T here is a reason why Viktor Orbán’s prayers “for the safety of the Israeli people” following Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel might ring hollow. Given that it comes from a darling of the MAGA right and a self-styled defender of a Christian Europe, Orbán’s long-standing relationship with the Islamic Republic should raise more than a few eyebrows in the United States.
Under Orbán’s premiership, Hungary has been extraordinatly sensitive to accusations of antisemitism. In the past, those were prompted (somewhat spuriously) by the government’s campaigns against George Soros, as well as (less spuriously) by its efforts to whitewash controversial figures in Hungary’s own wartime history. In addition to the warm ties between Fidesz and Likud, pro-Orbán voices emphasize the revival of Jewish life in the country, facilitated by its safety and absence of hate crimes and its support for Israel in international fora. It has been reported, for instance, that at Israel’s request Hungary blocked EU Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
There are more than a few wrinkles to the idea of Hungary as a bulwark against antisemitism, however. If Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, was assuring his Israeli counterpart of Hungarian solidarity after Iran’s attack, less than two months earlier (and just days after Hungary’s putative defense of Israel at the Council of the EU) he had been signing a memorandum of understanding in Tehran to promote deeper economic cooperation with Iran in areas such as the pharmaceutical industry, health care, agriculture, and water management.
While the actual volume of trade between Hungary and Iran remains modest (close to €50 million), it is not for a lack of trying at the top. On his most recent visit to Iran at the end of February, Szijjártó and his Iranian counterpart committed to issuing 5,500 licenses to each other’s transport companies to facilitate trade. At least, thankfully, the issue of nuclear cooperation was not brought up, unlike on earlier occasions when Hungary had expressed interest in taking part in Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, around 2,000 Iranian students are studying at Hungarian universities as a result of the Hungarian government’s effort to facilitate scholarly exchanges with the Islamic Republic, many benefitting from scholarships extended to them by the Hungarian government, such as the Stipendium Hungaricum. (In the similarly sized Czech Republic, which features a much larger international-student population overall, there are only 573 Iranian nationals enrolled in institutions of higher learning.) Between 2010 and 2018, under Orbán’s watch, Iranian nationals also topped the list of foreigners granted permanent residency in Hungary, ahead of Americans.
Orbán himself visited Iran with a large business delegation in 2015, only a month after the EU had entered into the Obama-led Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He met with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, opened an economic forum, and launched a joint commission on economic cooperation. His message, besides willingness to help with Iran’s nuclear program, was simple: “[The Middle East’s] highly complex affairs cannot be resolved, and the region cannot be stabilized, without Iran.”
In February 2017, shortly before President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, Orbán hosted Iran’s economy and finance minister, Ali Tayebnia, and announced a government-sponsored line of credit worth €85 million to support bilateral economic ties. In April, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization and Hungary’s deputy prime minister signed a memorandum committing them to joint work designing small nuclear reactors.
On a visit to Tehran in 2021, Szijjártó called the Hungarian–Iranian relationship “free of political disputes.” That wasn’t entirely accurate, but it wasn’t not far from the truth, either. Obviously, nuclear cooperation went nowhere during the Trump years. After the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Orbán suggested that the EU’s Iran policy ought to be aligned more closely with the United States and Israel.
Yet, with Trump out of the White House, the Hungarian government had no qualms hosting another business forum with Iranian officials in Budapest, just two months into the mass protests prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. While it is true that in some respects Hungary’s outreach to Iran does not fall outside of Europe’s mainstream — Germany’s exports to Iran, though a fraction of their previous volumes, were still at around €1.2 billion in 2023 — the disregard for the human-rights situation was striking.
In the fall of 2022, in response to the Iranian regime’s crackdown on protesters, Germany’s government stopped all trade guarantees for deals involving Iran and led the EU’s efforts to sanction Tehran. Szijjártó, meanwhile, was gushing that “Iran’s role had changed and the country’s importance had grown,” thus justifying further economic engagement with the country.
The conscious effort on Orbán’s part to cultivate a relationship with the mullahs likely reflects his contrarian nature, his disdain for what he perceives as German (and Western European) sanctimony and hypocrisy about economic dealings with autocratic regimes, and romantic fantasies about Hungarian affinity with Persian and Central Asian peoples, which date back to the 19th century and still enjoy some currency in Hungarian imaginations. More importantly, the decade-long policy reflects Budapest’s explicit bet on a post-American world and a delusion that Orbán will be treated as an equal in such a world by revisionists in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.
Whatever the exact explanation, Hungary’s cozying up to Iran cannot be taken lightly by those who care about the survival and security of Israel, and about America’s role in the Middle East. Lest they be seen as aiding and abetting one the most depraved regimes on the planet, those on the right who have thus far indulged Viktor Orbán and his eccentricities should start asking him some hard questions.