Poland's President Among Putin's Favorite Europeans in Budapest
Le Pen, Salvini, Nawrocki lined up for Orbán three weeks before Hungary votes.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski dropped a small bomb on X this Saturday. The target: his own president. Karol Nawrocki is flying to Budapest on Monday to stand next to Viktor Orbán at what’s being billed as a Patriotic Grand Assembly, and Sikorski wants everyone to know exactly what that means. The man Nawrocki is going to embrace, Sikorski wrote, is the same one who is blocking the 20th sanctions package against Russia and the return of 2 billion zlotys for equipment that the Polish Army transferred to Ukraine.
That should have been enough to cancel the trip. It wasn’t.
Monday’s guest list reads like a who’s who of Europe’s most committed Putin apologists: Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Geert Wilders. Sikorski called them Putin cheerleaders. Hard to argue with the label. Nawrocki chose to join this group voluntarily, three weeks before Hungary’s April 12 election, at the exact moment Orbán is most desperate to project international support because domestically, the ground is cracking beneath him.
Péter Magyar’s opposition rallied roughly three times the crowd Orbán managed on March 15. Most polls show Magyar’s Tisza party ahead. Orbán’s response has not been reflection or recalibration. It has been spectacle. Surround yourself with friendly foreign faces. Frame a domestic referendum on corruption and economic rot as a civilizational war. Hope nobody notices the difference.
And then there’s the Russia problem, which is no longer a subtext.
Investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi reported in VSquare that GRU military intelligence operatives are currently working out of the Russian Embassy in Budapest, coordinating a disinformation campaign to keep Orbán in power. The Kremlin-linked Social Design Agency, already U.S.-sanctioned, reportedly drew up plans to flood Hungarian social media with pro-Orbán content manufactured in Moscow but posted by local influencers. Magyar seized on it. At a rally in Pécs on March 8, his crowd chanted Russians, go home. On March 15, he called Orbán a traitor.
Orbán hasn’t denied any of it with specifics. Instead, his campaign pivoted to warning voters about an alleged Ukrainian invasion, a claim so absurd that Sikorski pointed to a special GRU team helping to push it. The fiction does its job: reframe the election around an external threat, position Orbán as defender of sovereignty, distract from the fact that his government is actively shielding the actual aggressor from consequences.
The sanctions blockade alone is remarkable. Hungary has vetoed the EU’s latest sanctions package and a proposed loan to Ukraine, citing a Russian drone strike on the Brody pumping station in January that disrupted oil through the Druzhba pipeline. Russia bombed the infrastructure. Orbán blames Ukraine. The entire European sanctions architecture is held hostage to a dispute manufactured by the country the sanctions target. Two hours of an EU summit were burned trying to move him. He didn’t budge.
This is the man Nawrocki is flying to Budapest to support.
Nawrocki won the Polish presidency last June with overwhelming far-right backing. He courted Grzegorz Braun, a candidate who ran on open antisemitism. He promised to end Hanukkah candle-lighting at the presidential palace. Since taking office, he’s been vetoing Tusk’s legislation at a pace that will break Poland’s all-time record by the end of this month. He opposes Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership. On paper, he’s closer to Orbán than to his own government’s foreign policy.
Tusk posted on Sunday with unusual bluntness: Nawrocki’s participation is a fatal mistake and confirmation of a dangerous strategy to weaken the European Union and strengthen Putin. That’s a sitting prime minister publicly accusing his own president of undermining national interests. In Poland. Out loud.
Sikorski’s parting shot deserves to stick: Mr. President, please take an interest in why Orbán’s nationalism and thievery have caused Hungary to become the poorest country in the European Union. Is that what you wish for Poland?
Hungary’s democratic institutions are hollowed out. Its media is captured. Its economy has stagnated under cronyism. Nawrocki is flying there to stand on a stage next to the man who did all of it, flanked by Le Pen and Salvini, in a city where GRU operatives are reportedly working the feeds.
Whatever Nawrocki says at the podium, Sikorski and Tusk have already told the world what Warsaw’s elected government thinks of it. The Polish foreign ministry and the Polish presidency are now operating on opposite sides of Europe’s defining argument, openly, in the same week Russian intelligence stands accused of meddling in the very election Nawrocki is there to celebrate.
Nobody at the presidential palace seems bothered by this.
Sources:
Washington Post: Orbán and Magyar rival rallies
Euromaidan Press: Poland’s FM opposes president’s trip to Budapest