For once the Left is right: Viktor Orban is now Putin’s stooge to such an extent that he has turned a blind eye to the blatant rigging of Sunday’s election in Georgia. On Monday the Hungarian Prime Minister turned up in Tbilisi to hail the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party’s “overwhelming victory”.
While most Western observers have condemned wholesale irregularities – including ballot box stuffing, voter intimidation and bribery – Orban was fulsome in his praise for “this free and democratic election”. He added that Georgia had made the “pro-European choice” – even though the Caucasian republic’s increasingly authoritarian government has jeopardised its EU candidacy.
Orban’s trip to Tbilisi is deliberately provocative, but in one sense he does speak for Europe. At present Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the European Union’s Council of Ministers. Nothing that Orban’s EU colleagues say or do will stop him exploiting this role to endorse a regime that patently prefers Moscow to Brussels or Washington.
Whether Orban’s endorsement actually confers legitimacy on the Georgian Dream government will depend on how far the West is prepared to go. The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has refused to recognise Sunday’s election and called for further investigation, while most European governments are also holding back.
But they have stopped short of declaring solidarity with the French-born Georgian President, Salome Zourabichvili. She has denounced the election as a fraud, in defiance of Georgian Dream and its all-powerful founder, the billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Last spring the country was convulsed by protests against a draconian law against “foreign interference” brought in by the Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, seen as Ivanishvili’s loyal crony.
Ivanishvili and Kobakhidze both subscribe to the “Global War Party” conspiracy theory, which claims that a shady Western alliance has manipulated Georgia and Ukraine into war against Russia. Unsurprisingly, they believe that George Soros is behind the conspiracy – the Hungarian-born American billionaire whom Orban has demonised for decades.
Speaking yesterday, Orban echoed this theory, congratulating Georgians for “having voted for peace” and “not letting your country become a second Ukraine”. The implication was clear: under Georgian Dream, there would be no repetition of the Russian invasion of 2008, which cost Georgia the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Orban has used similar rhetoric before, for example on his “peace mission” to Moscow in the summer. The Hungarian’s attempt to blame the war in Ukraine on neoconservative hawks in the West, rather than on Putin, strikes a chord with Donald Trump’s Republicans and others across the political spectrum in Europe.
In July Orban visited Trump in Mar-a-Lago, where they agreed on a wide range of issues. The Hungarian leader has promised to “open several bottles of champagne” if Trump regains the presidency next week. For his part, the former US President has praised Orban as “a tough person” and even as his “twin”.
Orban’s appearance in Tbilisi this week suggests that he hopes to play the role of trusted middleman between Trump and Putin, perhaps helping to broker a deal between Nato and Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
However, Orban is now deeply distrusted in most Western capitals – especially in Kyiv. It is hard to imagine Volodymyr Zelensky agreeing to give Hungary (which has territorial claims on the Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia) any role at all in future peace talks.
Until 1989, Viktor Orban was an anti-Soviet dissident and in the immediate post-Cold War period his party, Fidesz, was a pillar of Hungarian democracy. Now Orban is a role model for “strongmen” who curry favour with the Kremlin and Fidesz provides a blueprint for authoritarian regime change. From the scourge of Hungarian “goulash” communism to Putin’s stooge has been a long journey, but Orban seems now to have reached his final destination.
Georgia is only the latest country to be dragged back into the Russian sphere of influence. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, Ukraine would surely be next to be forced into submission. Were that to happen, the sound of champagne corks popping in Budapest would reverberate across Europe.