Exploiting Useful Enemies: Ukraine in Hungary’s Elections

The problem with demagogues is that they invariably fall into infantile practices. The politics of the playground is the politics of hate, violence and betrayal. It’s the politics of finding the useful enemy and bullying the theme till it’s raw. In Hungary’s parliamentary elections set for April 12, the only theme that seems to matter to the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) alliance and Viktor Orbán, the country’s demagogic leader of 16 years, is Ukraine.

Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky have been pictured as symbolic occupiers, intruders and meddlers, intent on bringing in Hungary and the rest of the European Union into Kyiv’s resistance against Russia. For his part, Orbán has been reproached by critics for having protean tendencies: once being a liberal voice seeking Hungary’s detachment from Moscow he became, in Jamie Dettmer’s words, “a self-styled champion of illiberalism – and the Kremlin’s best friend in Europe.”

He is also much admired by US President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the latter visiting Budapest as a gesture of full-throated endorsement. With that endorsement came sharp words for the European Union. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” Vance stated. “They have tried to make Hungary less energy-independent. They have tried to drive up costs for Hungarian consumers. And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.”

The Hungarian PM remains resolutely stubborn against efforts to continue aiding Ukraine, recently blocking an EU loan package to Kyiv worth 90 billion euros. For dropping his opposition, he has demanded that oil deliveries via the Druzhba pipeline, essential for transporting Russian oil to Hungary via Ukraine, be resumed. Supply stopped on January 27 after a Russian drone allegedly damaged it in a strike at the Brody oil hub in western Ukraine. Budapest claims that the pipeline is intact with any necessary repairs being purposely delayed by the Ukrainian authorities to damage Orbán’s re-election chances.

The motif of the useful enemy is being milked with a note of desperation, given Orbán is lagging in the polls behind opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party. Magyar has made it clear that Hungary, should he win, will tilt back to Brussels and away from Moscow. “In 2026, we and only we are capable of saying ‘no’ to the Ukrainians, to preserve Hungary’s peace, security, and the possibility of economic development,” Orbán told supporters in the vital constituency of Győr. In that same speech, the PM then did something those with authoritarian proclivities sometimes fall for: a tendency to scold and lacerate the perceived foreign enemy, drawing upon their dark energy as electoral demonology. “Dear Ukrainians, we will not ruin Hungary for your sake. We will not give up our children, we will not give up our sons, our weapons, and we will not give up our money either!”

Throughout the country, Zelensky features in various unflattering poses on billboards and posters. He can be found begging for money from the EU. He is featured alongside Magyar with sinister, conspiratorial promise. The message is crass but unmistakable: a vote for Magyar and Tisza would be a vote for war. This point was explicitly, and brutally made in a Fidesz campaign video born of artificial intelligence showing a little girl weeping at a window, spliced with scenes featuring her father’s execution in war.

Orbán is not entirely wrong in his assessments, usefully extreme as they might be. Ukraine has long billed its war with Russia as immemorial and civilisational, and Western civilisational at that. To take a contrary view is distasteful, libellous, even a betrayal. Rather injudiciously, Zelensky’s statement of blackmail on March 4 simply added to Orbán’s inventory of suspicions. “We hope,” warned the Ukrainian leader, “that no-one in the European Union will block the 90bn euros [of EU aid vetoed by Hungary].  Otherwise we will give that person’s address to our armed forces so they can call on him and speak to him in their own language.” This offering did not go unexploited. “They want to get rid of us, with threats if possible,” Orbán told state radio on March 6, “because if nice words don’t work, then with threats and blackmail.”

Only the previous day, Hungary’s Counter-Terrorism Centre seized two armoured vehicles from Oschadbank, Ukraine’s state-owned entity, purportedly carrying US$80 million in cash and gold. The employees were released without much fuss, but this gave Fidesz and the government a chance to allege a link between Kyiv and Magyar’s campaign. The latter, boomed the unverified accusation, had been in weekly receipt of 5 million euros in illegal campaign funds.

Russia continues to be fashioned in the Brussels-Kyiv imagination as the oriental, savage and tyrannical force, its ultimate target Calais, its soldiers hoping to have coffee and croissants in Paris, kuchen in Berlin, rijsttafel in Amsterdam and bigos in Warsaw. Moscow, goes this narrative, intervenes in elections with pathological insistence; saintly Kyiv never would, despite Zelensky’s bald efforts to back the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris against Trump in the 2024 US elections. This incredulous nonsense has been necessary to convert a fratricidal war into an international conflict, to make Kyiv a barricaded European front against an invigorated Russian expansionism that takes the form of boots and disinformation.

It is also necessary to pad out the Ukrainian résumé for membership of the European Union and the NATO alliance. Both compacts have been irresponsible, almost criminally so, in feeding fantasies of admission and integration, though both enjoy seeing the plucky Ukrainians die in their thousands in order to inflict harm upon the Russians in their tens of thousands. While that Slavic family front is bled white, Europe and the military-industrial complex can rest easy.

The Orbán project has been electorally successful but tends to create false gods of exaggerated potency. The threat transmutes into a villainous figure one can almost sympathise with. Zelensky can claim some pride for the free advertising his own cause is garnering. This is much like the once much admired billionaire financier George Soros, whom Orbán eventually accused of exerting an unhealthy influence in Hungary with the university he helped fund and “facilitating illegal immigration” through assisting Muslim migrants. The campaign model never really changes, but the returns can diminish. Over time, the populace will start asking questions, as well they might on April 12.

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