Salvini and Navracsics have different ideas on the future of Fidesz

There’s a new debate unfolding in Europe – for now only indirectly – with Viktor Orbán and Fidesz at its center.

Former Italian Minister of Interior, Matteo Salvini is on one side, who – according to Hungarian state news agency MTI – on Tuesday told journalists in Rome that his “goal remains to create a European centre-right party family with Viktor Orbán, all the more so because the European People's Party has never been as weak as it is now and has never been in government in so few countries as it is now.“

On the other hand, Tibor Navracsics, the fifth Orbán government’s minister without portfolio sees things quite differently. When speaking to Hungarian TV station ATV recently, he said that having activated his membership in KDNP (Hungary’s Christian Democratic Party), he is working on making Fidesz a member of the EPP again. Answering a question Navracsics, who returned to the government this year said that Orbán knows that he is working on bringing Fidesz closer to the European People’s Party, and he doesn’t oppose it.

It is worth noting that although Navracsics is a member of Fidesz, he decided to activate his KDNP membership when Orbán’s party left the EPP. The EPP being the party family which Fidesz commentators later described as the place where spineless crawlers make unprincipled deals.

This is the group that Navracsics intends to move Fidesz towards – while György Helvényi of KDNP (the party which co-governs with Fidesz) has never left the EPP.

The future of Fidesz in the EPP will probably be affected by the Italian parliamentary elections to be held in the spring of 2023 (and a year later there will be European Parliamentary elections as well). At this point, Salvini is counting on coming to government along with the Brothers of Italy lead by Giorgia Meloni, as well as the fact that the party with the most votes would appoint the next prime minister.

While Salvini wants to see a new right-wing European party family established with Orbán, it is interesting to see that although Fidesz left the EPP family, on most issues, members of the Hungarian governing party have voted with the EPP and they have been even more inclined to vote with the liberals than with the Le Pen-Salvini bloc.

We have written in detail about Fidesz being the EU’s orphan during the past year in this article.