Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,
U.S President Donald Trump has endorsed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for re-election ahead of Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election, praising him as “a truly strong and powerful leader” and saying he has his “complete and total” backing.
In the message posted Thursday on Trump’s Truth Social account, Trump credited Orbán with improving bilateral ties and framed him as a law-and-order nationalist leader. “Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán,” Trump wrote.
“I was proud to endorse Viktor for re-election in 2022, and am honored to do so again,” he added.
Praise between the two leaders stretches back years. In March 2024, after meeting Orbán at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the U.S. president claimed that, unlike much of Europe, “Hungary is a safe country because of [Orbán’s] strong immigration policies.”
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump added during a presidential campaign rally later that year.
Orbán has repeatedly returned the favor, portraying Trump as the indispensable champion of peace and sovereignty. At CPAC Hungary in 2024, Orbán rallied conservatives around Trump as he backed him to return to the White House.
Orbán has previously cast Hungary as an outpost surrounded by what he describes as a hostile liberal mainstream in Brussels and Western Europe. “Hungary is a conservative island in the liberal European ocean,” Orbán said.
With the election approaching, Orbán issued a stark warning to the European Commission not to interfere in what is expected to be his governing Fidesz party’s toughest vote yet. On Thursday, the Hungarian prime minister wrote on X, “Keep your hands off our elections! The report by the Republicans’ House Committee on the Judiciary exposes foreign actors attempting to influence Hungary’s vote, with money, services, and political backing flowing in from abroad. Decisions about Hungary’s future belong to Hungarians alone. Foreign meddling will not be tolerated.”
Orbán’s camp is drawing a line between open political endorsements and what it claims is covert institutional pressure by EU bodies and regulators. Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee have amplified that argument in recent days, alleging the European Commission has leaned on major social media platforms to shape what voters see online in the run-up to elections.
In one post circulated alongside the committee’s work, the committee’s account wrote, “It turns out interfering with elections is standard fare for the European Commission. Ahead of at least EIGHT elections across six European countries since 2023, the Commission met with platforms to pressure them to censor political speech in the days before the vote.”
“Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, in addition to the EU elections in June 2024,” a committee report published on Feb. 3 read.
“Nonpublic documents produced to the Committee pursuant to subpoena demonstrate how the European Commission regularly pressured platforms ahead of EU Member State national elections in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties,” it added.
EU officials rejected the broader accusation that Brussels interferes in member-state elections, describing such claims as unfounded, and insisting that it simply reminded platforms of the rules designed to reduce “disinformation” risks.
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