Nawrocki Is Repairing The Damage That Poland Dealt To Its Centuries-Long Hungarian Friends

It’s a national shame that it took till now for Poland to agree to disagree with Hungary about Russia.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki hosted his Hungarian counterpart Tamas Sulyok in southeastern Poland to celebrate Polish-Hungarian Friendship Day, which commemorates their nearly seven centuries of friendship since the first Congress of Visegrad in 1335 and millennium-long shared history. Nawrocki declared that “The friendship between our nations has endured and will endure. But as in any friendship, there are things we do not agree on…Poles love Hungarians, but they hate Vladimir Putin”.

This was an important clarification after he canceled a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban after December’s Visegrad Group Summit in Hungary on the basis that Orban had just returned from meeting Putin in Moscow. It was argued here that this was just a false pretext since Nawrocki met with Trump shortly after his Anchorage Summit with Putin. He might therefore have sought to please the two leaders of the conservative opposition with which he, a nominal independent, is officially aligned.

Whatever his motives were, Nawrocki also paid a brief visit to Budapest to meet with Orban in connection with the Friendship Day celebrations. This comes just several weeks before the next parliamentary elections in which the opposition’s European and Ukrainian backers are meddling with the aim of installing a Soros-like grey cardinal to subordinate Hungary to globalism. Nawrocki spoke earlier in the day about how Poland and Hungary cooperate to oppose EU overreach and reform the bloc.

It’s therefore in his interests to inspire patriotic Hungarians to rally around Orban in order for their country to continue cooperating with Poland on these significant issues in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by Nawrocki’s liberal-globalist rival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who hates them both. He condemned their meeting as “a fatal mistake and confirmation of a dangerous strategy to weaken the European Union and strengthen Putin” in an allusion to his debunked “Polexit” fearmongering.

What’s most meaningful is that Nawrocki traveled to Hungary to meet with Orban, which comes after him canceling last December’s meeting when he was already there for the Visegrad Group Summit, in order to help the leader of his country’s centuries-long friend win re-election. On that note, Poland hadn’t treated Hungary as an old friend since 2022, with the prior conservative government pushing pro-Ukrainian propaganda in Hungary and the current liberal-globalist one doing much worse.

Orban felt compelled to lambast them in summer 2024 for betraying their Visegrad Group to create a new alliance comprised of itself, the UK, Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia. Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Teofil Bartoszewski then called on Hungary to leave the EU. This prompted its Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto to double down on Orban’s criticisms of Poland. The centuries-long Polish-Hungarian friendship consequently ended at the state-to-state level for the next 1.5 years.

It’s now being revived thanks to Nawrocki’s efforts to repair the damage that the current liberal-globalist government and their conservative predecessor with whom he’s officially aligned dealt to Hungary. He himself also wasn’t helpful last December after canceling his meeting with Orban but he now finally agreed to disagree with him about Russia. That’s the way that it always should have been, and frankly speaking, it’s a national shame that it took till now for Poland to behave that way towards its oldest friend.