Hungary’s Orban meets Trump after NATO summit

AFP | Washington

The Daily Tribune - www.newsofbahrain.com

Hungary ’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban jetted off to Florida on Thursday to meet with former US president Donald Trump after the end of the NATO summit in Washington.

The sit-down at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is likely to further upset Budapest’s allies after Orban drew widespread ire from European counterparts for meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin last week.

Right-wing Orban, whose country took over the rotating presidency of the European Union this month, has been a vocal supporter of Trump, and last met the 2024 Republican presidential hopeful in March.

“We discussed ways to make peace,” Orban said in a post on social media Thursday evening with a picture of the two leaders meeting.

“The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!” The post did not elaborate further.

Orban sparked uproar in the EU by jetting to Moscow to hold talks with Putin on what the Hungarian leader described as a “peace mission” over the war in Ukraine. His Russia visit followed a trip to Kyiv for talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The 27-nation EU bloc has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and imposed unprecedented sanctions on Moscow.

“Viktor Orban has no mandate from the alliance, nor from the European Union, to conduct any form of negotiations,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said at the NATO summit.

“He can do it on his own behalf. But I fundamentally disagree about doing that. I simply do not see the purpose.”

Speaking to reporters Thursday, US President Joe Biden, set to face Trump in November, said that “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now -- there’s not much that he is prepared to do in terms of accommodating any change in his behavior.”