US Vice-President JD Vance has travelled to Budapest to back veteran Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a key European ally of the Trump administration, ahead of tough parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Vance is expected to take part in a joint press conference before addressing an election rally with Orbán in a football stadium on Tuesday afternoon.
The 12 April election is billed as Orbán’s toughest challenge in a political career going back almost 40 years. He has won four elections in a row since 2010.
Vance and his wife Usha were welcomed by Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó who told Hungarian media that Orbán’s friendship with President Donald Trump had created a “new golden age” in relations.
Last month, Trump said Orbán had his “complete and total support” in a video message to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest.
On Sunday Orbán faces Péter Magyar, a former insider in the prime minister’s Fidesz party, who broke with him two years ago to found the centre-right Tisza party.
Tisza leads Fidesz by between 10% and 20% in most polls. Only the strongly pro-government Nézőpont agency puts Fidesz narrowly ahead.
Orbán is hoping that Vance’s visit will impress undecided Hungarian voters enough to back him once again, as a strong and internationally respected leader in turbulent times.
“I’m looking forward to seeing my good friend Viktor, and we’ll talk about any number of things related to the US-Hungary relationship,” Vance told reporters as he left Washington earlier.
Officials are painting his two-day trip as the first top-level US visit since former President George Bush in 2006, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Orbán in Budapest in February.
Orbán has strong ties to the US Maga movement backing the American president, who said last month: “I hope he wins, and I hope he wins big.”
Their friendship goes back to 2016, when Orbán was the first and only EU leader to support him in the US presidential election. He strongly backed Trump for re-election in 2024, and was in Washington last October to secure an exemption for Hungary from US sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil.
Trump later made clear that the exemption was a personal deal between himself and Orbán – implying that if Orbán lost this election, his successor would have to re-apply.
Hungary, almost alone among EU countries, has defied calls from Brussels to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels. In Washington, Orbán also committed to buying more US liquefied natural gas (LNG), as well as US nuclear technology and fuel. Hungary depends heavily on Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline from the east, and on Russian gas through the TurkStream pipeline from the south.
Both sources are now problematic. No oil has reached Hungary through the Druzhba pipeline, which crosses Ukraine, since the end of January. Orbán blames Ukraine for failing to restore the pipeline after a Russian attack on oil infrastructure in western Ukraine on 27 January.
