Vice President JD Vance said Monday evening that he was “sad” but not all that surprised that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban lost his bid for reelection, asserting that his decision to campaign alongside the autocrat in Budapest last week was more about showing up for a loyal ally than lifting him to victory.
"We didn't go because we expected Viktor Orban to cruise to an election victory,” Vance said during an interview on Fox News. “We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time."
The comments marked the first acknowledgment by the White House of Hungary’s sweeping rejection of Orban, which put an end to a 16-year run that served as inspiration for President Donald Trump, Vance and countless MAGA allies. Orban, in many ways, had been a model of governance for many in the MAGA movement who championed his advocacy for illiberal democracy abroad and sought to emulate it at home. Orban also took hardline stances against immigration and decried rights for those who identify as LGBTQ+.
“His legacy in Hungary is transformational — 16 years, fundamentally changing that country,” Vance said, explaining that his decision to stump with Orban last week was “not because we can't read polls. We certainly knew there was a very good chance that Viktor would lose that election. We did it because he's one of the few European leaders we've seen who has been willing to stand up to the bureaucracy in Brussels.”
Still, Vance’s inability to help Orban avoid a crushing loss opens the administration up to criticism that its ideas and officials are not the draw they hoped — and deeper existential questions about the future of populist nationalism.
“It’s embarrassing for them, and shattering in a way,” said Johan Norberg, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. “Much of the temptation of this whole populist right movement has been [the idea] that ‘we have people, real people, on our side — we have the future.’ Orban being re-elected again and again was a very powerful sign of that to them. So his suddenly being voted out with the largest majority ever in a democratic Hungarian election is a devastating blow to that whole narrative.”
Steve Bannon, a senior White House counselor to Trump during his first term, said in a text message that Orban’s defeat “better be a warning flare for November” and the looming midterm elections.
Trump, who has twice taken questions from reporters over the last 24 hours, has yet to make a public statement about the defeat of his closest political ally in Europe.
Inside the White House on Monday, aides suggested there were far more pressing matters being tended to, mostly the increasingly fragile ceasefire with Iran and new U.S. blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that Trump announced Sunday after direct talks in Pakistan sputtered.
But the Hungarian election had been a major priority just days earlier. JD Vance had traveled to Budapest last week and while Trump didn’t make the trip himself, he did call into the rally. And that eleventh hour campaign push came weeks after another visit by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump, in his remarks via telephone during Orban’s rally aside Vance last week, credited the autocrat for his strict immigration policy in particular, stating that he “kept your country strong, and he kept your country good, and you don’t have problems with all of the problems that so many other countries have.”
Beyond his own immigration crackdown with an expanded and hyper-aggressive core of immigration agents deployed in dozens of American cities, Trump has modeled other aspects of his governance on Orban’s own actions, be it vociferously attacking judges, bullying the media into greater submission or hollowing out the government by firing career civil servants.
But in Hungary, voters revolted amid a heightened focus on Orban’s endemic corruption during a period of economic stagnation.
“This is quite the blow to the administration and MAGA ideology, because they thought of Orban as not just a great friend and ally in Europe, but also as the laboratory, someone who's been in charge for 16 years doing what they wanted to do,” Norberg said. “You can see that in everything from Project 2025 and how they wanted to dismantle checks and balances according to a Hungarian script.”
A political ally of Vance, the de facto 2028 GOP frontrunner who has long been a fan of Orban, said that the vice president “has to be aware of the parallels” between the circumstances that led to the dictator’s ouster and an America where Trump’s poll numbers have dropped in recent weeks as the Iran war has driven energy prices higher.
“It’s a setback for JD having just gone there right before the vote, and it’s a setback for a leader they really thought would be there for a long time,” the Vance ally said. “But I don’t see them rethinking the philosophical underpinnings that are at the core of the [National Security Strategy]. Euro-scepticism isn’t going anywhere.”
Several more mainstream European leaders have openly celebrated Orban’s defeat, many of them relieved about the ouster of the one individual who had been blocking a major EU loan to provide additional defense aid for Ukraine.
One of them, Finnish President Alex Stubb, spoke carefully about the matter during an appearance Monday at The Brookings Institution, a non-partisan Washington think tank focused on foreign policy.
After asserting that the fate of nationalist populism varies from country to country, Stubb was asked if he had any advice for countries like Germany that have seen a rise in support for far-right parties. He seemed to demur, but the subtext was unmissable.
“You can take this as you wish,” he told his questioner. “It's quite often not very helpful for your own goals to meddle in the politics of another country.”
Megan Messerly contributed to this report.
from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/jCuhaDb
via IFTTT
0 Commentaires