Orbán’s Washington triumph exposes Trump’s support for illiberal allies

Viktor Orbán’s Friday meeting with US president Donald Trump ended as a wide-sounding victory for the Hungarian prime minister, following the announcement of exceptions for Hungary’s imports of Russian oil from US sanctions. 

The meeting was promptly scheduled in the context of the US sanctions announced in October against the Russian energy companies Lukoil and Rosneft — which raised the specter of an energy price and supply shock for Hungary’s ruling party amid a highly competitive election campaign ahead of the April 2026 general elections — and in the aftermath of the failed Budapest Peace Summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, a diplomatic setback for prime minister Orbán that further weakened his domestic position.

From a Hungarian perspective, the meeting had a twofold purpose. It sought both to mitigate the energy-policy threat posed by the newly imposed sanctions to Fidesz’s election campaign and to demonstrate the depth and nature of the partnership between the two strongmen — thereby reviving the myth of Orbán’s strategic and foreign policy genius in the domestic campaign. In the end, Orbán appeared to deliver on both fronts.

Understanding Trump’s transactional nature, the Hungarian delegation arrived with a well-prepared economic package.

It featured a $114m [€98.5m] agreement with Westinghouse for nuclear fuel for Hungary’s Paks I reactors, plus a memorandum on technology transfer for spent-nuclear-fuel storage and potential future purchases of US-made Small Modular Reactors.

The energy deals were complemented by a $600m memorandum for US liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and an unspecified $700m defence procurement package.

PR stunt and geopolitical realignment

The true impact of the meeting depends on the timeline of the exemptions.

While Hungarian officials portrayed them as open-ended, US government sources indicated they lasted one year.

This distinction matters. An unlimited exemption would undercut the EU’s plan to phase out Russian fossil energy by January 2028 and suggest Washington was obstructing EU policy. A one-year waiver, by contrast, aligns with EU goals and pressures Hungary—the EU’s most reluctant diversifier—to reduce its dependence on Russia. The absence of criticism from the EU lends credence to the one-year exemption scenario.

The other energy-related elements of the Trump–Orbán deal point in the same direction. In fact, the meeting culminated in what could become the most significant geopolitical shift in Orbán’s multivectoral foreign policy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — namely the potential diversification of Hungary’s energy imports.

While not an immediate game-changer, the Westinghouse contract sets a path for Hungary to reduce reliance on Russian nuclear fuel.

Combined with the existing supply deal with France’s Framatome, this could eventually make possible the complete phase-out of Russian nuclear fuel one day, if required. It also creates the conditions for replacing Rosatom in the construction of the new Paks II plant.

The same applies to the fossil energy component of the agreement. The announced memorandum of understanding on Hungary’s purchase of US-shipped LNG worth $600m is not a game-changer in scale.

According to CREA data, Hungary imported natural gas worth approximately $2.1bn from Russia in 2024.

The MoU with the United States includes no time commitment, and it is worth noting that US-shipped LNG is on average 30–45 percent more expensive than pipeline-delivered Russian gas from Gazprom.

However, the American shipments will arrive via the Croatian LNG terminal at Krk and the pipeline network connecting Croatia and Hungary.

Until now, a key argument of the Hungarian government against energy diversification was that the existing Adriatic pipeline infrastructure was insufficient to guarantee Hungary’s supply and that Croatia was not a reliable transit partner.

These claims, particularly regarding the alleged lack of capacity of the Adria oil pipeline, were misleading and unfounded, serving primarily to disguise the Orbán government’s lack of genuine intention to diversify away from Russian sources.

Now, however, if the Hungarian government truly intends to implement the MoU on purchasing US-supplied LNG, it will need to engage in extended energy cooperation with Croatia — thereby undermining its previous arguments and opening the way for further diversification of future energy supplies.

Hence, the importance of the entire meeting. At first glance, it appeared to be a victory for Orbán, enabling the continuation of his multivectoral foreign policy, his reliance on Russia, and an affront to the European Union. In reality, however, it moved Hungary toward greater energy diversification — largely in line with its existing EU obligations — and contributed to reducing Russian influence over the country.

This came at the price of providing Orbán with support in his election campaign, both symbolically and by guaranteeing the continuation of Hungary’s existing energy import arrangements for the next 12 months.

Trump doctrine

Multiple observers noted even before the meeting that a potential exemption for Hungary would undermine the coherence of US sanctions policy and weaken Washington’s position vis-à-vis the main buyers of Russian fossil fuels, such as India and China.

The fact is that Trump could most likely have secured the same economic and trade agreements with Orbán without compromising the integrity of US sanctions policy — simply in exchange for the meeting in Washington and a potential campaign visit to Budapest.

Yet he chose instead to grant Orbán a resounding victory, even at the expense of undermining US policy coherence and national interests. The explanation for this behaviour can best be illustrated through another recent example.

During his October meeting with Javier Milei, Donald Trump agreed to a $20bn currency swap arrangement between the US treasury and Argentina, and to begin discussions on potential “trade advantages” for Argentina — conditioned on Milei’s electoral success.

This occurred at a time of a significant US budget deficit and a federal government shutdown, against the backdrop of a trade policy that typically pressures partners through high tariffs to extract trade concessions for the United States.

Since January, Trump’s administration has interfered several times in the democratic processes of US allies, openly backing radical-right, illiberal candidates in Romania, Germany, and Poland’s presidential race.

The Milei and Orbán cases, however, show that this policy goes beyond words: Trump is ready to use the levers of US trade and monetary policy to empower like-minded disruptors. 

In Hungary’s case, the balance of Trump’s “illiberal interventionalism” doctrine is mixed. He granted Orbán a resounding public-relations victory — simply because he chose to — even at the cost of undermining the coherence and deterrent power of US sanctions policy.

At the same time, however, he pushed Hungary toward meaningful energy diversification measures, thereby pulling Viktor Orbán at least partially out of Vladimir Putin’s orbit.

This, however, does not mean that European stakeholders should feel any less concerned. The extent of Trump’s engagement is at least as much explained by the administration’s intent to intervene on behalf of disruptive illiberal allies as by the personal relationship between Orbán and Trump.

No one should be surprised if, in the future, the United States employs both sticks and carrots to influence European elections in favour of like-minded comrades, potentially leveraging the tools of US trade and monetary policy to do so.  

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