U.S. Vice President JD Vance has travelled to Budapest to back veteran Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a key European ally of the Trump administration, ahead of tough parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Vance is expected to take part in a joint press conference before addressing an election rally with Orbán in a football stadium on Tuesday afternoon.
The 12 April election is billed as Orbán’s toughest challenge in a political career going back almost 40 years. He has won four elections in a row since 2010.
Vance and his wife, Usha, were welcomed by Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, who told Hungarian media that Orbán’s friendship with President Donald Trump had created a “new golden age” in relations.
Last month, Trump said Orbán had his “complete and total support” in a video message to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest.
On Sunday Orbán faces Péter Magyar, a former insider in the prime minister’s Fidesz party, who broke with him two years ago to found the centre-right Tisza party.
Tisza leads Fidesz by between 10% and 20% in most polls. Only the strongly pro-government Nézőpont agency puts Fidesz narrowly ahead.
Orbán is hoping that Vance’s visit will impress undecided Hungarian voters enough to back him once again, as a strong and internationally respected leader in turbulent times.
“I’m looking forward to seeing my good friend Viktor, and we’ll talk about any number of things related to the US-Hungary relationship,” Vance told reporters as he left Washington earlier. Officials are painting his two-day trip as the first top-level US visit since former President George Bush in 2006, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Orbán in Budapest in February.
Orbán has strong ties to the US Maga movement backing the American president, who said last month: “I hope he wins, and I hope he wins big.”
Their friendship goes back to 2016, when Orbán was the first and only EU leader to support him in the US presidential election. He strongly backed Trump for re-election in 2024, and was in Washington last October to secure an exemption for Hungary from US sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil.
Trump later made clear that the exemption was a personal deal between himself and Orbán – implying that if Orbán lost this election, his successor would have to re-apply.
Hungary, almost alone among EU countries, has defied calls from Brussels to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels. In Washington, Orbán also committed to buying more US liquefied natural gas (LNG), as well as US nuclear technology and fuel. Hungary depends heavily on Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline from the east, and on Russian gas through the TurkStream pipeline from the south.
Both sources are now problematic. No oil has reached Hungary through the Druzhba pipeline, which crosses Ukraine, since the end of January. Orbán blames Ukraine for failing to restore the pipeline after a Russian attack on oil infrastructure in western Ukraine on 27 January.
Interestingly, there has been no visible diplomatic support for the Hungarian government from the Trump administration on the pipeline issue. To prevent shortages, Hungary has been forced to release fuel reserves and import non-Russian oil through an alternative pipeline from Croatia.
A new problem emerged on Sunday, when the Serbian government – Hungary’s neighbour to the south – announced that explosives had been found and neutralised near the TurkStream gas pipeline, close to the border with Hungary.
Orbán and pro-government media labelled the incident a terror attack on Hungary’s energy supply. But former intelligence sources in Hungary, and the opposition leader Peter Magyar, accused Orbán of staging the incident with the help of the Serbian President Alexander Vucic to boost his chances of re-election next Sunday.
Orbán has made hostility to Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a cornerstone of his election campaign.
Other recent scandals also appear to have dented his popularity.
Private telephone conversations between Foreign Minister Szijjártó and top Russian officials over several years have been leaked.
Transcripts suggest that Szijjártó regularly keeps the Russian government informed about confidential discussions at European Union summits, and lobbied to get Russian officials off the sanctions list at Moscow’s bidding. Szijjártó has defended the calls as “normal diplomacy”.
