Trump is Emboldening Strongmen in Hungary and Slovakia
Yet authoritarian governments across Central Europe may not be as secure as they seem.
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It is evident from Viktor Orbán’s recent State of the Nation address, delivered on March 22, that he views himself as riding high on the back of the momentum created by Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office. “We are on the high street of history,” he said, “while our opponents are wandering muddy back streets on the edge of town.” The sentiment is shared by his less sophisticated imitators, such as Slovakia’s Robert Fico. A former member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he thundered at last month’s CPAC meeting about building “a barrier against dangerous woke ideologies,” together with the new U.S. administration.
But triumphalist rhetoric hides the fragility of the personalistic, only formally democratic, political systems that Orbán and Fico are striving to entrench in Hungary and Slovakia, as well as of the broader politics of nativism, grievance, kleptocracy, and phony social conservatism that the two prime ministers share with Trump.
Both Orbán’s and Fico’s international ambitions seem to be growing thanks to their inroads with the new U.S. administration, though those are largely imaginary in the Slovak case. As Orbán puts it, while Hungary was successful at mounting rebellions against Brussels in the past, “this time the aim is not to outwit, not to outsmart and not to survive, but to win.” Although not nearly as much of a household name as Orbán, Fico scored a meeting with Elon Musk during his trip to Washington, D.C. and is expecting the red carpet treatment when he visits Moscow for the second time in six months for the annual May 9 parade.
In both cases, however, the domestic picture is different. Support for Orbán’s Fidesz party has been in steady decline since the election in 2022. Recently, Budapest saw massive protests—not unlike those rocking the Vučić regime in Serbia and that of Bidzina Ivanishvili in Georgia, where pro-Western and pro-European forces have been out in the streets for almost a year. Bratislava saw protests too. More importantly, Fico’s governing majority is so thin that any vote requires accommodating a handful of fringe, independently minded parliamentarians—a situation that will be difficult for him to sustain for the full length of his term, which ends in 2027.
If the election were held tomorrow, the Slovak opposition would likely manage to depose Fico. Likewise, Orbán must be rattled by the fact that he faces a formidable political opponent in the figure of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party, which is now leading, quite consistently, in opinion polls. Magyar was married to Orbán’s former justice minister, who had to leave office alongside the former president, Katalin Novák, over issuing pardons to orphanage staff who were covering up child abuses.
Unlike other opposition groups, Tisza is a genuinely broad-based, center-right political force that cannot be so easily smeared as an outgrowth of George Soros’ progressive empire. Magyar’s own political past was intimately connected to Fidesz until his departure in February 2024, which he framed as a reflection of his disgust with the party.
That, of course, does not stop Orbán from throwing around the Soros accusation, oftentimes with explicit antisemitic references. “Soros’s agents here in Hungary,” he warned, “were busily setting fire to haystacks and poisoning wells”—a common medieval trope.
Yet a growing proportion of Hungarians share Magyar’s disgust. In a 2024 poll conducted by Globsec, only 36% of Hungarians were satisfied with how their democracy worked—a significantly lower proportion than in 2020 or 2022.
It is against this backdrop that one should try to understand Fidesz’ recent move to ban gay pride marches in Hungary under the pretext of protecting minors from the “promotion” of homosexuality. According to new legislation, substantial fines are to be slapped on future participants, who will be identified with the use of Chinese-provided facial recognition software.
Although Orbán sought to present Hungary as a bastion of social conservatism against the onslaught of “woke” ideology, particularly in his outreach to Republican audiences in the United States, the effort was always less than fully sincere. Hungary is a largely secular nation—according to the 2023 census, over 56% of Hungarians did not declare membership in any faith tradition, with Catholicism particularly in a freefall. In one 2017 Pew poll, just 9% of Hungarians reported attending weekly church services, compared to 41% of Poles and 16% of Ukrainians.
Even on gay rights proper, Hungary falls on the more liberal end of the Eastern European spectrum, just behind the Czech Republic. A Globsec poll conducted last year found that 58% of Hungarians agreed that “the rights of the LGBTI+ community (such as the right to marriage) should be guaranteed.”
As a result, it is far from obvious that borrowing this particular chapter from Vladimir Putin’s playbook is going to serve Orbán well. Meanwhile, the country’s economic fundamentals, as it heads to an election less than a year from now, are increasingly shaky. After a year of negative growth in 2023, the economy expanded by a mere 0.6% in 2024. Mind you, that was before the blizzard of haphazard protectionist measures rolled out by the Trump administration in the early weeks of his presidency.
Trump may seem to Orbán like a brother in arms, but his trade policies are bound to hurt Hungary’s automotive sector, which employs some 170,000 people. Audi’s factory in Győr, for example, is the largest engine plant in the world and a large portion of the vehicles it produces (similar to the nearby VW plant in Slovakia) are exported to the U.S. market. A 25% tariff on finished vehicles would be a massive shock to the entire car manufacturing ecosystem in Central Europe, not least in Hungary.
Nor is a crusade against gay pride marches going to sweeten the bitter aftertaste of a truly grotesque system of patronage and corruption, which is similar to the one Magyar is campaigning against in Slovakia. In the final days of the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned Antal Rogán, the director of Orbán’s cabinet, for presiding over a mafia-like system of spoils that allowed well-connected Fidesz supporters to control the commanding heights of Hungary’s economy. Slovakia does not fare much better. There is hardly a day without revelations of cabinet ministers (or their relatives) buying new seaside properties in Croatia, or using additional funds for defense to purchase luxury jets. Against the background of crumbling healthcare, education, and public services at large, that is hardly a recipe for sustained political success.
It is too early to write Orbán off. Likewise, Fico has been extraordinarily resourceful in making a political comeback following his downfall in 2018. One has to wonder whether their most plausible path to remaining in power beyond the elections looming on the horizon lies in some combination of voter intimidation, election fraud, and repression of a sort seen most recently in Georgia, whose government Orbán likes to praise as “patriotic.” Needless to say, such a scenario would be a tragedy for Central Europe. Yet in a world that is dislocated and without U.S. leadership, it is far from unthinkable.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.
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Time for a revolution!
sad, but not hopeless.