trip, according to diplomatic sources, while Péterffy has long been friendly with Orbán’s government. Orbán awarded him the Grand Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2017. His bank, Interactive Bank, was recently registered in Hungary – barely three months after the country’s government modified the regulation on special tax for banks.
DeSantis has earned repeated comparisons to Orbán, due to policies such as the “don’t say gay” bill that forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Orban’s critics say the nationalist leader has eroded democratic norms in Hungary, including the erosion of press freedom and the weakening of judicial independence.
Hungarian pro-government media has embraced the similarities between the two politicians with headlines such as: “Following Orbán’s footsteps: Florida’s Republican governor”. However, a source close to DeSantis said that the Republican governor is “not very keen on the Orbán comparisons”.
His press secretary, Christina Pushaw, has denied that the Hungarian law inspired the Florida bill. The DeSantis team also played down the significance of the Novák meeting.
“Florida continues to be an important political and economic partner to many countries around the world, and as foreign officials request meetings with our office it is appropriate to further develop these ties,” a spokesperson for DeSantis said in response to questions about the meeting with Novák.
While the Hungarians have found common ground with rightwingers on anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion issues, one stumbling block to closer cooperation with Republicans remains Orbán’s controversial stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Orbán is seen as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the EU, and has blocked several Nato-Ukraine Commission meetings while criticizing EU sanctions against Russia.
“It’s going to be difficult because there are almost no Republicans who agree with them on Russia-Ukraine,” said the former diplomatic source of the new Hungarian charm offensive.
However, just six days after he met with Novak, DeSantis appeared to echo Orbán’s rhetoric about the war, telling Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” was not a vital US national interest.
The Florida governor later said his “territorial dispute” remark had been “mischaracterized”.
According to a source close to the Orbán government, the Hungarian PM is hopeful that whoever becomes their candidate, the Republicans will win the 2024 elections. Hungary’s relationship with the Biden administration has been rocky from the start and it was the only EU country not invited to Biden’s Summit for Democracy earlier this year.
Despite the efforts to develop new ties in the GOP, Orbán’s social media suggests Trump is still his closest ally in America.
Before Trump’s arraignment last week, Orbán tweeted: “Keep on fighting, Mr. President! We are with you!”
