The meeting also comes as Trump has continued to embrace authoritarians of all ideological stripes. He’s praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Orban’s government has reciprocated, repeatedly praising the former president.

“Orban is setting up this huge barrier to anyone interfering in Hungarian elections, but Orban’s interfering in all sorts of other countries’ elections.”

Kim Scheppele, Hungary expert at Princeton University

Orban has served as Hungary’s prime minister since 2010. The next year, his party, Fidesz, used its two-thirds majority in the legislature to rewrite the nation’s constitution. It changed the retirement age for judges, forcing hundreds into early retirement, and vested responsibility for appointing new judges with a single political appointee who was widely accused of acting on behalf of Fidesz.

Fidesz later authored a new media law and set up a nine-member council to serve as the country’s media regulator. All nine members are Fidesz appointees, which media watchdogs say has facilitated a major decline in press freedom and plurality.

The country’s legislative lines have been redrawn to protect Fidesz members and no major news outlets remain that are critical of Orban’s government, making it almost impossible for his party to lose elections, analysts say.

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Orban backed Trump’s re-election effort and has had frosty relations with the Biden administration, which pointedly did not invite Hungary to a summit on democracy it organised after the president took office. Hungarian officials have accused Biden’s ambassador to the country, former human rights lawyer David Pressman, of interfering in internal governmental affairs.

Earlier this week, Hungary objected to Biden’s choice of a former Dutch prime minister to serve as NATO’s new commander, potentially stalling the appointment.

The Hungarian leader also has enthusiastically boosted Trump’s latest presidential campaign, posting a message encouraging Trump to “keep fighting” after he was hit with the first of what would be four criminal cases against him last year.

Trump posted a $US91.6 million ($137 million) bond to cover the defamation verdict in favour of writer E. Jean Carroll, and began his appeal of the case that arose from his branding her a liar after she accused him of raping her decades ago.

Last week, Orban declared that a win by the former president would be “the only serious chance” for ending the war in Ukraine.

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A video from the Heritage appearance posted by Orban’s political director showed the prime minister speaking with Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination before dropping out and endorsing Trump. The Hungarian leader also met with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser who remains a vocal ally of the ex-president and is active in global populist circles.

Orban’s visit this week comes after he signed a new National Sovereignty Law that penalises any foreign support of political actors in Hungary, part of the prime minister’s longstanding battle against the European Union and international nonprofits criticising his erosion of Hungary’s democracy.

“Orban is setting up this huge barrier to anyone interfering in Hungarian elections, but Orbán’s interfering in all sorts of other countries’ elections,” said Kim Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist and Hungary expert.

Orban is one of a small group of conservative populists who have publicly aligned themselves with US conservatives trying to oust Biden in November.

Last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Argentine President Javier Milei spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington. Orban was a featured speaker at the 2022 event, after which he met Trump at the former president’s New Jersey golf course.

Several conservative populists have won European elections in recent years, including in Italy and Sweden. But leaders in those countries have remained staunch opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, not battled with the European Union government or taken steps that alarm democracy advocates as Orban has.

Scheppele said the parallels between Trump and Orban go beyond ideology. She noted that Orban is not very religious but has become a hero to Christian conservatives for his hardline stances, much like Trump. The two men face a similar electoral quandary as well, she added.

“They’ve got the same problem,” Scheppele said. “How do you leverage a really solid base, which is not an actual majority, at election time?”

Reuters, AP

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