It’s also the enemy of Europe’s conservative-nationalists, who’d be left leaderless if Kiev and Brussels succeed in ‘democratically deposing’ Orban during early April’s next parliamentary elections and replacing his leadership of their movement with a collection of anti-Russian Polish figures.
Andrew Korybko
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently declared
that “As long as Ukraine demands that Hungary be cut off from cheap
Russian energy, Ukraine is not simply our opponent, Ukraine is our
enemy.” This followed him accusing Ukraine of meddling in Hungary’s next parliamentary elections in early April, which echoes last summer’s assessment by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and his own Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, with all this following last spring’s referendum meddling accusations.
As was explained here
at the time, Orban claimed that Ukraine conspired to manipulate the
results of the poll over whether to support its EU membership plans,
which coincided with Hungary reportedly downing a Ukrainian drone and
tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions on espionage-related grounds. These
escalating tensions are occurring amidst Kiev’s persecution of its
ethnic Hungarian minority that was described more at length here. Orban also just accused Ukraine of treating them as “cannon fodder”.
No self-respecting state can have normal ties with any state that treats its co-ethnics in such a terrible way, let alone while threatening its energy security
and meddling in its elections. That’s the behavior of a bonafide enemy
state, not simply a renegade former partner with whom ties are presently
tense. By explicitly drawing attention to this political reality, Orban
is also implying that opposition leader Peter Magyar is Ukraine’s
‘Manchurian candidate’, thus making support for him informally akin to
treason.
To be clear, Hungary isn’t the ‘dictatorship’ that
its political adversaries in the EU and Ukraine claim, so folks can
openly support Magyar without fear of persecution. Nevertheless, it’s
abundantly clear that Magyar would essentially function as a joint proxy
of EU and Ukrainian interests in Hungary if he replaces Orban as Prime
Minister, which would fundamentally shift its foreign policy. Radical
energy decoupling from Russia at huge financial cost to Hungarians would
be likely and arms might even be sent to Ukraine.
Hungary might
also begin the accelerated adoption of the euro at the expense of its
existing fiscal sovereignty under the forint. On the ideational front,
Hungary probably wouldn’t remain the center of European’s
conservative-nationalist movement, which could instead shift to Poland.
In that event, the aforesaid movement might then become infused with a
distinctly anti-Russian character, unlike the pragmatic approach towards
Russia pioneered by Orban and his continental like-minded allies.
Roman Dmowski, one of the godfathers of Polish nationalism who was diplomatically indispensable to the revival of Polish statehood, famously warned that “some people hate Russia more than they love Poland.” He elaborated
that “such patriotism, which thinks primarily about revenge on the
enemy, and not about the benefits of one’s own nation, is an extremely
dangerous threat, because it is a direct path to national suicide.” Such
a fate might befall Europe’s conservative-nationalist movement if this
happens.
Ukraine therefore isn’t just Hungary’s enemy, but
also the enemy of Europe’s conservative-nationalists, who’d be left
leaderless if Kiev and Brussels succeed in ‘democratically deposing’
Orban and replacing his leadership of their movement with a collection
of anti-Russian Polish figures. The movement might then either be
co-opted by such forces or fracture into less influential factions, with
either outcome serving the geopolitical interests of Europe’s ruling
liberal-globalists and Ukraine’s allied ruling clique.