However, do not count on the EU institutions to utter the slightest word likely to suggest that Brussels is getting involved in this crucial national election. And this, even if the reasons to speak out against Orban, the friend of Moscow, have not been lacking for Europe these days.
So when we learned about ten days ago that Budapest was transmitting almost directly to the Kremlin exchanges between the leaders of the Twenty-Seven, what did the European Commission do? Nothing or very little. The EU executive just described it as “very worrying”, which looks like an act of espionage for the benefit of a declared enemy power (Russia). And the institution asks, weakly, to Hungary “to provide clarifications”.
Orban n’attend que ça »
What about the European Parliament, very widely opposed to Viktor OrbánÂ? This is typically the kind of hot-button issue that the EU Assembly, which met immediately on March 25 and 26, would normally have debated in plenary session. But the electoral context led MEPs to abstain: “Orban is just waiting for that, for us to take up the subject and then denounce EU interference, which could work with some of the Hungarian voters,” we indicate within the centrist group Renew.
In fact, Péter Magyar is said to have even asked the European People’s Party (EPP, right), the most powerful political group in the Strasbourg Parliament – where he has been serving as an MEP since 2024 – to play “mezza voce”, as shocking as these revelations. The idea: above all, do not feed into the propaganda of the media controlled by Budapest, which portray this 44-year-old former senior official as a “puppet of kyiv and Brussels”.
Magyar distances himself
Although exasperated, Budapest’s European partners once again muted most of their criticism when Orban persisted in blocking, on March 19 in Brussels, their aid plan of 90 billion euros for Ukraine.
Throughout the country, posters were put up showing Péter Magyar alongside Volodymyr Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the Commission, wanting to pick the pockets of the Hungarians to finance Ukraine… and throw Hungary into war. 23% of the country’s citizens would be convinced that a victory for Tisza (“respect and freedom”), the Magyar party, “would drag the country into war”, according to a recent poll published by the Research Center 21.
