Prime Minister, what does the UK have to do with his friend Vladimir Putin?
– threw it there A British journalist for Boris Johnson, who greets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in front of 10 Downing Street.
Part of the British press looked at Orban’s visit recklessly, wondering why Orban was the second EU statesman to meet Johnson after the UK left the EU.
Announcements from the meeting provide a partial answer to this question: strengthening cooperation with the V4, which will be held by Hungary and for which Hungary is widely seen as its engine and Orban as its de facto leader.
It should be noted that V4 is a pillar of V4 and the Poles are one of the most populous camps for immigrants in the UK.
There are more serious motives in the background, and it is doubtful that the meeting took place now because it has been on the agenda for a few months now. The BBC According to his correspondent, the meeting was initiated by the Hungarian side, and the ethics require that if the EU leader requests an audience, sooner or later he will comply with the request.
There are more similarities than we think
The interests of Budapest and London intersect in international politics, and due to Brexit, they can find important allies in each other.
The UK is already looking for new partners in the process of leaving the EU, as it will be able to negotiate trade and cooperation agreements as an independent country. For some time, London had hoped to break up the union with member states over time by breaking the Brexit unity, but so far it has not succeeded.
Budapest may be one of the friends within the union, because Orbán’s government has not yet gone its separate ways in buying vaccines or building diplomatic and trade ties. Eventually Hungary could bypass the union and enter into tailored individual agreements with London, in keeping with earlier British plans.
Another important factor is that London now looks more like a competition for major European cities, which are either arguing over fishing rights or watching with light tears over the way the financial firms that have been growing Britain’s economy have been due to Brexit. I moved.
The relationship with Brussels is also not real, and the relationship has already become strained during the exit negotiations, which were not helped by transportation difficulties for the Oxford-AstraZeneca product or the European Union’s allegations about the nationalization of vaccines.
This is where Hungary comes into play, whose relationship with Brussels cannot be described as rosy either, which also coincides with the UK’s relationship with a “freedom fighter spirit”. That is why London benefits from the friendship of an EU member state that is ready to confront conflict with EU institutions.
Hungary as a distributor of democracy
It might be a cause for concern in London that Budapest had established friendly relations with the mummies of the Western federal system, Russia and China, against which the British government also hardened, in the name of sovereignty, and which also became a heavy blow. British. While the Russians carry out a toxic bombing in England, an investment bank is being set up in Hungary, London bans Huawei from building the British 5G system, and the Chinese telecom giant is headquartered in Budapest.
However, observers say Johnson could be a valuable mediator between Orban’s government between Beijing and Moscow.
According to official information, Johnson encouraged Hungary to use its influence to promote democracy and stability. It can be said: promoting democratic values between the Chinese and the Russians.
The answer to the question “why did they just meet” is that in two weeks a summit of the Group of Seven of the world’s most advanced economies is due to take place in Carbis Bay, England, where the UK presidency intends to urge the protection of Western liberal democracy and the values of the participating countries and their allies.
Thus the Orban-Johnson meeting can be seen as either a preliminary discussion or a survey as the British prime minister looked at who he was dealing with in Hungary when US President Joe Biden was revitalizing the alliance of Western democracies and compared it to emerging authoritarian regimes. Strong working hard.
The Hungarian prime minister himself said that issues related to democracy, the press, the LGBT community and the rule of law were discussed in the meeting with the British prime minister on Friday.
But they still pinch each other, right?
It is conceivable that Johnson and Urban’s approach also has an ideological streak. Although members of the British press attack Orbán for his anti-immigration sentiment, which the Hungarian prime minister has made no secret of, it is not forgotten that many people voted to leave over immigration in the Brexit referendum. The British prime minister, along with his former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who turned against him that day, was a major proponent and strategist of Brexit.
Among other things, the Watchman I also recently reported that in recent months, EU nationals suspected of trying to settle and work in the UK without complying with new immigration rules have been deported en masse from UK borders. Moreover, those involved are not only deported, but sometimes pre-arrested and even imprisoned for several days. In other words, the UK is cracking down on illegal immigration or perceived illegal immigration.
Orbán’s government is not convinced by emphasizing that it has a problem with illegal immigration. According to critics, if an immigrant had money, he could settle in Hungary without any problems, but London, which does not accept the money of Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese billionaires without reservations, will blame Budapest.
Thus, the British and Hungarian governments can have a common denominator in the immigration issue. The Hungarian side supports stricter British rules, and the British are trying to take advantage of the Hungarian community, which includes hundreds of thousands of people in Britain, especially those who registered with the authorities in the post-Brexit period.
Although Johnson and Urban’s worldviews are not necessarily the same, the former may have discovered a non-EU counterpart to the latter.
(Cover Photo:
Boris Johnson will receive Viktor Orban in front of the Prime Minister’s residence in London, 10 Downing Street, on May 28, 2021. Photo: Prime Minister’s Press Office/Benko Vivien Cher/MTI)
