The former president piled praise on the Hungarian leader during his speech at the Republican convention.

The Republican National Convention came to an end on Thursday with former President Donald Trump’s acceptance of the party’s presidential nomination.

During his closing speech — which lasted over an hour and a half — Trump touched on various topics with a domestic focus but also spoke about his ally, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

On stage, Trump praised Orbán, calling him a champion of “illiberal democracy” in his own country.

The European Parliament's organising body will discuss how the institution will engage with Hungary while it holds the EU's rotating presidency, the head of the bloc's legislature said on Tuesday, following criticism of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban drew rebukes from other European Union countries and leaders for recent surprise visits to Russia and China on a self-styled "peace mission" to end the war in Ukraine, days after Hungary assumed the EU's rotating presidency on July 1.

Top EU officials will boycott Hungary’s six-month presidency of the European Council following Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s controversial visits to Moscow and Beijing, a spokesperson for the European Commission announced Monday.

“In light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian Presidency, the President (Ursula von der Leyen) has decided that @EU_Commission will be represented at senior civil servant level only during informal meetings of the Council,” the spokesperson posted on X.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban appeared to endorse Donald Trump and raised doubts about President Biden’s fitness to run for a second term in a move that has continued to upset leaders across Europe. 

"We continued the peace mission in Mar-a-Lago," Orban wrote on his official social media account on X. "President @realDonaldTrump has proved during his presidency that he is a man of peace. He will do it again!" 

The European Union must engage Russia if it is to build a "sustainable security architecture", Hungary’s minister for EU affairs, János Bóka, said on Wednesday in an interview with Euronews.

"If we are willing to build a sustainable security architecture for decades to come, somehow, the relationship between Europe and Russia needs to be devised," Bóka said.

Dmitry Peskov out, Viktor Orbán in?

In a leaked letter seen Tuesday by POLITICO, the Hungarian prime minister underlined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist position on Ukraine so thoroughly he could have been auditioning for the role of Kremlin spokesperson.

The missive, addressed to European Council President Charles Michel and shared with other members of the European Council, lays out Putin’s thinking about the status of his war in Ukraine — and what Orbán reckons the EU’s next steps should be.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could not mediate between Russia and Ukraine to end fighting between the two countries.

Orbán visited Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin last week with the stated aim of bringing about peace between their two countries, which have been locked in a brutal armed conflict since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán predicted that former President Donald Trump would win the November election and said the change in leadership would be “good for the world.”

Mr. Orbán praised Mr. Trump during his Sunday interview with Axel Springer media outlets, including Politico, and called him a “self-made man [who takes a] different approach to everything.”

“He is the man of peace. Under his four-year term, he did not initiate a single war, and he did a lot in order to create peace in old conflicts in very complicated areas of the world,” Mr. Orbán said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a surprise visit to Beijing on Monday where Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for a global effort to push Russia and Ukraine toward a “cease-fire” and praised Orban’s diplomatic initiatives — a powerful display of how Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin are seeking to create a multipolar world order not dominated by the United States.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's new far-right party alliance in the European Parliament has fulfilled the requirements to form a political group called "Patriots for Europe."

To form the group, 23 MEPs from seven countries are needed.

On Saturday, the group secured the membership of the far-right Danish People's Party and the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang, meeting the required threshold.