Hungary heads to elections in April. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party face their stiffest challenge in years from a relative newcomer, Péter Magyar of the opposition Tisza Party.
The question for Israel supporters is, what will it mean for Hungary-Israel relations?
Under Orbán, Hungary has become Israel’s staunchest ally on a continent where many Jews fear to walk the streets wearing outward symbols of their religion. In Hungary, the streets are filled with Israeli tourists chattering in Hebrew. There are, on average, six flights a day between Tel Aviv and Budapest.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the two countries’ close ties was Orbán’s royal welcome of Benjamin Netanyahu in April 2025, in open defiance of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Israeli prime minister. Then, Orbán announced his country was withdrawing from the ICC.
Netanyahu told Orbán: “You support Israel. Proudly. Unstintingly. You stand with us at the [European Union], you stand with us at the U.N., and you’ve just taken a bold and principled decision on the ICC.”
Could such warm relations be in jeopardy under a Magyar-led government?
“I think, without exaggeration, that if Orbán does not win the Hungarian elections, it’s detrimental to Israel,” Rabbi Yonatan Megyeri, director of communications of Chabad Hungary and chief editor of Neokohn.hu, a Hungarian-Jewish news site, told JNS.
The issue is not that Magyar would adopt an anti-Israel policy per se, it’s just that he isn’t passionate about Israel in the same way as Orbán, said Megyeri. “It’s not important enough to him to go to war with the European Union on this issue.”
In contrast, Orbán’s alliance with Israel fits neatly into his broader foreign policy of refusing to submit to E.U. diktats on a host of issues, most especially immigration. As Western Europe finds itself awash in immigrants, many harboring hostile attitudes toward Jews, Orbán has rejected E.U. demands that Hungary open its borders to asylum seekers.
“Orbán’s friendship with Israel is also a way of sticking his middle finger at the European Union, at Brussels,” said Megyeri.
Miklós Szánthó, director general of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a conservative research institute based in Budapest, told JNS, “Magyar has quite clearly indicated that he would break the long-standing policy of the Orbán government of supporting Israel within the European Union.”
Szánthó quoted the Tisza leader, who at a press event in April 2024, said, “If we really oppose something, we will oppose it, but we will not oppose it just to block the other 26 member states. And the same applies to sanctions related to Israel, by the way.”
Magyar and his Tisza Party are a “creation of the Brussels elites,” Szánthó said, and given the hardening attitudes of those elites toward the Jewish state, Magyar will be no friend of Israel.
Three years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered so much if Hungary had a leader who was less than 100% supportive of Israel, said Megyeri, but two years into the Gaza war, it’s clear that Israel can’t afford to lose a European ally.
“Israel faces isolation on the international stage, with everybody, left and right, turning against Israel—Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, you name it,” he said. “When you have 20 friends, you can afford losing one. When you have three friends, or just one, then that’s a big problem.”
Hungarian Jewry
A Magyar premiership could potentially have a negative impact on the local Hungarian Jewish community, as well, though not necessarily by the rise of “traditional antisemitism,” he said. Megyeri puts the number of Hungarian Jews at between 80,000-120,000 people, of whom only 10,000-15,000 are affiliated to Judaism in some way.
The harmful consequences would come from a change in Hungary’s immigration policy, he said. There is a fear among the general population that a Magyar administration would follow in the footsteps of most of the rest of the European Union and open the borders to Muslim migrants. The fear is “pretty well-grounded,” said Megyeri.
“One reason why our Jewish friends can feel safe and thrive in Hungary is our firm policy of protecting our borders and keeping mass immigration out,” said Szánthó. “We are now forced to pay a fine of one million euros per day for keeping our country secure from a flood of radicalized migrants—mostly from the Islamic world.”
Magyar would “open the floodgates to a mass of Islamist immigration,” said Szánthó.
Just on Wednesday, in a video post to X, Orbán said, “Jewish communities are safer in Budapest than anywhere else in Europe. Zero tolerance for antisemitism, no hate crimes, no violent migrants. This is how a modern European capital ought to be.”
Magyar’s chances
The economic downturn and the public’s desire for “change” are two reasons that Magyar has emerged as a serious threat, according to Szánthó. Every democracy reaches a point where, if the same party has been in power for too long, people start looking for something new.
Magyar, 44, is well suited to meet that desire. And he’s relatively new on the scene.
Megyeri’s impression is that Orbán didn’t take Magyar seriously at first. That changed with the strong showing of Magyar’s Tisza Party in the E.U. elections in May 2024. It won 30% of the vote, beating all other opposition parties and coming in second to Orbán’s Fidesz, which won 44.5%, its worst result in European elections.
Most polls show Tisza leading Fidesz at this point, said Megyeri.
However, Szánthó questioned the accuracy of the polls. Online news site Politico had been caught manipulating its “poll-of-polls” by removing the data from two conservative institutes (including his own), and replacing them with data from one on the left, he said. “They did this after discovering that the original dataset put Fidesz in the lead,” he added. “The aim was clearly political: preserving Brussels’ and the Hungarian left’s myth that ‘Tisza was comfortably in the lead.’”
His group’s polling puts Fidesz ahead by seven points. Many other pollsters give Fidesz a lead between 5%-10%, Szánthó added, and even some left-wing polls have begun to signal a shift in favor of Fidesz.
However, he didn’t expect an Orbán victory to be easy, calling it “the most competitive election in the last two decades.”
