Why does Hungary's Viktor Orban support Serbian nationalism?

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban fosters close ties with right-wing populists, authoritarian leaders and dictators the world over — from Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Vladimir Putin in Russia.

In some cases, Orban even helps such politicians flee from the judiciary in their own countries.

In 2018, for example, Hungary helped Nikola Gruevski, former Prime Minister of what is now North Macedonia, to flee from Skopje to Budapest. Hungarian diplomatic vehicles were used to smuggle Gruevski across several national borders. Gruevski had been convicted of corruption and was facing a prison sentence in his native country. Instead, he was granted asylum in Hungary.

In March 2024, Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro spent several nights in the Hungarian Embassy in Brazil, likely to avoid being arrested by police.

Then, in late December, Hungary granted asylum to former Polish deputy Justice Minister Marcin Romanowski, who is wanted in Poland on criminal charges and against whom a European arrest warrant has been issued.

Arrest warrant for Milorad Dodik

But all these things pale in comparison to Hungary's latest "rescue mission," which involves Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and has not only major security consequences for Europe but also geopolitical repercussions.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is made up of two entities, the predominantly Bosniak and Croat Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the predominantly Serbian Republika Srpska.

In late February, a court in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, sentenced Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska, to one year in prison and banned him from politics for six years for acting against the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The sentence is not final and Dodik can appeal.

However, authorities in Bosnia last week issued a national arrest warrant for Dodik. The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina feared that Dodik could flee to Hungary.

Members of Hungarian anti-terror unit in Bosnia

After the sentence against him was handed down, Dodik himself said that Hungary had, as a precautionary measure, sent a police special operations team to Republika Srpska in late February.

The team, which included 78 members of the Hungarian anti-terror unit TEK, traveled to Republika Srpska in armored vehicles and with a mobile operations center. According to the Hungarian government, they went there to take part in a joint training exercise with Bosnian Serb special operations forces.

Although it is usual in Europe for such joint exercises to be announced in advance, that did not happen in this case. Moreover, the TEK forces — some of them in civilian clothing — entered Bosnia from Serbia without the knowledge of the Bosnian authorities.

Dodik has for years been agitating against the existence of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole. The situation has escalated in recent months, with Dodik openly disregarding Bosnia's judiciary and threatening violence and even the secession of Republika Srpska from the rest of the country if he is arrested.

Regional destabilization

Dodik has the support of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who propagates the concept of "Srpski svet" (Serbian world), the cultural and spiritual unity of all Serbs and their unification in a single nation state.

This policy is closely modeled on Vladimir Putin's "Russkiy mir" (Russian world) concept and has caused growing tension in the region in recent years. So much so, that a new war in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Kosovo no longer seems out of the question.

This means that by supporting Dodik and Vucic, Orban is also making a considerable contribution to the destabilization of the region.

Orban's long-standing engagement in the Balkans

Orban's intense involvement in the Western Balkans goes back more than a decade.

His closest ties are to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, which is why Balkan expert Adnan Cerimagic calls the autocratic trio a "brotherhood."

Orban and Vucic have together launched a number of major billion-dollar investment projects such as the high-speed railway link between Budapest and Belgrade, which was financed with Chinese loans.

In 2021, Orban came to the aid of Dodik, who has had US sanctions imposed on him, with a financial injection of €100 million ($108 million) for Republika Srpska. A year later, he followed up with a low-interest €110-million loan.

Hungary seeks status as a regional power

For Orban, supporting EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans that are ruled by his allies is a long-term strategy. He obviously hopes it will strengthen his hand in the European Union.

At the same time, he is keen to establish his country as a regional power in central and southeastern Europe.

Moreover, Orban is himself no stranger to ethno-nationalist concepts like "Srpski svet." There are Hungarian minorities in all of Hungary's neighboring countries. These communities are particularly large in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and Serbia.

In the case of Ukraine, at least, Orban does not seem to be excluding the possibility of the country collapsing in the medium term and Hungary getting back parts of the western Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia.

Orban regularly refers to Ukraine as a "no-man's land" or a "territory called Ukraine."

Broken Hungarian-Bosnian relations

Despite all this, it remains unclear why Orban's support for Dodik und Republika Srpska is so marked.

Dodik, who is even more pro-Putin than Orban, is still under US sanctions.

There are reports that the US has been highly critical of the TEK traveling to Republika Srpska and has warned Hungary against continuing to support Dodik's separatist plans.

With these actions, Orban has also torpedoed his country's relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.

Bosnia recently refused permission to land to a Hungarian military airplane carrying a secretary of state in Orban's government.

Moreover, Zeljko Komsic, the Croat representative in the three-member Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, has called for Hungary to be excluded from EUFOR/Althea, the EU's peace mission in Bosnia.

Dodik denies genocide

Despite the fact that Bosnian authorities have issued an arrest warrant against him, Dodik was in Israel on Tuesday afternoon, where he took part in a controversial antisemitism conference organized by the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, which is being attended by numerous far-right politicians from around the world.

Dodik posted on X that "Serbs and Jews are peoples who have faced attempts at total eradication — and they survived. That is why we understand each other. And that is why we stand together."

This is both cynical and grotesque in a number of respects. There has never been a plan or a campaign to eradicate all Serbs.

For his part, Dodik denies the genocide of the Muslim Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995. To back up this claim "academically," he set up a commission headed by the controversial Israeli Holocaust researcher Gideon Greif.

In 2021, this commission "established" that there had been no genocide in Srebrenica, which is in direct contradiction of the judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague.

Experts and researchers consider the report to be unscientific. Nevertheless, Dodik holds fast to his view that it is above all the Serbs who were victims — also in the Yugoslav Wars.

This article was originally published in German and adapted by Aingeal Flanagan.