Eurasia Press & News
The collapse in the hitherto close Polish-Hungarian relations has been collateral damage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Warsaw expects serious gestures from Budapest to repair ties, but Orban hopes the estrangement is just a temporary blip.
For years, Russia has been the elephant in the room during talks between Poland and Hungary, with both parties keen to sweep any controversies under the rug to concentrate on mutual interests, such as most recently standing up to the European Commission in its attempts to force both populist governments to back down in their attempts to undermine democratic norms.
“Poland has been looking at Russia as a security threat ever since 2008; Hungary, however, still sees it as partner – this is the key difference,” Miklos Mitrovits, an historian and Central Europe expert at Hungary’s University of Public Service, tells BIRN.
But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that became no longer possible. Hungarian diplomacy missed the momentum to adapt and change tack and, as a result, has put not only the Polish-Hungarian ‘special relationship’ at risk, but also the very future of Visegrad Group (V4) cooperation.
“If we differ on the most existential of issues, it will be hard to cooperate on other fronts,” summarises Andrzej Sadecki, head of the Central Europe team and a Hungary specialist at OSW, the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies.
The “most existential of issues” is clearly the war in Ukraine. While Warsaw has gone all out in supporting Kyiv, including delivering weapons and lobbying other countries to do so, Budapest’s position has been – at best – ambivalent.
Although Hungary has voted for all ten EU sanction packages (some significantly watered down), the country’s prime minister and Putin’s last remaining ally in the EU, Viktor Orban, vocally criticises these measures for “doing more harm to the EU than to Russia”.
Hungary still maintains energy cooperation with Russia’s Gazprom and Rosatom – it has signed an expanded gas supply agreement and officially still insists that Russia will build the Paks 2 nuclear power plant – arguing that it is an “economic necessity”.
At the same time, the Hungarian government remains unwilling to participate in deliveries of weapons to Ukraine or the training of its soldiers, and has a fractious relationship with Kyiv’s leadership. Government trolls openly disseminate Russian propaganda and hold Ukraine at least as responsible as Russia for the war.
The blocking of Russian Orthodox bishop Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (and war supporter) from being added to the EU sanctions list and Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s high-profile visits to Moscow and Minsk were seen – even by many Hungarian diplomatic experts – as unnecessary and provocative steps.
Diverging paths
“In the beginning, people in Poland thought Orban is facing re-election and he can’t admit to having made a mistake by previously investing in the relationship with Russia,” OSW’s Sadecki tells BIRN, referring to the April 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections won in a landslide by Orban’s Fidesz party. “Many people were waiting, thinking this was a temporary thing.”
“But after the elections, the first thing we saw was that Foreign Minister Szijjarto stayed in his post, and he is the most symbolic figure in terms of Hungarian-Russian ties,” Sadecki says. “And then we gradually understood that our paths are really diverging.”
Bilateral relations hit rock bottom last summer when Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, after Orban had remarked on differences between the two capitals over the war in Ukraine during his key annual speech at Baile Tusnad in Romania, told the press: “I confirm Prime Minister Orban’s words that Poland and Hungary have parted ways.”
Since then, the previously intense rhythm of high-level meetings has given way to a series of low-level meetings mostly between mid-level bureaucrats rather than government politicians.
And it’s not just in political circles that the change is being felt; Polish society, too, has become increasingly disillusioned. In a recent poll by CBOS, the popularity of Hungarians among Poles has plummeted by 21 per cent and is at its lowest level for 30 years, just hovering above that for the Germans.
Sadecki points out that “while Poles and Hungarians always thought of themselves as close, now we’ve had protests in front of the Hungarian embassy, for example.”
The Hungarian government is aware that notable political gestures are needed to restore Polish relations, which are considered crucial for Hungary’s national interests in the EU, especially to block rule-of-law and Article 7 procedures, which seek to suspend funds or certain rights of member states.
The visit of the just-inaugurated Hungarian President Katalin Novak to Warsaw in May or her train journey to Kyiv in November were intended as such, but there was little follow-up. “Warsaw expects major gestures, like Orban visiting Kyiv or Hungary participating in the training of Ukrainian soldiers or sending weapons,” Hungarian expert Mitrovits says. “The very minimum would have been the fast-track approval of Finland and Sweden’s NATO application.”
But even there, Orban managed to sacrifice long-term diplomatic relations for short-term domestic gains. Despite having promised Morawiecki last November that Hungary would ratify the accession of both countries “during the first parliamentary session in 2023 in February”, Finland’s accession was approved only at the end of March, while Sweden is still being kept waiting.
“For Poland, NATO enlargement is a guarantee of regional security,” Mitrovits underlines. “By blocking NATO enlargement, Hungary is damaging vital Polish interests.”
Crisis? What crisis?
Yet in some circles, both Polish and Hungarian experts avoid using the word “crisis” to describe the current state of relations and hold firm in the belief that the estrangement is only temporary.
To these observers, the difference between Poland and Hungary essentially boils to the single issue of the delivery of weapons to Ukraine. Poland has been a major provider of materiel to the Ukrainians, even lobbying for other countries to do more, while Hungary has limited itself to offering humanitarian aid, welcoming refugees, and treating Ukrainian soldiers in its hospitals.
These sources claim that it’s only a minority of countries in the EU that deliver weapons to Ukraine, so Hungary’s position is not so unusual. Others point out, however, that according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s “Ukraine Support Tracker” a database of military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, actually 18 member states plus EU institutions have provided military aid to Ukraine.
On the Hungarian side, the government tries to frame the current deep freeze with Warsaw as merely part of the electoral cycle. “No major breakthrough can be expected until the Polish elections. If [Civic Platform] or the current opposition wins, relations with Hungary would be very complicated, and could affect European-level cooperation,” Peter Dobrowieczki, research director at the Hungarian-German Institute for European Cooperation, under the government-close Mathias Corvinus Collegium, tells BIRN.
But if the nationalist-populist Law and Justice party (PiS) stays in power, relations could become much smoother again, he believes.
Positive developments in Ukraine would also help. “If the war ends or there is a de-escalation in the conflict, the acute problem we are having in bilateral relations could be downgraded to the level of strategic disagreement,” Dobrowieczki says.
Dobrowiecki spies optimistic signs that cooperation between Hungary and Poland might prevail on the European level and not fall prey to the different approaches to the war. “Only recently, Hungary and Poland shared the same position in the EU, both opposing the prolongation of the gas demand reduction plan and protesting against cheap Ukrainian grain exports,” he points out.
However, he concedes that, for now, Hungary will mostly have to build on its “soft power” – cultural or scientific programs – as high-level meetings are currently out of the question for most Polish politicians.
Got your back, Jacek
The relationship between Poland and Hungary has historically been close, but ties became tighter since Orban’s Fidesz and PiS have been in power. The two governments have not only had each other’s back when breaching democratic norms, but also borrowed each other’s tactics. Most crucially, they lent each other support in the various disputes over the rule of law, weakening the European Commission’s ability to penalise them over breaches.
But Polish expert Sadecki notes that divergent views on Russia are starting to affect cooperation in EU affairs too, one area where the Warsaw-Budapest alliance had seemed unshakeable.
“It’s been received quite badly in Poland that, at the EU level, Hungary is using the tactics of blocking some agreements on Ukraine in order to get something else,” Sadecki says. “And then there’s the fact that Hungary is becoming an increasingly less attractive partner. The more it is sidelined in the EU and NATO, the less it has to offer.”
Hungarian expert Mitrovits agrees. “The mutual solidarity on EU issues is gone,” he says. “Warsaw does not want to be associated with Hungary, as it casts a bad light on them in the EU.”
Yet, even with this more cooperative attitude, Poland has got little closer to unfreezing its suspended EU funds than Hungary.
What the future holds for bilateral relations and for the V4 remains unclear. Most experts agree that Poland has significantly increased its standing and its role in Europe since the war began.
Polish diplomacy regards events as having proven it right. It began raising warnings about Russia as an aggressive power after the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which became louder after the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and the subsequent fomenting of a separatist war in the Donbas region. Few took Poland seriously at the time.
“The Polish experience, their specialist knowledge about Russia, is appreciated, especially as we see a new ‘Iron Curtain’ being drawn across Europe,” Mitrovits says. “For the US, with its eye on China, Poland has become its most important ally in Europe that can help safeguard security in the region.”
Indeed, experts say it is not just Hungary’s ambivalence towards Russia that’s driving a wedge between the two countries, but also Warsaw’s deepening ties with Washington. Anti-Americanism, especially since the defeat of Orban’s friend and ally Donald Trump in 2020, is carefully cultivated by Fidesz and its allies in the media.
If the Orban government goes too far in questioning the transatlantic alliance, experts warn it could have a lasting effect on Polish-Hungarian relations that outlives even the end of the war in Ukraine.
