How Poland and Hungary went from friends to enemies – POLITICO

Their parties were both members of the conservative European People’s Party in the European Parliament, both had cut their teeth in the anti-communist opposition in the late 1980s, and both had often encountered each other as they rose through the ranks of their respective countries.

“Because Orbán and Tusk were members of the same EU party and shared a passion for football, it was said at the time that they had a warm relationship,” says Edit Zgut-Przybylska, assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Poland Academy of Sciences.

“This relationship included many things,” added Zsombor Zeöld, a Budapest-based expert on Polish-Hungarian relations. “When Donald Tusk was elected President of the European Council, he still had the political support of Viktor Orbán. But somewhere in the mid-2010s this relationship broke down, and I think this went hand in hand with the fact that Fidesz’s relations with Europe, its relations with the European institutions, with the so-called Brussels, also broke down. .”

As Tusk moved into the center of the Brussels bubble, Orbán’s fight against the European institutions became increasingly powerful. At the same time, Tusk’s Civic Platform party lost power to Kaczyński’s PiS in 2015 – and the worldviews of Fidesz and PiS were much closer, even though PiS belonged to the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists.

Once in power, Kaczyński tried to emulate Orbán – at one point even saying he would turn Warsaw into Budapest. PiS followed the Hungarian model of trying to place the media and courts under tight political control, although the Polish party faced more opposition than Orbán in his seizure of power in Hungary.

That made both Warsaw and Budapest targets for EU concerns about a backsliding in democracy – and strengthened their alliance to withstand that pressure from Brussels.