Strongman Orbán and American Right Forge Deepening Political Alliance

On 7 March 2025, The Boston Globe report­ed that Hun­gary’s right-wing leader Vik­tor Orbán has devel­oped increas­ing­ly close ties with Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives, cul­mi­nat­ing in a Decem­ber meet­ing with Pres­i­dent Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The arti­cle begins:

In Decem­ber, a month after the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Vik­tor Orbán, the right-wing leader of Hun­gary, vis­it­ed Don­ald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. After­ward, he post­ed smil­ing pho­tos on social media with the cap­tion, “The future has begun!” The friend­ly meet­ing was the cul­mi­na­tion of years of increas­ing­ly close ties between the Amer­i­can right and Orbán, a nation­al­ist strong­man who has cracked down on uni­ver­si­ties, immi­gra­tion, and what he calls trans­gen­der “ide­ol­o­gy” at the same time as he has rewrit­ten Hun­gary’s con­sti­tu­tion and, his crit­ics say, under­mined the inde­pen­dence of its courts. Yet Orbán’s poli­cies have become a source of inspi­ra­tion for US con­ser­v­a­tives. Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance has praised Orban’s high­er edu­ca­tion agen­da. Influ­en­tial activist Christo­pher Rufo trav­eled to Hun­gary to study Orbán’s poli­cies. Orbán gave speech­es at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence in Texas and Budapest in recent years.…

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Key Points:

• Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Orbán has cul­ti­vat­ed exten­sive rela­tion­ships with Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives, includ­ing fund­ing part­ner­ships and paid fellowships.
• The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, cre­ator of Project 2025, formed a coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with Hun­gary’s gov­ern­ment-fund­ed Danube Institute.
• Some Repub­li­can gov­er­nors imple­ment­ed poli­cies resem­bling Orbán’s approach to uni­ver­si­ties, LGBTQ+ issues, and gov­ern­ment control.
• Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion shows sim­i­lar­i­ties to Orbán’s gov­ern­ing style, using fed­er­al fund­ing as lever­age and focus­ing on “wok­e­ness” issues.

Orban and Hun­gary have fig­ured promi­nent­ly in a devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US using Hun­gary as a plat­form. GIOR has pub­lished a report on this alliance titled “The Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance: An Oppor­tu­ni­ty for Russ­ian Influ­ence?” The GIOR report details the role that Vik­tor Orban and the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment have been play­ing in the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA).

The full report can be down­loaded here.

Dis­claimer: This post was gen­er­at­ed using AI, with added con­text where pos­si­ble. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they do not depict real events.