After the visit to the illiberal icon Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro will make a quick visit to the capital of Hungary, Budapest. He will meet an exponent of the team in Europe, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Like the Brazilian, the Hungarian will face decisive elections this year — only then, in April. While the image gain Orbán may have with Bolsonaro is unfathomable, the visit appears to be part of a movement to galvanize his support base.
The culmination, if the plan succeeds, will be to have Donald Trump at a conservative event in Budapest. The problem is that the former American president, who received support from Orbán for his election in 2016, resists traveling in times of Covid-19.
Little is known about what Bolsonaro will do in Budapest, a trip that was included at the last minute in the wake of his visit to Putin. Secom (the Presidency’s Communications Department) and Itamaraty did not disclose the reason for the displacement until this week, when bilateral agreements to be signed in the areas of defense and culture, humanitarian and water resources management emerged.
The agenda itself was only released on Wednesday afternoon (16), at European time, in the morning in Brazil. Bolsonaro leaves Moscow and will be received by President János Áder at 10 am local time (6 am in Brasília). Afterwards, he meets with Orbán and signs such treaties.
Both leaders will make a joint statement and are expected to have lunch. Later, the Brazilian visits the National Assembly and, as he said this Wednesday in Moscow, takes off for Brazil.
The Brazil-Hungary trade flow is modest, although it is on the rise. In 2021, the country exported US$62 million to Hungarians, importing US$457 million. In the area of defense, however, there is a big deal underway with the support of both governments, the sale for US$ 300 million of two Embraer KC-390 freighters to the country, which is a member of NATO (Western military alliance).
Ideologically, however, the ties between Orbán and Bolsonarismo are strong. The prime minister, in power since 2010, was visited by President Eduardo’s son in 2019. The deputy for the PSL-SP (scheduled change to the PL) is the one who usually interfaces with right-wing populist movements around the world, with special contact with the radical fringes of Trumpism, coordinated by former White House aide Steve Bannon.
The prime minister’s convictions are more flexible. He burst onto the Hungarian scene as a student leader in the throes of the Cold War in 1989. Like every young man, a harsh critic of the Soviet Union’s dominance over Hungary and other satellites.
His country suffered the first major Moscow-mandated armed intervention against its post-war European vassals in 1956 to quell a student revolt that spiraled out of control against the Communist regime. There is a disturbing museum in Budapest about this trauma, the House of Terror, which also takes aim at the fascists who came before the communists in World War II.
Orbán founded a liberal party, Fidesz (Hungarian acronym for Union of Young Democrats) – Hungarian Civic Union. He came to power in 1998 and stayed until 2002, defeated by socialists.
Since the 1990s, it has tipped towards the extreme right, with the usual package of the European model: nationalist discourse, against immigrants, against internationalism. He is often listed with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the also autocratic Turkish president, who lives a relationship of cooperation and rivalry with Putin.
Interestingly, Orbán had a stint at Oxford University supported by billionaire George Soros, today the beast of the so-called anti-globalist circles — Trumpists and Bolsonarians who followed the late writer Olavo de Carvalho, such as the former Brazilian chancellor Ernesto Araújo and the President’s children.
But the prime minister has always been critical of Russia, even for a certain Hungarian Cold War atavism. That changed after the 2008 global crisis, and in 2014 Orbán cast Putin as the star of the model he called illiberal democracy.
Here and there, there were squabbles, but in the end the two leaders are perceived by the European Union elite in Brussels as political beings of the same extraction. Orbán’s attacks on the independence of the Judiciary, with the occupation of positions, and on LGBTQIA+ rights have already earned him several censures.
In addition, since the middle of the last decade, he and Putin have been negotiating a 12 billion euro nuclear energy mega-project funded by Russian state-owned Rosatom, seen by critics as a way to buy support for the Kremlin.
At the same time, he is a member of NATO in sensitive Eastern Europe, shaken by the crisis in which Putin’s troops surround neighboring Ukraine. He has already told Putin, whom he has visited recently, that he is worried about the risk of a new European refugee crisis should there be the conflict the Russian denies wanting.
The crisis was on the menu of Bolsonaro’s visit, who had been pressured by the US not to appear at Putin’s side at this tense moment, so as not to assume support. The president said he is “in solidarity with Russia” and that the Russian seems to “want peace”.
