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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a columnist at Le Monde
In her memoir Freedom, Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel recalls her excitement as she took her seat in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 to watch the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, happened to be sitting in front of her. A huge football fan, he taunted her: “One thing is clear. Here, you cannot be sure that you will win.”
Germany won 1-0. But for Merkel, beating Orbán at his own game back in Europe would prove more challenging. That same year, Orbán coined the expression “illiberal democracy”, which would define his fight against the EU’s established political order.
Orbán faces his most serious electoral challenge on April 12 — so serious that Donald Trump is sending his vice-president JD Vance to the rescue. In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, some may find it useful to look back at Orbán’s tumultuous 16 years in power and wonder how so much damage to European cohesion was allowed to be done. Until the last moment, the Hungarian leader has defied the EU, vetoing a vital €90bn loan to Ukraine. His foreign minister Péter Szijjártó admitted co-ordinating with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on sanctions targeting Moscow.
Building an illiberal democracy in the heart of Europe started with taking advantage of the generous EU budget while relentlessly attacking what were viewed as Brussels’ infringements on Hungary’s sovereignty. EU cohesion funds financed more than half of the country’s public investments, accounting for an average of over 3 per cent of Hungary’s GDP for more than a decade. Meanwhile Orbán’s associates have scooped up public contracts.
Germany soon became Hungary’s dominant partner. Orbán wanted to industrialise its economy; Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Opel were happy to oblige, attracted by cheap labour and state subsidies.
Visiting Budapest in 2015, Merkel tried to lecture Orbán on the role of a democratic opposition; he replied by revelling in the 300,000 jobs created by German companies and the record exports to her country: “All I can say to the chancellor is: thank you, Germany!” Just as her dislike of Vladimir Putin did not prevent Merkel from increasing Germany’s dependency on Russian gas for the sake of German industry, she could not ignore the benefits that Hungary brought to her country’s economy.
The two leaders soon found themselves at loggerheads. Later in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Afghan refugees tried to cross Hungary to reach Germany, Orbán built a fence on his border but Merkel welcomed them with open arms. That episode was a turning point in the rise of populist movements in Europe. An official who sat through a European summit in September 2015 told me how leaders from central Europe and Donald Tusk, then president of the European Council, pleaded in vain with both Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker, then the Commission president, not to impose refugee quotas on member states.
Western Europe’s leaders completely misread the shock of the refugee crisis on post-communist societies unprepared for multi-ethnic immigration. Their uncompromising stance contributed to the victory of the Polish nationalist-populist party PiS and strengthened Orbán’s status as leader of the illiberal camp.
He had another advantage, skilfully used: the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) group in the European parliament. It included his own party, Fidesz, as well as Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister CSU. The EPP hypocritically provided crucial protection to Orbán until 2019 when it finally suspended Fidesz — not expelled, though, because it still needed its Hungarian members to vote in Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president with a razor-thin majority. Fidesz eventually left the group in 2021, but benefited from its complacency for two decades.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron believed he could charm Orbán into more reasonable positions. Both fond of history, they had long, one-on-one intellectual conversations around the Élysée dinner table. That did not sway the Hungarian rebel either.
In the end, the EU’s major mistake, says Clément Beaune, Macron’s former European adviser, was to believe that member states, particularly those from central Europe, would inevitably follow the path of liberal democracy. “We did not anticipate what happened, so we don’t have the tools,” he notes. One answer could be to abandon the unanimity rule on foreign policy decisions. But, adds Beaune, “France and Germany always opposed the idea, because they thought it protected them. In fact, it protected Orban.”