A new low

Hungary’s tax authority said they had been detained on suspicion of money laundering, which prompted a furious response from Ukraine. In a post on social media, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha denounced what he called “state terrorism and racketeering”.

This incident followed an earlier decision by the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to deploy the military to guard power plants after warning that Ukraine planned to disrupt his country’s energy system. Orbán had previously accused Kyiv of holding back Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline, which passes through Ukrainian territory.

In these conflicts with Ukraine, Orbán’s eyes are certainly on the home front. Hungarians head to the polls in April for parliamentary elections and, with ordinary people having suffered from high inflation and limited job prospects in recent years, Orbán may well be ginning up international incidents to distract from his poor economic record.

But a deeper dive into the region’s history shows that Orbán has often picked diplomatic fights with neighbouring states, with Ukraine taking the brunt of this campaign. When the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed after World War I, several countries in central Europe inherited ethnic Hungarian communities within their new borders. One of these communities was in Transcarpathia, a region of Czechoslovakia that was taken over by the Soviet Union in 1946. The Hungarian minority there became citizens of independent Ukraine in 1991, along with the rest of Transcarpathia.

A hallmark of Orbán’s nationalist politics since the 1990s has been his willingness to criticise neighbouring countries over their treatment of their Hungarian minorities, and after becoming prime minister for a second time in 2010, he fulfilled a longstanding pledge to offer Hungarian citizenship and passports to ethnic Hungarians in surrounding states.

Several years later, in 2014, Orbán then called for “autonomy” for ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine and has since then kept up a series of complaints about the Ukrainian government’s treatment of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia.

Following Russia’s 2014 incursions into eastern Ukraine, for example, Kyiv instituted laws restricting the use of minority languages that were introduced to promote the Ukrainian language and limit Russian. Orbán complained that the laws violated the rights of Transcarpathia’s Hungarian minority to their own culture and language. He has subsequently used the rationale of defending minority rights to block a variety of measures promoting cooperation between Ukraine and the EU.

Ukraine has been a major focus of Orbán’s campaigns regarding ethnic Hungarian rights. But the country is not alone in being targeted by Budapest. Orbán also referred to southern Slovakia, where there is a large ethnic Hungarian minority, as a “partitioned part” of Hungary in a July 2023 speech.

It has become complicated for Orbán to maintain his rhetoric of protecting ethnic Hungarian rights as the war in Ukraine has continued and Hungary has drifted further into Russia’s sphere of geopolitical influence. For example, he has more recently muted his criticism of neighbouring countries for their treatment of ethnic Hungarians if they are supportive of Russia.

The Hungarian prime minister initially looked the other way when Slovakia’s government, which has been led by pro-Russia Robert Fico since October 2023, passed a new law in January criminalising speech against a set of post-World War II laws called the Beneš decrees. This law has widely been seen as targeting Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarians.

The Beneš decrees were used by Slovakia’s government to deport thousands of Hungarians from the country in the 1940s. While leaders of Slovakia’s Hungarian minority continue to denounce these decrees as a crime against their community, under the new law they could be put in jail for such statements.

Orbán’s initial response was cautious. He pledged to talk with Fico but only once he had a “sufficiently deep understanding” of the situation. Orbán’s opponent in the upcoming election, Peter Magyar, then led a protest in front of the Slovak Embassy in Budapest where he denounced the new law. And under pressure, Orbán announced he would be appealing the law to the European Commission.

The new law put Orbán in a bind. Should he criticise Slovakia over this assault on the collective rights of ethnic Hungarians and risk sowing discord with a fellow Russian partner? Or should he defend the Slovak government against criticism from Magyar and pay for it at the ballot box?

It’s likely that whoever leads Hungary’s government after the upcoming election will continue to pick fights with neighbouring states over the issue of national minorities. Magyar has signalled he will continue Orbán’s approach, and not only with his protest in front of the Slovakian Embassy.

In 2025, he made a point of travelling to Ukraine and Romania to meet with ethnic Hungarians. And he has also consistently demonstrated concern for these minority communities in his campaign speeches.

Given his record of chiding neighbouring states over their treatment of Hungarian minorities, a Magyar win in April will not mean an end to tensions between Hungary and Ukraine. But it could still be a fresh start after years of hostility under Orbán.

This article was first published in The Conversation. Views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of Novaya Gazeta Europe.