Tomás Ó Flatharta

The far-right political rulers of the USA and the Russian Federation, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, are promoting the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, ahead of a general election in the Eastern European state on Sunday April 12 2026. The implications of this political development are widely understood; a selection of reactions which have appeared on Bluesky should put an end – for ever – the obviously ludicrous theory promoted by some on the left that the 2022 Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine was a disguised USA V Russia war (a “Proxy” war).

Vance in Budapest: Orbán as the Far Right’s Proof of Concept

What Pinochet Was to Neoliberals, Orbán Is to Christian Nationalists

When US Vice-President J.D. Vance travelled to Budapest to endorse Viktor Orbán ahead of the 2026 Hungarian elections, the ideological logic of the Trump–Orbán alliance came into focus. For American nativist Christian nationalists, Orbán’s Hungary is a proof of concept: evidence that a programme combining Christian nationalism, anti-migration politics, and systematic dismantling of democratic opposition can hold power for sixteen years. Jan Bělíček dissects Vance’s Budapest speech — its Great Replacement tropes, its anti-EU demagoguery, its hollow invocations of workers’ rights, and the irony of preaching Christian civilisation to a comparatively secular Hungarian audience. The underlying agenda, Bělíček concludes, is replication: Vance and Trump want to build in the United States what Orbán has built in Hungary. [AN]

Watching yesterday’s second appearance by J.D. Vance in Budapest, I think I finally understood why the second-highest-ranking US politician has travelled to lend his support to Viktor Orbán ahead of the elections. [1] For nativist Christian nationalists like Vance, Orbán’s Hungary represents much the same thing that Augusto Pinochet represented for the neoliberal right. [2] It demonstrates that their political experiment — grounded in Christianity, aggressive nationalism, and hostility to expert knowledge and the left — can succeed and hold power for an extraordinary sixteen years.