Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
Peter Magyar came to power on May 9, 2026, promising nothing less than the total reconstruction of Hungary. Four months later, his government
demonstrated that defeating Viktor Orban’s Gangsterocracy was considerably easier than governing the country that the dimwit of Alcsutdoboz left behind.
The new administration inherited an institutional wreck: a hollowed out constitution, a highly politicized and irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy, economic bankruptcy, diplomatic isolation, and a foreign policy subordinated for sixteen long years to Viktor Orban’s dead-end personal relationships. No reasonable observer could expect such damage to be repaired in a few months. But the new Prime Minister was not elected merely to administer Viktor Orban’s inheritance more politely. He received a two-thirds parliamentary majority and, with it, the constitutional power to change Hungary fundamentally. Instead, his government has produced hesitation where strategy was required, improvisation where preparation was indispensable, and contradiction where Hungary desperately needed clarity. Its most conspicuous failure has been foreign policy.
The Viktor Orban government reduced Hungarian diplomacy to a cynical incompetence. Moscow supplied energy and political patronage; Beijing supplied loans, factories, and grandiose announcements; Brussels supplied money, while serving as the Gangsterocracy’s preferred enemy; Washington, D.C. was treated according to Viktor Orban’s personal calculation, according to which the Republican Party’s MAGA faction might protect him. As a result, Hungary ceased to conduct foreign policy in the internationally acceptable sense. It conducted a series of transactional relationships designed to sustain one man’s domestic power.
Peter Magyar promised to end this corruption of Hungary’s international position. Yet, he has not replaced Viktor Orban’s “Trojan Horse” mentality and opportunism with a coherent national doctrine. He has merely softened the language, while retaining too much of the intellectual confusion. He has said that Hungary is returning to Europe, but it continues to treat European solidarity as something to be renegotiated issue by issue. He has said that Russia constitutes a security danger, yet Hungary pursued its inherited legal challenge against the European Union’s use of profits from frozen Russian state assets to assist Ukraine – a challenge dismissed by the EU’s General Court. He has said that Budapest will no longer be the Kremlin’s “Trojan Horse,” but it still appears incapable of stating plainly whether Russia’s defeat, containment, or accommodation is Hungary’s strategic objective. Announcing a new “pragmatic policy” toward Russia is perhaps the most evasively meaningless and laughable declaration of the 21st century.
The recent expulsion of ten Russian “diplomats” was a welcome and long-overdue assertion of sovereignty. Yet, even this decisive-looking measure exposed the government’s deeper weakness. It occurred four months after Peter Magyar entered the Prime Minister’s office and was presented as an isolated security response rather than part of a comprehensive dismantling of Russian political, intelligence, financial, energy, and information penetration. The Kremlin promised retaliation, while conspicuously kept open the possibility of preserving its relationship with Budapest. Expelling diplomats is an act. A foreign policy requires a doctrine.
Peter Magyar’s policy toward Ukraine has been even less coherent. During the election campaign, he tried to distinguish himself from Viktor Orban without appearing “pro-war.” Since taking office, he has alternated between reassurances to Hungary’s allies and restrictions designed to appease an electorate conditioned by sixteen years of FIDESZ propaganda. His government indicated that Hungary would cease obstructing some European initiatives, yet continued to attach conditions to Ukraine’s European integration and avoided an unambigious commitment to Kyiv’s survival as an independent, sovereign state.
The legitimate rights of the Hungarian minority, albeit that this minority left Hungary proper in 1918, could be defended. Yet, minority protection cannot become a reusable pretext for strategic paralysis. A competent government would negotiate enforceable linguistic, educational, cultural, and administrative guarantees, while simultaneously recognizing that a Russian victory would endanger both Ukraine and Hungary. Peter Magyar instead risks converting a genuine minority-rights dispute into the continuation of Orbanism by more presentable means. This is the fundamental defect of his diplomacy: he wishes to receive the benefits of Western alignment without consistently accepting its strategic obligations. This already tried, yet failed hovering between East and West, reminds the observant persons of Charles de Gaulle’s egomaniac diplomatic levitation between NATO and the Soviet Union in 1966. His simultaneous removal of NATO’s military headquarters from France and his long journey to the Soviet Union wanted to underline his resolve to show France’s independence from Washington, D.C. Yet, even then, France was a major European power. Hungary is an almost irrelevant member of both NATO and the EU. Most importantly, Hungary cannot reconstruct itself without deciding where it belongs. Nor has Peter Magyar’s government articulated a serious policy toward the United State of America. Viktor Orban personalized American-Hungarian relations around President Trump and his MAGA. Peter Magyar appears to believe that merely being less provocative toward the White House will repair the damage. It will not. Hungary must build institutional relations with the White House, the U.S. Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon, the American business community, and the media. Friendship between states cannot depend upon political fortunes – or personal affection – of individual leaders.
Even Peter Magyar’s opening toward Poland, though symbolically sensible, revealed the substitution of gestures for strategy. His first foreign trip as prime minister emphasized democratic restoration and renewed Central European cooperation. Yet, a visit is not an alliance, and a photograph is not a regional architecture. Hungary needs a concrete plan for rebuilding the Visegrad relationships, strengthening NATO’s eastern flank,improving ties with Romania and Croatia, stabilizing the Western Balkans, and preventing Russian and Chinese domination of the region.
Of course, the Peter Magyar government’s defenders will reply that four months is little time to reverse sixteen years of destruction. That is true – but beside the point. A new government with a two-thirds supermajority already should have published a national-security strategy, should have ordered transparent reviews of Russian and Chinese influence, should have defined its Ukraine policy, should have established its principles of relations with the European Union, and should have rebuilt a professional diplomatic service. Instead, Peter Magyar has governed foreign policy as he conducted his rise to power: tactically, personally, and reactively. He is skilled at identifying the public mood and positioning himself between competing constituencies. These talents made him an extraordinarily successful campaigner. It does not automatically make him a statesman. Statesmanship requires choosing among incompatible alternatives. Hungary cannot simultaneously be a reliable NATO ally and a sanctuary for Russian and Chinese influence. It cannot demand European solidarity, while threatening obstruction whenever domestic politics becomes uncomfortable. It cannot welcome Chinese capital, while refusing to disclose the strategic price. It cannot defend Transcarpathian ethnic Hungarians by weakening the very Ukrainian state whose continued existence protects them from Russian imperial rule.
The tragedy of the Peter Magyar government’s opening months is not that it has committed one catastrophic foreign policy blunder. It is that it has not yet demonstrated the intellectual discipline necessary to prevent the next one. Its diplomacy resembles a compass whose needle moves according to the nearest political magnet. Moreover, Peter Magyar was elected to dismantle Viktor Orban’s Gangsterocracy. Yet, foreign policy shows how deeply this Gangstericracy survives – not merely in institutions, contracts, and personnel, but in mentality: permanent tactical maneuvering, fear of unambigious commitments, and the confusion of national interest with short-term popularity.
Yet, Hungary does not need a more courteous version of Viktor Orban’s balancing act. It needs a government capable of distinguishing independence from isolation, pragmatism from appeasement, and sovereignty from the theatrical abuse of the veto power. Thus far, Peter Magyar has offered a change of diplomatic atmosphere. He has not offered a foreign policy worthy of a reconstructed Hungary.