Although he has acknowledged that “it is not good news”, the general secretary of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, has made an effort this Monday to minimize the effects for his party. Garriga has assured that his party’s international alliances “do not depend on electoral results”, but are based on convictions, and has added that the ties with the Italian Giorgia Meloni, the Frenchman Marine Le Pen or the Hungarian Orbán remain just as solid and strong.
However, although they share ideological affinities and even friendship, Santiago Abascal’s relationship with the Italian prime minister is not comparable to his alignment with the leader of Fidesz, to whom Vox MEPs abandoned Meloni at the beginning of the current legislature to go to the new political group promoted by Orbán in the European Parliament, the so-called Patriots, of which Le Pen and the Italian Matteo Salvini, a government partner but also a rival of the Italian president, are part.
For Vox dissidents, Orbán’s fall reopens the debate about why Abascal joined the Polish ultra-Catholics of Law and Justice or Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, to join a group in which French abortion defenders coexist with Flemish and Hungarian secessionists and Italians close to Putin. The former spokesperson for the ultra party in Congress recalled this Monday that this decision was never explained – Abascal argued that it was about forming a large ultra group in the European Parliament, but it never caught on – and he used it as one of the reasons to demand the holding of an extraordinary congress of his formation.
The truth is that, with the defeat of Orbán, Abascal has not only lost an ideological reference but also a political and financial godfather. With his closure of borders and his outright refusal to accept the distribution of refugees during the great migration crisis of 2015, Orbán became the leader of populist rulers who, like Donald Trump, have raised the rejection of immigrants as a political flag. In addition, Vox leaders have gone to Budapest to centers such as the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), where the intelligentsia of Fidesz, whose think tank,
More important is your financial support. Vox turned to a bank linked to the still Hungarian prime minister, Magyar Bankholding (MBH), to It was not the first time that this entity financed an electoral campaign abroad: in 2022 it lent 10.6 million to Marine Le Pen for her campaign for the Elysee
Although Hungary is only slightly larger than Andalusia (93,000 square kilometers and 9.5 million inhabitants), Orbán was the only Patriots head of government until the Czech Andrej Babis became prime minister last December. The use of state resources and his close relationship with President Donald Trump made the Hungarian president the strong man of the main far-right group in the European Parliament, although its formal leaders were the Frenchman Jordan Bardella, from the parliamentary bench, and the Spanish Santiago Abascal, from the European party.
Although the polls already predicted the victory of the opposition Péter Magyar, the magnitude of Orbán’s defeat – 15 points difference, magnified by the electoral system established by Fidesz to precisely make it difficult for him to be removed from power – has fallen like a sledgehammer among his supporters. Patriots released a statement last Saturday, the eve of the elections, in which it warned of alleged “external pressure on the electoral process in Hungary” and denounced alleged “blackmail” of the electorate. Still this Monday he was talking about the “worrying political interference of the European Commission”, but Orbán’s quick recognition of his defeat removed any temptation to question the legitimacy of the results.
After ensuring that the “brutal campaign” of the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the “veiled threats of expulsion of Hungary from the EU have had consequences” at the polls, Garriga stressed that his party has not questioned “at any time the electoral result in Hungary.” On the contrary, he added, the victory of an opponent, even if he came from the ranks of Orbán’s party, demonstrates in his opinion the strength of the Hungarian rule of law, “in the face of those who have wanted to question it.” It is the same argument put forward on social networks by the leader of the French far-right, Marine Le Pen.
The fall of Orbán leaves Vox orphaned, which could seek a rapprochement with Meloni – who is committed to Atlanticism in the face of Orbán’s pro-Russian position and seeks to influence European policies instead of torpedoing them – or wait for Le Pen to win power in the French presidential elections of 2027. For now, Vox reaffirms its alliances outside Europe: among others, with the Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu and with the American Donald Trump, although the presence of Vice President JD Vance in Budapest in the final stretch of the campaign does not seem to have benefited Orbán. Unlike the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who has come out in defense of the Pope, the general secretary of Vox has avoided criticizing even though Garriga usually concludes his political speeches with invocations to God and many voters of his party await the Pontiff’s visit to Spain next June. “I am not going to make any assessment of the statements that a president may make about the Holy Father or the Secretary General of the UN,” he apologized.
