Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has praised Boris Johnson and signalled that he believes Brexit could prove to be a British success story.
“The whole world was against him,” Prime Minister Orbán said of his British counterpart at a marathon three-hour press conference in Budapest.
“The liberal-leftist media, the global Soros network and all the tools of the pro-remain EU, but just because he and the British people believe in democracy, they’ve done it,” Orbán continued — “it” being deliver Brexit, at least in name, come January 31st.
“[The British] have opened this vast door of opportunities for themselves. I’m sure there is a success story that will be written there,” he said.
While the Hungarian government has proved something of a thorn in the side of the EU establishment — resisting its attempts to impose compulsory migrant redistribution quotas on member-states, criticising its punitive approach towards Britain in the Brexit negotiations, and pursuing pro-family policies as a means to halt demographic decline rather than mass immigration — it is not itself in favour of exiting the bloc.
Indeed, the country supports bringing Serbia and other new countries into the EU, likely in the belief that they will be more likely to align with Hungary and its conservative-minded allies in the Visegrad group — Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland — in trying to shape the bloc into an alliance of sovereign nation-states, rather than a nascent federal union along U.S. lines.
For now, however, federalist-leaning politicians from Western Europe retain control over most levers of power in the EU.
It remains to be seen whether the Hungarian position on Brexit, which is that the EU should agree to a mutually beneficial free trade deal instead of attempting to punish the British pour encourager les autres — which the Hungarians believe will backfire and leave the EU worse off — will become more influential now that Brussels cannot count on a Remainer-dominated British parliament to help them undermine (or subvert) the British negotiators.