“A Successful Opening to the East?”

The End of Hungary’s “Opening to the East”. For years, Viktor Orbán’s government sold the East as Hungary’s economic future and the West as a fading dependency. But the trade numbers never supported the fantasy and after Tisza’s landslide victory, the political system that sustained it may be starting to collapse as well.

Author: Dr. Georges Suha

Jet-setting abroad, landslide at home

As the end of the year approaches, everyone takes stock: companies, families, and perhaps even Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This year, Péter Szijjártó nearly circled the globe ten times. He could practically have made it to the Moon. He used a government jet for 187 flights, which, compared with last year’s 238 trips, might even look restrained.

But in the meantime, Hungarian politics has undergone a historic reversal. In the April 12, 2026 parliamentary election, Tisza defeated Fidesz, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat, and the winner TISZA party secured a two-thirds majority. This is not just a routine alternation of power. It is the kind of mandate that, for the first time in years, creates a genuine opening not only to replace a government, but to rewrite the operating logic of the system itself.

Against that backdrop, the foreign minister continues to recite the familiar lines: Hungarian foreign policy is now driven by economic results; we are opening to the South, opening to the East, diversifying, building “connectivity” whatever that is supposed to mean.

In Szijjártó’s telling, the foreign economic portfolio he oversees is not merely a policy tool. It is part of a patriotic worldview, a front line in the defense of national sovereignty.

The assembly line of foreign-policy clichés

Hungarian foreign policy now runs on an industrial supply of clichés: peace, peace summits, peace struggles, peace policy, economic neutrality, the supreme primacy of the national interest in an age of danger, the permanent threat of illegal migration, and the endless refrain about failed Brussels sanctions. All of it packaged against the idiocy of the Brussels elite, legitimized by supposedly overwhelming national consultations, constrained by limited room for maneuver in energy policy, a landlocked geography, refineries optimized for Russian crude, geopolitical necessity, and whatever else happens to be needed that week.

So yes, the country has grown poorer, every regional competitor has overtaken us, and Hungarian diplomats are greeted with condescending smiles in much of the world. But we are still told that Hungary is the voice of peace, and that ours is the most sovereign foreign policy in Europe, perhaps in the entire world.

And naturally, the talent base on Bem Embankment is second to none: Gyula Budai, Evelin Gáspár, washed-up athletes, party youth loyalists, faded local-government hopefuls, and parachuted NER loyalists all doing their part. According to Tamás Menczer, whose diplomatic style is as refined as ever, and who continues to draw a healthy salary from the foreign ministry, “foreign economic policy stands at the center of Hungarian foreign policy.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.

The end of one era, and the chance to bury its myths

For nearly a decade and a half, Hungarian public life has been accompanied by the official slogans of the “successful Opening to the East” and the “strategic Opening to the South.” There is just one problem: numbers are stubborn things. Data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office and Eurostat, along with independent expert analysis, show clearly that reality is the exact opposite of what the propaganda machine has been selling.

And now the political context has changed as well. This is not simply a case of Fidesz losing office. The election winner has received the kind of parliamentary strength that makes it possible not only to swap out personnel, but to dismantle an entire political stage set: the domestic balance of power, the logic of state operation, and with it the foreign-policy self-justification through which the “Opening to the East” was marketed for years as a historic achievement. Reuters reports that Tisza’s supermajority could support constitutional and institutional reforms, including changes affecting media and the rule of law. That is why this election has the potential to change not just policy, but the very language in which Hungarian foreign policy has been framed. 

Numbers have no respect for propaganda

The utterly failed “Southern Opening” strategy was supposed to create new markets in Africa and Latin America, diversify exports, and reduce dependence on the West. None of that happened. Hungarian exports remained marginal, in many places they actually declined, the promised projects never materialized, and Szijjártó’s exotic lightning visits produced no durable economic relationships.

It is no coincidence that government PR now talks only about the supposed triumphs of the Eastern Opening. The Southern Opening has quietly disappeared from the rhetoric altogether.

The myth of the Eastward turn

Things are no better when it comes to Asia, despite the fact that NER messaging still tries to hold the line in its propagandistic war of numbers. Fidesz politicians speak of eastern ties as one of Hungary’s great strategic success stories, as though they had opened entirely new horizons for the economy.

But there is no success story here. Over the last fifteen years, the center of gravity of Hungarian goods exports has not shifted eastward. If anything, it has tilted even more decisively westward.

The European Union and North America together accounted for 81 percent of total Hungarian merchandise exports last year and in the first ten months of last year. Asia, by contrast, has not expanded its role. It has shrunk, slipping below 5 percent last year.

China remains, in export terms, little more than a statistical footnote. Just 3.3 percent of Hungary’s total exports go to the world’s second-largest economy. That tiny share has been essentially stagnant since 2010. So despite all the foreign ministry’s theatrics — the oversized embassy, the four consulates-general, the small army of diplomats — there has been no meaningful breakthrough. Meanwhile, imports from China continue to far exceed export figures.

The same pattern shows up in services exports: the dominance of the EU and the United States is beyond dispute, while Asia’s relative weight continues to decline.

Not a Chinese breakthrough, just a rounding error

The much-advertised scale of Hungarian exports to China is, in truth, barely above the margin of error. It falls well short of the EU average  (8.3 percent last year) and lags behind regional peers as well.

For comparison: Hungary exported roughly €4.5 billion worth of goods to China last year. The EU as a whole exported €213 billion. Hungary therefore accounted for just 2 percent of total EU exports to China.

Foreign direct investment tells a slightly more nuanced story, but for the first thirteen years of Fidesz rule there was no sign of any meaningful “Eastern breakthrough” there either. Total Asian investment did rise over the last two years, but most of that came from South Korea, whose share climbed to around 6 percent. China’s share did not even reach half of that, while the EU and the United States still accounted for more than 70 percent of total investment.

In 2024, Chinese FDI inflows did jump, largely thanks to battery and electric-vehicle projects. But the stock of FDI still shows Austrian dominance: Austria alone has more investment in Hungary than China. And the Korean and Chinese factories in question are not aimed at the Hungarian market anyway. Their target is the European Union. In other words, even these projects are fundamentally West-facing.

Public money does the heavy lifting

It should also be said that more than one-third of Asian FDI inflows are effectively supplemented by state support in the form of tax breaks and direct cash subsidies, a proportion that is exceptionally high by EU standards.

The government has poured a combined 300 to 400 billion forints of taxpayer money into the Hungarian projects of CATL, BYD, and Eve Energy in Debrecen and Szeged alone. The exact sums are not public, which is scandalous in itself and that figure does not even include the annual tens of billions spent on HIPA, the foreign ministry’s investment-promotion agency.

The success narrative rarely dwells on that part.

Tied aid loans and murky beneficiaries

The same opacity surrounds the tied aid loan programs linked to Tanzania’s 18 billion forints, Chad’s €200 million, or Laos’s $150 million. There is no central, public annual summary in a single document. These agreements are announced piecemeal through decrees, government decisions, and diplomatic press releases, in different currencies and on different timelines.

Transparency, in the plainest sense, does not exist in the NER political vocabulary.

And the beneficiaries are not hard to guess. A substantial share of the gains flows to politically connected businessmen operating in the background, often through grandly branded water-management or agricultural pseudo-projects in exotic, distant, and hard-to-monitor countries.

Not a breakthrough, but a failed set piece

Hungary’s supposed foreign economic success, especially the “Opening to the East”  is not an economic breakthrough at all. It is a political set piece: a tidy rhetorical construction designed to conceal reality.

The real picture is one of embarrassingly low export performance, Chinese factories inflated with public money, and projects that over time mean dependence, environmental strain, and the extraction of profits. The real balance sheet is therefore not a foreign-policy success story directed by the foreign ministry, but a loss imposed on taxpayers: propaganda defeating facts.

And now, for the first time, it is not only obvious that the story was false. It is also entirely possible that the winner of the election will replace the story itself. Not just new slogans, but a new foreign-policy direction; not just new faces, but a new grammar of statehood; not just a shift in emphasis, but a different relationship with Europe. Reuters has reported that Peter Magyar’s victory is already being read as a potential reset in Hungary’s ties with the EU and as an opening for sweeping domestic reforms. Which is to say: the “Opening to the East” is no longer the future tense of a ruling system. It is the past tense of a failed era. 

Cover photo credit: ChatGPT

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