Occupy Brussels! Viktor Orbán’s plan for Europe

Hungary, in Viktor Orbán’s words, is preparing for war.

“We need to go deeper, occupy positions, gather allies and fix the European Union,” the 60-year-old Hungarian prime minister declared in an interview at the end of last year. “It’s not enough to be angry. We need to take over Brussels.” 

Orbán has long railed against the EU, using it as a scapegoat to rile up populist support and casting his country’s relationship with Brussels as an us-versus-them battle to hammer home a right-wing ideology grounded in nationalism and traditional family values.

But in recent years — and in particular since his reelection for a fifth term in April 2022 — there’s been a shift in Orbán’s tone and a change in his approach to the EU.

In the Hungarian leader, the EU faces a new type of Euroskeptic, one who doesn’t want to leave the bloc but instead shape it, putting his stamp on policies from support to Ukraine to the fight against climate change to migration.

Orbán has poured money and resources into Brussels, erecting the infrastructure to shape the conversation in the EU capital as he prepares to take on the bloc’s rotating presidency in July on the heels of an expected right-wing surge in June’s European Parliament election.

“If we want to retain Hungary’s freedom and sovereignty, we must occupy Brussels and bring change to the European Union,” Orbán declared at a rally in Budapest to mark Hungary’s national day on March 15.

Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, a former ally turned critic of Orbán and author of “Tainted Democracy,” said the prime minister’s efforts to shape the political debate in Europe — and forge connections with like-minded conservatives in the United States — reflects the self-confidence of a leader who no longer faces significant opposition in Budapest, having been reelected in 2022 with a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament.

While Orbán faces new opposition in the form of Péter Magyar, a former official from the Hungarian leader’s Fidesz party, it’s not clear yet whether the upstart will prove to be a serious threat. Meanwhile, Orbán continues to face pressure from Brussels, where EU leaders have threatened to cut off funding over concerns about democracy and freedom of the press in Hungary.

“Orbán doesn’t have to worry about losing power at home because he has amassed huge power,” Szelenyi said. “His aim is now wider than Hungary. This has been pretty obvious for a while. He wants to not only protect his regime in Hungary but to influence political culture in Europe. Brussels is the cornerstone of this.”

Hungary’s soft power offensive in Brussels

In downtown Brussels, around the corner from the American and Russian diplomatic missions, a legion of builders is hard at work.

The Hungarian government is racing to complete renovations on a vast 18th-century mansion it bought in 2021 in time for July when Budapest assumes the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, the institution where diplomats, ministers and technical advisers meet to set the bloc’s policy.

The new space — the mansion previously housed the Belgian Ministry of Finance — will complement the existing Hungarian embassies to the EU and Belgium and act as a meeting point and venue for cultural events, said Hungary’s ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Tamás Iván Kovács.

“We’re proud of being one of the oldest countries in Europe, more than 1,000 years of history with a very rich and very unique culture,” he said, name-checking composers like Franz Liszt and Béla Bartók and Hungarian Nobel prize winners and literary greats.

The mansion, which Hungarian officials are already referring to as “Hungary House,” is just the latest addition to Budapest’s growing soft-power offensive in Brussels.

Leading the country’s ideological assault is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (commonly referred to as MCC), an Orbán-backed think tank. The government-affiliated organization opened a branch in Brussels in 2022, offering an unapologetically conservative take on EU affairs as it seeks to disrupt the Brussels think tank circuit.

The Brussels branch, with a staff of about 20, is an offshoot of a privately funded educational foundation based in Budapest, which was granted €1.4 billion by the Hungarian state during the COVID pandemic — just as Budapest was tightening the screws on other academic organizations in the country, including the George Soros-backed Central European University.

To imbue the next generation of Hungarian luminaries with conservative values, the organization gives children, often from poor backgrounds, scholarships to attend centers across Hungary, where they partake in extra-curricular activities and education.

“There is a chance that they are going to be among the next generation leaders of Hungary, not just in the political realm, but in the spheres of culture, economy, business,” said Balázs Orbán, a top adviser (but no relation) to the Hungarian prime minister and the driving force behind MCC. 

At a recent MCC event in Brussels, young staffers from the European Parliament mingled with representatives from EU countries, as they heard from various right-wing speakers on the rise of populism. 

The aim of the association, director Frank Furedi told attendees, was to provide people with the “intellectual resources” to counter a dominant culture that wants to “shove gender politics down our throat” and “destroy our past.” 

Previous gatherings have zoned in on hot-button issues, like farmer protests against the EU’s green agenda. A recent report, “How did LGBTQ take over the EU?” argues that “the issue of sexual rights has been weaponized to demonize EU Member States of Central and Eastern Europe.” On April 9, the group will present a report warning about efforts to create “a United States of Europe.”

“This event will be an occasion ‘to kick up a fuss’ and reveal what the EU elites have been doing — both in plain sight and also behind the back of European people,” the group announced.

Balázs Orbán says MCC will offer a more conservative take on EU politics and philosophy — something that has been lacking since Britain’s exit from the European Union. “Everybody may say there is full agreement about the strategic direction of Europe, but that is not true,” he said. “Our aim is to influence the European debate.”

Budapest is also funding The European Conservative, an English-language magazine and website putting a conservative slant on EU news, through the nonprofit Batthyány Lajos Foundation. 

“We have a lot to be proud of,” said Kovács, the Hungarian ambassador. “It’s important that we have a way of communicating this directly. Unfortunately, some of the mainstream coverage is distorting and not telling the full picture.”

Right-wing surge in the European Parliament

Hungary is eyeing the coming months as a crucial window for political change. In June’s EU election, citizens across the bloc will choose the 720 members of the European Parliament and trigger a wider rejigging of the top EU leadership roles across the bloc.

All signs point toward a swing to the right. A recent poll for the European Council on Foreign Relations forecast a right-wing surge in June’s election, with populist and nationalist parties gaining ground and centrist and left-leaning forces losing seats — a shift that would coincide with Hungary taking the helm of the Council of the EU.

“I haven’t seen such a good opportunity for national, conservative, sovereigntist and Christian-based forces to become dominant in the European Union in a long time,” the Hungarian leader said in March. Orbán’s statement was posted on his social media accounts accompanied by clips of him rubbing shoulders with right-wing European leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico.

“It’s not an overnight revolution,” he elaborated during an onstage interview at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, a Turkish conference on international diplomacy. “But change could start from June. That’s my hope, and I’m working on this. I [will] try to play a role to unify the right … and sweep away the socialist, leftist, progressive, liberal dangerous guys.”

As part of his effort to “unify the right,” Orbán has been in search of allies. His Fidesz party has been politically homeless since leaving the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021, but speculation is rife that it will seek to join the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a more conservative political family in which Italy’s Meloni is the heaviest hitter.

Though the far-right Sweden Democrats and the Czech Civic Democrats have threatened to quit the political family if Fidesz is admitted, bigger beasts in the ECR jungle such as Poland’s Law and Justice party are open to it. Polls predict that if Fidesz were to join, the ECR could become the third-largest group in the European Parliament after June’s election. 

Orbán has said that Meloni is also on board. The Italian leader has emerged as an Orbán whisperer in recent months, convincing him to back a funding plan for Ukraine at an EU summit. 

In a sign of ever closer ties, the Hungarian leader flew into Brussels a day before another meeting of EU leaders last month to present the co-president of the ECR in the European Parliament, the Polish academic Ryszard Legutko, with an award for “the protection of European values and freedom.” 

Orbán’s vision for Europe

So what does Orbán want?

Most of the time the Hungarian leader and those around him frame their ambitions in the negative: railing against bureaucracy, migrants, the “LGBTQ agenda” and assistance for Kyiv in its war against Russia.  

What they don’t do is suggest Hungary should leave the EU.

“You can take a simplistic approach and suggest that Hungary is against the European effort, but take a look at reality,” said Zoltán Kovács, the international spokesman for the Hungarian government. “Hungary is with the European mainstream on agendas basically 85 to 90 percent of the time.”

Support for the EU remains high in Hungary — and Orbán knows it. The European Commission’s regular Eurobarometer survey consistently finds Hungarian support for EU membership at well above 50 percent. A recent survey found that 72 percent believed EU membership is a good thing.

“Orbán can criticize the European Union,” said András Bíró-Nagy, director of Policy Solutions, a Budapest-based think tank. “He can say it is going in the wrong direction, but he cannot play with Hungary’s EU membership. That’s a red line even for his own Fidesz voters.”

So rather than wanting to leave the EU, Orbán and his allies insist it must be reshaped, with more power given to national governments (sovereigntism, in their parlance) and less to the institutions in Brussels.

“Sovereignty is the main idea,” said Balázs Orbán. “We need someone who is representing the idea of individual national member states cooperating — not a federal superstructure. That was in fact central to the idea of the EU at the beginning.”

The best guide to the Hungarian vision for Europe may be the vetoes Budapest has deployed in Brussels. Many EU decisions require the consensus of the bloc’s 27 countries, and Orbán has not shied from withholding his, even in the face of pressure from other leaders. He has used his effective veto to block everything from sanctions on Russia to an EU position on global taxation to funding for Ukraine. 

Many times, Orbán has blocked or held up decisions to extract concessions, but he has also deployed his veto — sometimes at the eleventh hour — in the name of the principle that countries should have more control over what goes on within their borders. 

A case in point is the recent Nature Restoration Law, a key part of the EU’s Green Deal agenda designed to protect biodiversity that has fallen foul of farmers. During negotiations between EU institutions, Hungary supported the bill — but on the eve of the final negotiation, Budapest announced it would oppose the law, over what it says are legitimate concerns from farmers in other parts of Europe and claiming Brussels wants to set “irrational targets” motivated by a “green ideology.”

Orbán’s frequent use of the unanimity rules has led to calls, most notably from France and Germany, to remove them in certain areas of EU decision-making, like foreign policy.

Budapest has sworn to oppose such a move. Hungarians “don’t like being dictated to,” said Balázs Orbán, citing — as many government officials do — a kind of Hungarian exceptionalism built on centuries of history and resistance.

“I don’t see any willingness in Hungary to give up any more sovereignty, either in foreign policy or even the joint loan projects,” he added. “You’re losing your sovereignty step by step. We want to stop this never-ending federalization.”

The Hungarian presidency of the Council of the EU

As Hungary prepares to take the helm of the Council of the EU for six months starting in July, many in Brussels are expecting a bumpy ride.

The holder of the rotating presidency is supposed to be an “honest broker” and set aside their national interests, but few believe Orbán won’t use the opportunity to tilt things in his direction.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Budapest’s battle against the EU’s migration policy, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has said the issue will be a focus of the country’s presidency. Speaking alongside his Austrian counterpart earlier this year Szijjártó said that “a sharp political change is needed in Brussels so that the European Union does not attract, but stops illegal migrants.” 

Another priority will be enlargement, but on Hungary’s terms. While Budapest is expected to advance this file — a key strategic focus for the EU since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — it will focus on the aspirations of the countries in the Western Balkans rather than Ukraine, whose entry into the bloc it opposes. 

Also significant is what Hungary will omit from its list of priorities. With Orbán seizing on the recent farmers’ protests as a sign of popular discontent with Brussels’ green policies, EU officials don’t expect an emphasis on climate during Hungary’s tenure.

Then there’s the issue of the rule of law. The European Commission has been withholding EU funds from Budapest as it tussles with Orbán over concerns he undermined the country’s judiciary, media and democratic standards. The European Parliament has passed a resolution questioning whether Hungary’s presidency should take place at all.

Not only is Orbán unlikely to pay the Parliament any heed. All indications are that he will relish his role, which — in addition to allowing him to put his stamp on EU policy — will provide him with a place on the global stage.

In stark opposition to the positions taken by his fellow EU leaders, the Hungarian leader has cozied up to the American conservative TV host Tucker Carlson, cheered former U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection and congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his obviously rigged election victory. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called Orbán Beijing’s “friend.”

In his annual speech to the Hungarian parliament in February, Orbán noted that Hungary’s EU presidency will overlap with the U.S. presidential election. 

“Make Europe Great Again!” he declared. “Over there MAGA, over here MEGA.”

“Real change can be brought about by a new European right, of which we Hungarians are a part,” he added. “Down with Brussels. Long live Europe!”