Within days, the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, had flown to Moscow, and returned with two freed prisoners of war, dual citizens of Ukraine and Hungary. With his PoW diplomacy, Putin was not only signalling goodwill towards Hungary, he was effectively endorsing Orbán’s re-election on 12 April. The recent staging in Hungary of a gathering of global hard-right leaders (the Conservative Political Action Conference) further underlined Orbán’s transatlantic alliances. Rarely have elections in central and eastern Europe attracted such intense global attention or seen a race in which the US and Russian political camps openly align behind the same candidate. Péter Krekó is a political scientist, behavioural scientist, and director of the independent thinktank the Political Capital Institute in Budapest

Source: The Guardian March 31, 2026 08:31 UTC