POLITICO: Hungary plans anti-Ukraine bloc with Czechia, Slovakia

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico (left); Andrej Babiš, whose party just won Czechia’s recent parliamentary election (right) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (centre).
Photo: EPA-EFE

Hungary is looking to join forces with Czechia and Slovakia to form a Ukraine-skeptic alliance in the EU, a top political adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told POLITICO.

Orbán is hoping to team up with Andrej Babiš, whose right-wing populist party won Czechia’s recent parliamentary election, as well as Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to align positions ahead of meetings of EU leaders, including holding pre-summit huddles, the aide said.

While a firm political alliance remains some way off, the formation could significantly impede the EU’s efforts to support Ukraine financially and militarily.

“I think it will come — and be more and more visible,” said the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, when asked about the potential for a Ukraine-skeptic alliance to start acting as a bloc in the European Council.

“It worked very well during the migration crisis. That’s how we could resist,” he said of the so-called Visegrad 4 group made up of Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland at a time when the Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party was in power in Warsaw following 2015.

A new Visegrad alliance would count three rather than four members. Poland’s current center-right prime minister, Donald Tusk, is staunchly pro-Ukraine and is unlikely to enter any alliance with Orbán.

Fico and Babiš, however, have echoed the Hungarian leader’s viewpoints on Ukraine, calling for dialogue with Moscow rather than economic pressure. Babiš has been criticized for his public skepticism on supporting further European aid to Kyiv, with Czechia’s current foreign minister warning in an interview with POLITICO that Babiš would act as Orbán’s “puppet” at the European Council table.

The Hungarian prime minister’s Fidesz party — part of the far-right Patriots for Europe group — could expand its partnerships in the European Parliament, he said, naming the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group and “some leftist groups” as potential allies.

Mainstream parties such as the center-right European People’s Party could sooner or later turn against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, destroying the centrist majority that supported her re-election, the adviser said.

“So this reconstruction of the [Visegrad 4] is going on. We have the third-largest European parliamentary faction. We have a think tank network, which is widely here [in Brussels], and it has a transatlantic leg as well. And we are looking for partners, allies on every topic.”

Budapest wants to boost its political alliances in Brussels, Viktor Orbán’s political director says.

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