00:00The polls have been open for a few hours now. We're about halfway through the voting day. They'll close at
00:047 p.m.
00:04And starting at about 8 p.m., we're going to start to get an idea of what this vote actually
00:08looks like.
00:09Obviously, everybody here in Hungary has been tense with anticipation in terms of the outcome here.
00:13Will it end the longest-running European political dynasty within the European Union, Viktor Orbán's premiership here in Hungary?
00:20And that is the big question. If you look at the polls leading into this, as we've been discussing,
00:24you know, there are many of them showing a double-digit leave for the opposition candidate, Peter Magyar.
00:29That being said, every single person I've spoken to, whether it's the experts, whether it's the man on the street,
00:34nobody wants to make a prediction of how this is going to go by this evening, a little bit later
00:39today.
00:39There have already been allegations on both sides of false flag operations of irregularities within voting.
00:45If the election is very close, there is still 10 percent of the vote that comes from outside of the
00:49country.
00:49That will take another week to calculate. This could be kicked into different courts.
00:53If it's close in different districts, those courts obviously favor Viktor Orbán.
00:57So these are some of the many issues that we're watching here and observing here on Election Day.
01:01As we watch down the river here, all of the sort of different parties collecting their headquarters
01:06for their celebrations or concessions this evening.
01:09And there is also a question of whether, if Viktor Orbán loses, he will in fact concede.
01:12Oliver, this is sounding all very familiar to those of us who covered the last U.S. election.
01:17That's like the equivalent of the mail-in ballot.
01:19I didn't realize that was such a big 10 percent. It's a big percent of the vote.
01:23I was also reading that one of the reasons people may be interested in Magyar is something we saw when
01:30Biden was electioned here.
01:31It was electioned. Excuse me. It's been a long weekend.
01:33It was elected here that Hungarians are looking for kind of a calmer, less combative government.
01:40They don't want to be at the center of these political fights anymore.
01:43They want to just kind of have... I remember when people here were voting, they said they wanted the cool
01:48jazz backgroundness of a presidency.
01:50Are Hungarians craving a little calmer political climate? Is that what's driving some of this?
01:57Yeah, I think to a degree they are.
01:59I mean, the sort of whole Orbán theory of politics has been basically to create sort of external threats,
02:04either sincere or in some ways fabricated to the Hungarian population.
02:08There's been a lot made of the bureaucrats in Brussels.
02:11A lot of the election posters were sort of evil-looking images of Ursula von der Leyen.
02:16There's also the issue of other sort of influences within the country, the sort of woke liberal side of things.
02:21That has, again, been very much the Orbán playbook for the last 16 years, creating a lot of fear from
02:26outside
02:26and saying that Fidesz, his party, is the only one that can defend it.
02:30That being said, there is a sense that that has sort of run out of steam at this point.
02:33And Peter Magyar has put out a slightly more optimistic view about what the future could look like.
02:39His slogan has been now or never, basically, which is suggesting in some people's minds
02:43this is the time to pivot back to the European Union, away from Moscow.
02:47All of that being said, I mean, he is coming in as a sort of, with this ambition of being
02:51a sort of reformer of the system.
02:53There's also lack of patience here for the graft and corruption that they've seen from the Orbán regime,
02:57the enriching of his family and friends.
02:59But that being said, Peter Magyar is still a very nationalistic figure.
03:02This is a person that is squarely on the right, really draped in the Hungarian flag.
03:06Even before J.D. Vance arrived here, he said, basically, once again, something we've heard throughout the election campaign,
03:11this is an election that will not be decided in Washington, D.C.
03:14It will not be decided in Moscow, but it will also not be decided in Brussels.
03:18So he's really been taking some of the Orbán playbook, but trying to give a more optimistic sort of view
03:22of the future.
03:23You mentioned J.D. Vance, so that's where I want to go,
03:25and American involvement and American allegiance with Viktor Orbán right now and from President Trump.
03:31It's an interesting position for J.D. Vance to be in, having gone to Hungary, then going right to Pakistan,
03:38and then on his way back from Pakistan without resolving this war,
03:41and sort of the implications of what that means for the vice president,
03:45especially as the American administration has taken such a pro-Orban position.
03:51What can you tell us about that?
03:54Yeah, when we think about how sort of Trump has cast himself on the global stage,
03:58for the Europeans and for the far-right in Europe, it's really been a rallying cry,
04:01certainly at the beginning of the Trump administration.
04:03You saw the far-right over in Germany, the far-right in France, the United Kingdom, here in Hungary,
04:08all line up behind the president of the United States as sort of a consolidated message
04:12of an effective political strategy that, A, gets you elected, but sort of works in terms of policy,
04:17does get the agenda moving forward.
04:19Within the last six months, what we've seen from the president of the United States
04:22on the issue of Greenland, on the issue of Iran, which has caused huge sort of issues here in Europe
04:27in terms of energy prices causing inflation, that is something that has zero support in Europe
04:32from the liberal side of the spectrum all the way to the conservative side of the spectrum.
04:35So there's that side in which, you know, the sort of sway of the Trump administration
04:39feels that it is sort of diminishing as the flag-bearer for far-right politics within Europe.
04:44There's also the other question for sort of J.D. Vance and for the Trump administration.
04:48They're not only a flag-bearer for the far-right, they're supposed to be the great negotiators,
04:52breaking through these sort of impossible geopolitical issues.
04:55We saw that happen with Gaza and Israel.
04:58That is obviously not happening here with Iran.
05:00So J.D. Vance, he comes to Hungary, he endorses Orban, he then goes to Pakistan,
05:04fails to get a breakthrough there.
05:05If you get a failure here from Orban getting re-elected,
05:08it poses some real questions about the effectiveness of those two reputational qualities
05:12of the Trump administration.
05:13Oliver, I also want to ask you, because it's not just America that has kind of inserted itself
05:18into this election, there's other players as well, including the EU, Russia, and China.
05:22I remember when I was covering Pompeo during the first Trump administration,
05:25he did a huge swing through Hungary, through Slovenia, through Eastern Europe,
05:29trying to get Chinese influence out of that region.
05:32Where does that stand, and how much have you seen Russia and China,
05:36and to some extent the EU, try to put their thumb on the scale here?
05:41Yeah, absolutely.
05:42I mean, the EU obviously has a massive interest in what happens in Hungary,
05:45because Hungary is part of the political structure of the EU.
05:47Viktor Orban sits at the European Council.
05:49He currently is the only person sitting between Ukraine, the EU,
05:53and that 90 billion euro loan that's supposed to go to Ukraine.
05:56When I spoke to Zelensky a few months ago, he said that that is a question of survival for the
06:00country.
06:01Russia obviously is well invested, that's well sort of cataloged here in Hungary.
06:05But the question of China is a super interesting one.
06:07You go back to 2023, when you look at the Chinese investment that was made in the continent of Europe,
06:1244% of that investment was in Hungary, a nation of 10 million people,
06:17about a quarter trillion euro economy, very, very small,
06:19because BYD, the EV manufacturer, they opened up operations here.
06:23CATL was another one that was operating here.
06:25And when Xi Jinping came to Europe, which you know is a very rare event indeed,
06:29he came to France, he came to Serbia, and he came to Budapest.
06:32So again, this has been part of the sort of Orban playbook, a sort of playing between everybody.
06:36Not clear if it's going to continue to go forward in that manner.
06:39But Petr Magyar may also want to continue to draw for that.
06:42He's a big generator of jobs and manufacturing output to have those two massive Chinese companies operating here in Hungary.
06:48And Huawei, right?
06:48When I was there in Ukraine, everybody had a Huawei phone, which was really surprising me.
06:52Tim, you have a consumer question.
06:53Yeah, well, I'm just wondering how the war is playing into the backdrop of this election
06:58and higher prices across Europe and perhaps higher prices across Hungary
07:02and what that's doing to the consumer in Hungary
07:04and sort of how the different candidates are actually addressing that.
07:09Yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to ask you which war,
07:11because both wars are playing pretty large roles here in Hungary.
07:14For the war in Ukraine, this has basically been the poster child for Orban.
07:18I mean, you see Zelensky plastered across this town as a sort of mugshot in a sort of warning,
07:23don't get embroiled with Ukraine, we need to be sort of more hedged.
07:26That's been part of the Orban message.
07:27But in terms of the energy question, it's a serious one for Hungary.
07:30It's a landlocked nation, doesn't have access to seaborne crude or LNG and those sorts of things.
07:34And it's a nation that has been severely scarred by the inflation crisis over the last couple of years.
07:39I mean, I think inflation in Hungary reached over 20 percent,
07:42much higher than it was the average across from the European Union.
07:45So that has really stayed with people in terms of some of the concerns.
07:48And as energy prices get boosted, boosted, boosted, you can insulate to a certain point,
07:51but at a certain point, that's going to be felt by the consumer.
07:54And we should say that a lot of the domestic issues that Viktor Orban was having on the economy
07:57are going to be Peter Magyar's issues, and they're not going to be swift and easy ones to resolve.
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