Dalibor Rohac

Orbán is doubling down on Russian energy

Victor Orbán (Credit: Getty images)

Viktor Orbán’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, delivered everything the audience could have asked for. From an emphasis on ‘winning’, through an equivalence between the modern-day left and Cold War communism, to extolling the virtues of Hungary’s border ‘wall’, he covered it all.

Its concluding segment, dedicated to Russia’s war against Ukraine, however, was significant by what it conveniently omitted: Hungary’s deepening energy dependence on Russia. Of course, nobody at CPAC was going to give Orbán a hard time over the fact that, his expression of solidarity with Ukraine notwithstanding, Hungary continues to import 65 percent of its oil and 85 percent of its natural gas from Russia – numbers the Hungarian government shows no intention of reducing.

In fact, the focus in Budapest is, instead, on expanding imports from Russia. In July, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó visited Moscow with the purpose of getting the Kremlin to commit to additional deliveries for the upcoming fall and winter. On his recent Fox News appearance, Szijjártó claimed that ‘there are no alternative sources in the region, and there are no infrastructural possibilities’ other than Russian pipelines and Russian gas.

Orbán is using this as an opportunity to turn public opinion against what he sees as weak and decadent West

That is true but only in the immediate short term. As the Germans rush to augment their liquified natural gas (LNG) infrastructure and the efforts by Three Seas Initiative over the better part of the past decade show, such alternatives exist, but they require policy decisions, money, and time. Thanks to years of planning, for example, Lithuania has now been able to withstand being cut off from Russian energy completely. In 2012, Hungary’s own Energy Strategy saw diversifying away from Russian gas as a priority.

Today, however, Hungary is doubling down on Russian energy – including by cementing Rosatom’s project of expanding the Paks nuclear power plant at a time when, say, Finland has decided to scrap its contracts with Russia’s energy monopolist.

Here is what Szijjártó and Orbán do not want Western conservative audiences to realise: they do not think Hungary’s energy dependence on Russia is a problem.

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