How Orbán changed his stance towards Ukrainians and why he got a "slap" from Trump
The capital of Hungary hosted a congress of the ruling Fidesz party over the weekend. Viktor Orbán’s political force officially approved the list of candidates who will run under the party’s banner in the upcoming parliamentary elections in April 2026.
These elections are already being called decisive for the future history of Hungary and Europe as a whole. For the first time in the past 16 years, Viktor Orbán has a real chance of losing power and for quite some time has been trailing in the polls behind the young Hungarian politician Péter Magyar and his Tisza party.
The pre-election party congress showed that Orbán’s party has begun to make serious mistakes. Moreover, in the prime minister’s lengthy speech that set the tone for the campaign, there was not a single reference to the "Ukrainian threat."
Read more about an important shift in Hungary that could play a key role for us in the article by Sergiy Sydorenko, European Pravda's editor: Ukraine is 'no longer a threat'? Why and how Orbán changed his rhetoric about Ukrainians ahead of the elections.
The congress of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party on 10 January, which was supposed to be a triumph for the authorities, turned into a farce because Orbán’s team simply forgot to register the domain name of the new campaign and Péter Magyar snapped it up.
As a result, on Saturday morning, after the stage for the party congress had already been set up and photos showing the campaign slogan "A reliable choice" were leaked to the opposition, the obvious next step was to check whether a website under that name existed. Logically, Orbán’s team should have prepared a campaign website to match the slogan. It quickly became clear, however, that Orbán’s supposedly "internet-oriented" campaign had not even bothered to think about it.
"When we saw this, we first laughed loudly, and then, in two minutes, registered the site and filled it with real content to explain to you that Fidesz really is a ‘reliable choice’ for oligarchs, but the worst possible choice for the Hungarian people," Orbán’s opponent Péter Magyar said.
Indeed, on Sunday the website biztosvalasztas.hu (the slogan of the Hungarian prime minister’s party campaign – "A reliable choice") went live online, designed in Fidesz’s corporate colors, but filled with anti-government explanations and accusations.
In informational terms, Orbán lost this round. The media discourse shifted significantly from the content of the congress to the "theft of the website."
But the opposition did not stop trolling the authorities there.
On Monday, Péter Magyar announced that his team had begun registering the trademark "biztos választás." The owner of the trademark is to be the Tisza party, meaning that from now on, Orbán’s camp would have to pay a small fee to their opponents for every cap, mug, or T-shirt bearing the campaign slogan. "From now on, they will financially support Tisza’s campaign," Magyar explained.
It should be emphasised that the trademark idea is unlikely to work in practice.
But Péter Magyar’s real goal is different. He is trying to prove to Hungarians that Orbán’s team is incompetent and constantly makes mistakes. The comic story with the website became evidence that this accusation is not unfounded.
And then, quite unexpectedly, Viktor Orbán received a slap from the American authorities. The US president not only refused to record a message for "his friend Viktor," but also did not assign this role to anyone from his administration such as JD Vance or anyone else.
How desperate the organisers were can be judged by the fact that at the last moment they were forced to look for a replacement for the American slot and found only… American actor and comedian Rob Schneider.
But even more important is the fact that in the prime minister’s lengthy speech that set the tone for the campaign, there was not a single thesis about the "Ukrainian threat."
It turned out that claims about "dangerous Ukrainians" and "Ukrainian criminals" find absolutely no support among broad segments of the population. Voters were also not united by the idea of an existential threat to Hungary from Ukraine’s accession to the EU – an idea into which Orbán personally invested a great deal of time and resources.
However, it is now clear who has taken over the role of "Hungary’s enemy," from which Ukraine has been removed – the EU.
Indeed, the word "Brussels" was mentioned more than 30 times in his speech, each time in a negative context.