The Grand Budapest Cartel

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism.

How is that possible? How did this happen?

The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

To explain how all of this happens requires a brief history lesson. Today, Hungary has a rapidly aging, shrinking population of 9 million in a small, landlocked state surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, with an economy only slightly larger than Oklahoma’s and a GDP per capita of around $23,300. It reached this state because Hungary has, since the end of the Middle Ages, been subject to pressure from surrounding powers in central Europe.

After Hungary’s last king died in 1526 during a battle against the Ottoman Empire, much of its territory fell under Turkish rule, and the remainder became a vassal of Austria from 1526 until 1867. Austria managed, during the intervening centuries, to claw back much of Hungarian territory as the Ottoman Empire declined. After a failed revolution in 1848, Hungary finally achieved a degree of autonomy during the Dual Monarchy from 1867 until 1918, at which point the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. During the interwar years, Hungary had lost much of its territory and largely operated as a German proxy until the death of Adolf Hitler, after which Josef Stalin turned Hungary into a Soviet satellite state in 1945. In 1956, Hungarian revolutionaries led by Imre Nagy attempted a democratic overthrow of the communist government but were suppressed by Nikita Krushchev, with Nagy executed in 1958. In short, for the last five hundred years, despite a couple of attempts at self-rule, Hungary has always been the junior partner to a superior regional power. Under Orbán, this state of affairs remained unchanged.

Orbán was born on May 31, 1963, and grew up around Hungarians suppressed by communism. As a young man, Orbán was part of the Alliance of Young Democrats, which was a radical democratic student party with an age limit of 35. Orbán spoke out in June of 1989 to demand a free, democratic Hungary at the reburial of Nagy at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. The Alliance of Young Democrats became the Fidesz Party in 1990 with Orbán as its head. Orbán won his first premiership in 1998 and successfully governed as a Hungarian version of Margaret Thatcher, seeing Hungary enter NATO in 1999. However, his party lost the majority in 2002, putting Fidesz in opposition until Orbán returned to office in 2010.

Orbán returned to power a different man. Instead of aligning Hungary with NATO, he aligned the nation with Russia in the same way as other right-wing European parties, such as National Rally in France and Lega per Salvini Premier in Italy. For example, Orbán borrowed from a Russian bank to fund a Russian-built nuclear power plant in Hungary. After winning reelection in 2014, Orbán became a thorn in the side of the European Union in its efforts to resettle Middle Eastern migrants, refusing to admit them to Hungary. Despite his obvious Russophilia (or, for some, perhaps because of it), this stance earned him support from the American populist right, seeing their migrant crisis as an analogy to the American border crisis.

Orbán won a fourth election in 2018, at which point he began to govern in the authoritarian fashion he once rejected as a young man. In 2020, the Hungarian Parliament passed legislation allowing Orbán emergency dictatorial powers nominally to handle the COVID-19 pandemic but which ultimately led far beyond that remit. After ousting the Central European University for its ties to the Soros Foundation (although Orbán was once a recipient of a Soros Foundation fellowship in 1989), the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) was packed with Orbán loyalists, including American scholar Gladden Pappin, then a professor of political science at the University of Dallas.

Pappin is a leading American postliberal whose ascent in Hungarian politics is somewhat unusual, as he does not even speak the language. Then again, for his work for Hungary, he never had to. Pappin became one of the chief spokespeople for Hungarian family policy, in which Orbán dispensed benefits to married women having children. Pappin’s articles touted great success in family formation, rate of childbirth, decline in abortions, and the like, and were unavoidable in conservative publications during the early 2020s.

For his service, Pappin was appointed president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, where he began working with American and European policymakers to influence them to adopt what amounted to the same line as Russia. Pappin quickly moved from recommending not only Hungary as the model for family policy to insisting during on American Moment podcast, Moment of Truth , on the end of the American “liberal imperium” in favor of handing over areas of the world to Russian and Chinese spheres of influence. Other important figures in the influence campaign are John O’Sullivan, a former aide to UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and his leadership of the Danube Institute.

The Danube Institute invites influential American conservatives to Budapest to wine and dine them and sponsors pro-Orbán work for publication in Budapest-based outlets like The Hungarian Conservative and The European Conservative. These periodicals have limited readership but are propped up by large grants from the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, which spends the money instead of the government to work around EU transparency regulations. The foundation has also funded prominent New Right figures like Christopher Rufo, Michael O’Shea, and Jeremy Carl. Indeed, the Danube Institute itself operates as part of the foundation. A permanent fixture behind much of this outreach is Balázs Orbán (no relation to Viktor), who is the prime minister’s right-hand man and nearly everywhere Hungary has an English-language presence. These figures are why Budapest has had an annual CPAC conference since 2022 and worked with the Edmund Burke Foundation to bring NatCon to Brussels in 2024. Among the six co-Sponsoring institutions at NatCon Brussels, three were Hungarian: MCC, the Danube Institute, and The European Conservative. Effectively, the conference was bought and paid for by the Hungarian government.

What Pappin, O’Sullivan, Balázs Orbán and the like are supposed to do is use Hungarian money funneled through their think-tanks to influence the easiest targets in the English-speaking world: conservative academics. Conservatives in the Anglo-American higher education system are a beleaguered bunch. For the low, low price of a first-class ticket to Budapest and an earnest crowd of listening students, many conservative academics would write breathless articles in praise of Hungary that would make a right-wing Walter Duranty blush. They also served as talent scouts, sending students to pro-Hungarian American conservative organizations, and these same students went from student to entry-level staffer to the White House in a few short years. These trips presented Hungary as the real future of the Right, not one where, as in the US, conservatives had to compete with progressives—and often lose—but where the Right was always winning, always dining well, and always living in Habsburg-built capitals.

Orbán was doing much the same on the Right as Russia itself had done for the Left during the Cold War. This is not “Russia-gate” paranoia, either, but a matter of public record among Orbán and Fidesz officials themselves. For example, Orbán was not merely a Russophile but was directly cooperating with Vladimir Putin, referring to himself as the “mouse” to Putin’s “lion.” His administration also regularly handed off diplomatic information to Russia, as foreign minister Péter Szijjártó reported earlier this year. Hungary joined the Belt and Road Initiative with China and allows Chinese nationals to operate within Hungarian borders without being subject to Hungarian law. Again, Hungary has always had leaders who did this, as it is a small nation that needs a larger one to protect it in exchange for Hungarian loyalty. Orbán is nothing more than a lordling, and Hungary is Russia’s vassal.

That is not to diminish the effectiveness of Orbán’s efforts at subverting traditional American conservatism. Hungarian family policy has found its way into American conservative bastions like the Heritage Foundation, which released its “Saving America by Saving the Family,” with heavy reliance on the Hungarian model. Heritage also announced a think-tank partnership with the Danube Institute and together organized the Heritage Foundation Geopolitical Summit, where Balázs Orbán and Pappin have given talks on topics like the decline of American unipolarity and how to implement a new multipolarity with China and Russia. When Casey Michel reported on the relationship between Hungary and Heritage in 2024, Heritage responded by denying that it had received money from the Hungarian government, but nothing else, including the fact that Heritage had led the effort to have the Trump White House gut Ukraine funding in their war against Russia. Pappin also became a regular guest with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), appearing on one of its podcasts alongside Rachel Bovard, Vice President of Programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, and John A. Burtka IV, the president of ISI.

Also included are Pappin’s “postliberal” allies: Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick J. Deneen, and Chad C. Pecknold. Deneen and Pecknold are regular visitors to Hungary, bringing with them figures like senior advisor Samuel Samson, the author of the now-infamous “Christian civilization” article at the State Department Substack. Senior officials in the Trump administration like Gavin Wax, Chief of Staff to the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, and William Ruger, United States Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration, have appeared with Pappin at major events, such as at the 2023 New York Young Republican Club, which hosted a book release for Balsaz Orbán. Ahmari was also on stage.

But the most important influence effort was an event in 2022, during JD Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign. Ahmari organized an event at the Franciscan University of Steubenville titled “Restoring a Nation.” The guest speaker was J.D. Vance, then running as the Republican candidate for the Ohio Senate seat. The lineup is the same as many of the other events Pappin has organized or participated in here in the US: Pappin, Bovard, Burtka, Deneen, Pecknold, and Vermeule. Strangely, while the YouTube archive of the talks given is still up, Vance’s and Vermeule’s are not listed. However, I have the audio of Vance’s talk, and Vance regards this audience as his friends and allies, even venting at length about how little he likes campaigning. Vance would later in 2023 call himself a “postliberal” at Deneen’s book launch for Regime Change alongside Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, blurbing the book alongside Vermeule and Ahmari.

With all this said, one can close the circle of alliances and friendships. Orbán relies heavily on Pappin, John O’Sullivan (president of the Danube Institute), and Balázs Orbán to influence the United States in ways that serve Hungary’s interests and indirectly those of Russia and China. Among those who are ideological partners are Ahmari, Deneen, Pecknold, and Vermeule. His political allies in think tanks and conservative organizations include people at the Heritage Foundation as well as Bovard at CPI and Burtka at ISI. Finally, there are political allies in the administration, like Samson, Ruger, and Wax, as well as in campaign funding and Silicon Valley networks, including Thiel’s. While Hungary may be a poor and small country, it is rich in friends in America, Russia, and China; however, with Orbán’s recent electoral defeat, this entire apparatus of influence is likely to come crashing down. The Hungarian people were not only voting for themselves on April 12, but also for the fate of the American Right.

During the months that follow Peter Magyar’s ascent to prime minister, we must demand full accounting of the Fidesz Party influence campaign, especially where the money came from, who received it, and what conditions were placed on them. Since 1938, the US government has required individuals doing political, lobbying, and public relations work for foreign entities to register under FARA, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Those found possibly violating the act must be subject to federal investigation, and we have reason to believe that, given the lack of FARA filings by many in the Grand Budapest Cartel, there have been serious violations.

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Editor’s note: A podcast with James Patterson and Providence Managing Editor James Diddams discussing the relationship between Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and the American right is also available for listening.