Viktor Orbán last Sunday he witnessed the Premier League match between Manchester City and Liverpool from the Etihad box, invited by the president of the Mancunian entity, the Emirati magnate Khaldoon Al Mubarak. The Hungarian Prime Minister could not celebrate the victory of his compatriot, Dominik Szoboszlaiundisputed holder in the reds and great star of the Magyar team. He didn’t seem to mind too much, however. He had come from celebrating his private victory a couple of days earlier in Washington.
Although Orbán celebrated like someone who knows they are a loser celebrates. The Hungarian Prime Minister continues to trail in the polls Péter Hungariana former Fidesz militant converted into its fiercest opponent at the head of Respect and Democracy (Tisza, by its Hungarian acronym). Orbán has not yet gained the necessary momentum to win a fifth consecutive term (which would be his sixth in total) in the April 2026 elections.
In the most unfavorable polls for the Fidesz leader, Magyar leads with an advantage of more than eight points. The thing seemed lost. Until your “dear friend” Donald Trump came on the scene to get him out of trouble. During his official visit last Friday to the White House, the president of the United States threw him a lifeboat in the form of an exemption to continue purchasing Russian gas and oil.
Hungary will not have to take into account the sanctions that Washington imposed at the end of October on the two main Russian oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft, motivated by the failure of the preparations for the summit that Trump and Putin intended to hold, precisely, in Budapest.
The Hungarian oil company Mol will not have to immediately stop crude oil imports arriving through the Druzhba gas pipeline because Orbán achieved the main objective of his visit. The exemption.
The Fidesz leader landed in Washington with the need to “save the country from tripled utility bills and gasoline at a thousand forints,” and argued in front of Trump that Hungary’s purchases of Russian energy only represent 0.2% of Moscow’s exports.
That is to say, the Hungarian import does not have, in practice, sufficient relevance to bring a Vladimir Putin reluctant to negotiate a resolution to the Ukraine war on the terms the White House demands. And he got his way.
Orbán watches Manchester City against Liverpool from the Etihad box.
Reuters
But Washington and Budapest have different versions of the duration of the safe passage. Orbán’s Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártómaintains that there are no temporal limitations of any kind, while the Secretary of State, Marco Rubioclarifies that the exemption will be valid until October 2026.
Rubio himself acknowledged, in any case, that it would be “extremely traumatic” for the Hungarian economy to interrupt the supply “immediately.” The bottom line is that the agreement is only verbal. There are no signed documents.
“The word of those who are above is what counts,” Orbán acknowledged in the interview every Friday on the Good Morning, Hungary program on public radio. Kossuthwhere he noted that the exemption will remain in effect as long as Trump remains in the White House and he is prime minister. “This is a personal agreement between two leaders. Bureaucrats write what they write, but that is not important,” he insisted.
Thus, he covers his back until after the April elections. “Orbán’s interest is to associate these agreements with him,” summarizes, in case there were any doubts, the analyst Mátyás Bódi.
“What did Orbán offer in exchange?” Hungarians ask. He tells them nothing. “We don’t pay a single cent, because the president of the United States likes Hungarians,” he remarked this Friday into Kossuth’s microphones.
In fact, Orbán promised Trump that, in the next five years, he would buy more liquefied natural gas from the United States (about 2 billion cubic meters) under the pretext of diversifying its energy sources.
In any case, Hungary will have to guarantee sooner or later that its energy supply does not draw on Russian sources. Because the extension is just that. An extension. Even his own Zsolt Hernádipresident and CEO of Mol, seems to have assumed it, according to the independent Hungarian press.
Neither the United States nor the European Union are in the business of allowing any Western ally to obtain Russian oil. In Brussels they have the goal of completely disconnecting from their gas starting in 2028. For this reason, the host of the Good Morning, Hungary program asked him what Trump’s exemption was for if the Commission had adopted this measure.
Orbán answered the question with a big announcement: he will file a complaint with the Court of Justice of the European Union over the ban on importing Russian gas.
“Of course we are going to sue, we are not resigned; with various means I am going to fight on the Brussels front for the Hungarian tariffs,” he said this Friday. “We do not accept this obviously illegal solution, contrary to European values, chosen by Brussels to block a national government that does not agree with it.”
This framework helps Orbán to present himself as the only European leader capable of dialogue with Putin. On public radio, the Hungarian Prime Minister once again repeated that preparations for the summit in Budapest are still underway. Then he rambled for several minutes, according to the newspaper report Telexabout the ten years he had to invest in improving relations with Russia to overcome the obstacles of history. A decade waiting for this moment.