Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and a very large team of ministers, propagandists and the country’s well-connected economic elite flew to Washington on November 7 to meet with President Donald Trump, the first bilateral meeting between the two leaders since he returned to power. The scale of the trip itself was unprecedented, and it was also unusual in its historical context. Truly a spectacle.
President Trump is pressuring Prime Minister Orbán to go along with sanctions on Russian fossil fuels and increase purchases of U.S. LNG. Trump’s hardening of his stance toward Russia was a blow to Orbán, who has good relations with Moscow and Washington and has positioned himself as Trump’s closest ally in Europe, although he is ostracized by Western liberals. At first, President Trump’s strategy appeared to be working, as he sought to bring the Ukraine war to a quick end by making concessions to Russia.
Over time, the classic foreign policy bureaucracy appears to have regained influence and pushed back against President Trump’s inner circle, especially President Putin. Recent sanctions and increased military cooperation demonstrate this shift. Foreign policy discussions in Budapest over the past few weeks have focused on whether and for how long Prime Minister Viktor Orbán can circumvent these sanctions and continue purchasing Russian oil. So the stakes for the conference were high.
Dramatic victory for Orbán
Details of the announced deal are still unclear. Prime Minister Orban offered a blanket waiver, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio disputed and said the waiver would last just one year, while U.S. officials warned reporters it was not yet formal and was only a verbal understanding. In any case, the immediate threat of financial upheaval has apparently been postponed until after the April elections. President Trump also amplified President Orban’s misleading message about the difficulty of eliminating dependence on Russian oil. Additionally, politicians put the Trump-Putin meeting scheduled in Budapest back on the agenda.
Despite all the uncertainties, the deal represents a victory for Mr Orbán. He was able to leverage his American connections and symbolic capital, giving him another chance to portray himself as a politician who punches well above his weight in international politics, and was able to keep the profits of Russian oil and Hungary’s flagship energy companies flowing.
But this is a painful victory. It will cost more than Mr. Orbán’s gifts, his promises to Mr. Trump, and the economic commitments made in Washington. And these efforts cannot be ignored. These range from purchases of U.S. nuclear fuel to purchases of U.S. military equipment and liquefied gas, which would represent a U-turn in Hungarian energy policy that requires a thick skin to sell to a Hungarian audience that has been imprinted with the narrative that there is no alternative to Russia’s involvement in Hungarian nuclear energy.
Rather than building endogenous capacity, Prime Minister Orban continues to make concessions such as procuring external lifelines and adjusting policies. But the real costs are deeper and can be seen in three dimensions: moral-political costs, economic dependence, and costly illiberal ecosystems.
moral and political costs
First, the United States’ green light for Hungary’s continued dependence on Russian fossils has serious moral and political costs. Mr. Orban has no qualms about befriending war criminals. Still, the relationship with President Putin carries moral costs on a scale with serious political consequences.
Currently, Slovakia and Hungary are the only countries in the European Union that receive oil from Russia, and Hungarian oil giant Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Group plays an important role in Slovakia’s energy sector. After Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Hungary increased its share of Russian oil imports by 25 percentage points, reaching 86 percent in 2024. Imports of Russian oil benefit Hungary, enable relatively low energy prices, and are a key pillar of President Orbán’s illiberal strategy.
It took a massive campaign to convince some voters that Putin was a good man who could lower energy prices and protect white Christian conservatism from the “self-destructive” “Muslim communist” West. Most Hungarians remain pro-EU, and appearing as a Russian Trojan horse has electoral costs. Moreover, Orbán’s Putinism has isolated him even among his illiberal allies from Warsaw to Rome. Budapest on November 14 objected to the European Union’s planned phase-out of Russian energy in 2027, vowing to further deepen the political consequences of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s alignment with Moscow.
Depletion of orbanomics
Second, the price that Hungary pays for Russian oil is not only measured in rubles flowing to the East, but also in euros lost from the West. Despite all the economic nationalist chest-beating, Hungary remains heavily dependent on foreign capital and EU funds. Throughout the 2010s, Orbán was able to get away with shenanigans in Europe, aided and abetted by mainstream conservatives. Escalating corruption in Hungary and, ultimately, Budapest’s doubling down on its pro-Russian foreign policy after the invasion of Ukraine, hardened Europe’s elites against Orbán. Orbanomics emerged as an illiberal response to the internal contradictions of liberal globalism.
However, it has failed to create sustainable economic alternatives, and has also failed to upgrade industries and increase domestic production capacity, while deliberately suppressing wage increases to maintain the country’s cost competitiveness in a low-value assembly platform economy. The gamble of “opening up the East” also failed to replace Western markets and capital. The political and economic exhaustion of Orbanomics increased the external vulnerability of the Hungarian economy. One of those vulnerabilities is the loss of EU funds.
A one-year U.S. exemption for Russian oil and gas will ease the immediate energy crunch and underpin Orban’s energy policy, but it will double down on the country’s core weaknesses. That is, an externally wired and shock-prone model with weak domestic upgrading, wage restraint, and dependence on foreign currency goodwill. Therefore, continuing to maintain close ties with President Putin will undermine the country’s economic future.
Illiberal power structures
Third, the ties and symbolic capital that Orbán can leverage in Washington did not emerge out of thin air. He was one of the first to understand that it was not enough for the illiberal right to seize control of the state. Real power requires the dismantling of liberal hegemony. Since 2010, he has launched a counter-hegemonic project aimed at reshaping the state, civil society, and culture in the service of an alternative order. The project quickly spread beyond Hungarian borders. Small states alone cannot sustain such ambitions.
Prime Minister Orbán therefore sought to embed Hungary’s transformation within the international illiberal ecosystem, forging ties with national conservatives, especially in the United States. Over the past decade, Hungary has devoted significant resources to fostering these connections. Trump and his intellectual circle, in turn, treat Hungary as an illiberal laboratory that justifies attacks on higher education, the media, civil society, and democratic institutions. Orbanism and Trumpism are twin expressions of a deliberate, seismic rebellion against the liberal world order, and their ideological ties are therefore deep. As Prime Minister Orbán said after his meeting with President Trump, Hungary is “a unique island in a sea of liberalism.”
But their mutual admiration hides a costly reality. The idea is that a network of taxpayer-funded foundations, consultancies, and media platforms circulates talent, ideas, and strategies throughout the illiberal ecosystem. The dramatic victory in Washington in November 2025 is the product of this illiberal counter-hegemonic apparatus, and its cost can be measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. But the same networks that delivered symbolic victories and temporary policy concessions also bind Budapest to Trump’s transactional demands.
How to save illiberalism?
The costs of the Trump-Orbán deal are thus significant and wide-ranging. Although Prime Minister Orbán’s request was granted, Hungary’s political and economic vulnerabilities remain unresolved. Nevertheless, Orbán achieved an important short-term victory that could even influence the outcome of elections to be held next April. Avoiding the economic costs of sanctions offers Orbán’s government a lifeline as the country’s economy descends into turmoil. This leaves room for pre-election measures to improve Mr. Orbán’s favorability ratings. These steps will help minimize the costs of orbanomics depletion.
To stay in power, Mr. Orbán will need to restructure elections so that he can profit domestically from illiberal international relations. This is no easy feat in a country so politically and linguistically closed off. Nevertheless, this foreign policy restructuring, as opposed to rescuing a sinking economy, is doable before elections. If President Trump gifted President Orban a visit to Budapest and perhaps even a “peace summit” with President Putin, he might be able to save his loyal Hungarian friend’s political future.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
