Last week, Head of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás of Hungary spoke at the Károli Open University event. In his speech, he told the audience that he thinks it is certain that President Trump will visit Hungary at some point in his second term.
As long as the current administration is in power in the United States, the relationship between Washington and Budapest will be outstandingly good, he explained, because of the ideological alignment of the two governments. This gives him the confidence that President Trump will eventually come to Hungary on an official visit. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary visited President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida three times last year.
If he does, he will be the fourth incumbent POTUS to come to the country. George H W Bush was the first to do so. He delivered an address at the Karl Marx University in Budapest, Hungary in July 1989. President Bill Clinton came twice. He attended the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) Summit in Budapest in December 1994; then spoke to American troops stationed at the Taszár Air Base in Southern Hungary in January 1996, during the Yugoslav Wars. The last US President to visit Hungary while in office was George W Bush, following in his father’s footsteps. He met with President László Sólyom of Hungary in June 2006, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon have also travelled to Hungary. However, they did so after they were out of office.
In his lecture at Károli, Minister Gulyás also spoke about how, unlike Brussels, the administration in Budapest actually protects its citizens' free speech rights. As for the end of the Russo–Ukrainian war and the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, he stressed that Hungary expects the status quo in place before the language law was introduced in 2015 to be restored after a peace deal is made.
Related articles:
