After Ukraine, a new possible hotbed of tensions still arrives from Eastern Europe. In fact, on Sunday in Budapest and the surrounding area there is a return to the polls and the governing party Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Union), led by outgoing premier Viktor Orban, still appears as the clear favorite. Not only that: Orban's rather authoritarian and strongly anti-Europeanist methods were not enough, which he removed the European flag from institutional offices and authored the gag law against the press in 2010, consensus seems to be growing for Jobbik, an even more extremist party, which in the wake of the French elections is gathering the creeping continental discontent against Brussels' austerity.
So much so that Orbàn himself declared that "Jobbik is a party even more to the right than us", but that "it's not enough to shake your fists: you always have to sit down at a table, because isolation is a bad answer". And yet, the Fidesz government of isolation was the great promoter: it made autonomy from the EU its forte (although Hungary received funding of 5,3 billion euros from the European institutions in 2013 alone), has totally broke off relations with the International Monetary Fund and he managed to never be invited by the White House during the entire period of the 4-year mandate, a circumstance that has never occurred since the fall of the Soviet regime.
Orbàn, who nonetheless claims important results such as the GDP growth and deficit below the 3% thresholdhas always looked more to the East than to the West: first trying to get closer to Asian countries (in particular China, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, which was not by chance the first country to buy a considerable amount of Hungarian bonds) to increase its exports beyond the European Union, then with the controversial nuclear deal with Putin. The 10 billion euro investment, lent by Russia, was attacked by many, because it tied up the Hungarian economy for decades without any kind of transparency or possibility of bank reconciliation. A bit like what happened in Ukraine.
