President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Hungary’s newly elected Prime Minister Peter Magyar on April 15, just two days after his election, to congratulate him despite the close ties between the Turkish leader and outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Ankara’s signal that its “institutionalized good relations” with Hungary will continue even as the Turkish opposition congratulated Magyar and observers draw parallels between Orbán’s rule and Erdoğan’s.
In the phone call, which took place 48 hours after Magyar’s victory, bilateral relations were discussed and Erdoğan said he was “keen to further advance the enhanced strategic partnership between the two countries.”
Magyar said, “We agreed to continue cooperation between our countries in the areas of energy, security policy, trade, and culture.”
Erdoğan invited Magyar to Ankara, while the Hungarian prime minister invited Erdoğan to the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, the anti-communist movement that was crushed by a forceful Soviet military intervention.
Political scientist Sezin Öney described Magyar’s invitation to Erdoğan as carrying an “ironic subtext.”
Orbán, long criticized in Brussels for his close ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin, has nevertheless maintained a close relationship with Erdoğan, who also has worked closely with Moscow. Magyar, meanwhile, has said relations with Russia would be “entirely based on trade” and would primarily concern oil and natural gas supplies, stressing that he would not be “friends” with Putin.
Turkey and Hungary deepened their relations after Orbán returned to power in 2010, elevating ties to a strategic level. In 2023, the two countries agreed to upgrade relations to an “enhanced strategic partnership.”
Following Magyar’s election, AKP spokesperson Ömer Çelik said after a Central Executive Board meeting that the government would continue “the longstanding, institutionalized good relations between Turkey and Hungary.”
In the same speech, Çelik described opposition comparisons between Turkey and Hungary as “baseless, inept and irrelevant,” while opposition figures also congratulated Magyar on his electoral victory.
OPPOSITION GREETINGS
CHP Chair Özgür Özel said, “Those who become authoritarian by using the tools of democracy will ultimately be defeated,” while Ekrem İmamoğlu, the party’s presidential candidate and jailed mayor of Istanbul, said in a message from Silivri prison: “This victory belongs to all of us who believe that the ballot box is stronger than fear and that justice, no matter how delayed, is never defeated. Istanbul stands with Budapest. The wind is changing direction.”
In Hungary’s previous election in 2022, six opposition parties united against Orbán but still lost by a wide margin.
In Turkey’s 2023 presidential election, six opposition parties formed a similar alliance, known as the “Table of Six,” backing then-CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as their joint candidate. The effort was widely compared to Hungary’s opposition coalition.
