In Hungary, the Iran war is exposing tensions. Voters may decide on 12 April that the prime minister\u2019s geopolitical contortions are a liability<\/p>\n
On 3 March, Viktor Orb\u00e1n held a phone conversation<\/a> with Vladimir Putin. According to official Hungarian reporting, the discussion focused on \u201cenergy issues\u201d and other routine matters. What followed was anything but routine. Within days, the Hungarian foreign minister, P\u00e9ter Szijj\u00e1rt\u00f3<\/a>, had flown to Moscow, and returned <\/a>with two freed prisoners of war<\/a>, dual citizens of Ukraine and Hungary.<\/p>\n Hungary is not part of the military conflict in Ukraine, but the message was unmistakable. With his PoW diplomacy, Putin was not only signalling goodwill towards Hungary, he was effectively endorsing Orb\u00e1n\u2019s re-election on 12 April.<\/p>\n P\u00e9ter Krek\u00f3 is a political scientist, behavioural scientist, economist and director of the independent thinktank the Political Capital Institute in Budapest<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Hungary, the Iran war is exposing tensions. Voters may decide on 12 April that the prime minister\u2019s geopolitical contortions are a liability On 3 March, Viktor Orb\u00e1n held a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin. According to official Hungarian reporting, the discussion focused on \u201cenergy issues\u201d and other routine matters. What followed was anything but … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}