JD Vance due in Hungary to back Orban's re-election bid

JD Vance due in Hungary to back Orban's re-election bid3 hours agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleNick ThorpeBudapestEPAVance's visit is the latest show of White House support for OrbanUS Vice-President JD Vance is due in Hungary to back veteran Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a key European ally of the Trump administration, in a tough parliamentary election.Vance is expected to address an election rally with Orban in a football stadium in Budapest on Tuesday afternoon. Last month President Donald Trump said Orban had his "complete and total support" in a video message to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest.The 12 April election is billed as Orban's toughest challenge in a political career going back almost 40 years. On Sunday he faces Peter Magyar, a former insider in Orban'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 Nezopont agency puts Fidesz narrowly ahead.Orban's friendship with President Trump goes back to 2016, when he was the first and only EU leader to back Trump in the US presidential election. That friendship has flourished since then. Orban 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 Orban - implying that if Orban loses 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, Orban 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 fr...