Reassessing Orbán
A sense that going all-in for Orbán might have been a mistake is dawning in PiS.
The Polish right is distancing itself from Orbán and highlighting that his close alliance with Russia was a big problem in Warsaw.
“[Orbán] was an ally of Poland only in the contest with cosmopolitans and centralizers in the EU and on migration. That was important, but not enough,” Sławomir Cenckiewicz, the head of Nawrocki’s National Security Bureau, wrote on social media.
The Hungarian PM had “a different perception of the Russian threat, differences over NATO, … and an energy policy entirely at odds with our interests,” he added.
Tobiasz Bocheński, a PiS member of the European Parliament, said: “As for Viktor Orbán’s eastern policy, I have repeatedly stated that it was completely at odds with ours.”
Key figures in the PiS camp are either quiet or issuing uncontroversial congratulations to Magyar, while trying to change the subject in Warsaw by shifting to domestic issues. The party’s X feed on Monday was dominated by attacks on Tusk over health care, without a single mention of the Hungarian result.