Hungary would have given in to Russia, says Orbán’s top aide

If it were in Ukraine’s shoes, Budapest wouldn’t have fought the Russians, said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s top aide.

Balázs Orbán, the political director of his namesake (but no relation to him), was a guest on a podcast on Wednesday where he talked about Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression. 

“Every country has the right to decide its own destiny, and leaders take responsibility,” Orbán said. However, he went on to add that if the same situation had happened to Hungary, they wouldn’t have taken up the fight against the aggressors — a lesson learned in Hungary’s own unsuccessful pushback against the Russians in 1956.

“We probably wouldn’t have done what President Zelenskyy did two and a half years ago, because it’s irresponsible,” the political director said. “Because obviously he put his country into a war defense, all these people died, all this territory was lost — again, it’s their right, it’s their sovereign decision, they had the right to do it. But if we had been asked, we would not have advised it.”

Opposition politicians have already called on the political director to resign, including the leader of the center-right Tisza Party, MEP Péter Magyar: “With these words Balázs Orbán has humiliated the memory of thousands of Hungarian freedom fighters, hundreds of whom — unlike Balázs Orbán — were ready to sacrifice their lives for the freedom and independence of their country.”

The leader of the center-left Democratic Coalition, ex-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, wrote in a Facebook post: “The Orbán government would hand Hungary over to the Russians without a fight.”

In invoking this historical example, Orbán has touched on a sensitive point in Hungarian history: October 1956, when a revolution broke out against the totalitarian communist regime, demanding democratization and exit of the Warsaw Pact. But in less than three weeks, Soviet troops invaded the country, and the struggle for freedom left 2,700 dead and 20,000 wounded; 176,000 people fled the country of less than 10 million after the fight was lost. 

In addition, the new communist regime that ruled Hungary for another 33 years after the Soviet invasion executed 229 civilians, including the prime minister during the revolution, Imre Nagy.

The lesson of this chapter of history, according to Balázs Orbán: “We have to be careful here, and we have to be careful with very precious Hungarian lives. You cannot just throw them away in front of others.”

After the pushback, Balázs Orbán defended his statement, saying that “Hungary’s position is clear: we see no sense in the Ukrainian-Russian war” in which hundreds of thousands of people have died “for nothing.”