Hungary’s Orbán to meet with Trump after NATO summit amid Ukraine ‘shuttle diplomacy’

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is expected to meet with former US president Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after a NATO summit on Thursday (11 July), according to people familiar with the plans.

Orbán, who attended the NATO summit in Washington this week, will fly to Florida on Thursday (11 July) after the closing day of the Western military alliance’s meeting.

The sit-down with Trump, first reported by Bloomberg, is the latest in a flurry of talks Orbán has held in the past week since taking over the rotating EU presidency on 1 July.

Orbán, a vocal supporter of Trump, has maintained close ties with the former Republican president over the years, last meeting him at his Mar-a-Lago residence in March.

Before flying to Washington, the Hungarian praised Trump in an interview with Politico, describing him as “the man of peace”, adding that there was a “very, very high chance” current US President Joe Biden would not win the US election in November.

The talks come a week after Orbán drew widespread criticism from EU counterparts for a solo diplomatic effort that included meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in what the Hungarian leader described as a ‘peace mission’ over the war in Ukraine.

In his meetings with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Putin and Xi, the Hungarian leader aimed to ‘collect information’ about the possibility of a ceasefire and the prospects for peace negotiations, his foreign policy advisor told Euractiv last week.

EU leaders and officials had been unanimous in recent days in condemning the surprise visit to Moscow, insisting that Budapest had not consulted its counterparts and was not acting on behalf of the bloc as a whole.

On Wednesday (10 July), EU envoys issued another stern rebuke to Budapest, but have so far struggled to come up with an option to address the issue.

At the NATO summit, European leaders doubled down on Hungary’s solo run.

Orbán’s trip to Russia was a political mistake, European Council President Charles Michel told a group of reporters, including Euractiv, on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington.

“This was a political mistake,” Michel said, adding that “member states reacted very clearly (…) by making clear that there is a severe warning towards the Hungarian presidency,” said Michel.

“This way of working is not acceptable,” he added.

“Viktor Orbán has no mandate from [NATO], nor from the EU, to conduct any form of negotiations,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb told reporters, also on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington.

“He can do it on his own behalf. But I fundamentally disagree about doing that. I simply do not see the purpose,” Stubb added.

Orbán’s meeting with Trump on Thursday is likely to further antagonise EU leaders, who are already angered by Hungary’s increasingly contrarian approach to the bloc’s foreign policy positions.

According to several EU diplomats who spoke to Euractiv, the Hungarian leader had not informed his counterparts of the planned meeting.

Some of them expressed concern that, with a possible Trump victory in November’s elections and the Republican candidate taking the White House, Orbán was already positioning himself as a possible intermediary between Putin and Trump.

Orbán, like Trump, has expressed scepticism about the role NATO was playing in support of Ukraine and has refused to send military aid to Kyiv, securing an opt-out in exchange for green-lighting Dutchman Mark Rutte as the alliance’s next boss.

[Edited by Daniel Eck]

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