Hungary’s Orbán claims Poland’s center-right government was installed by the EU

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán suggested on Friday that Poland’s government and its prime minister, Donald Tusk, were installed by the European Union as part of a plot to remove the country’s previous right-wing populist leadership.

Orbán provided no evidence to substantiate his claims about Poland’s government, which was elected in 2023 with record high voter turnout of nearly 74%.

The comments came two days after Orbán, a nationalist who has taken an increasingly adversarial approach to the EU, told supporters in a speech that the bloc seeks to topple his government and install a puppet regime in Hungary.

Speaking to state radio Friday, Orbán lashed out at EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and the leader of the bloc’s largest political group, European People’s Party president Manfred Weber, claiming they were seeking to replace his government as he said they had in Poland in 2023, when a coalition led by Tusk defeated the governing Law and Justice party in national elections.

“It’s not even a secret conspiracy against Hungary, it is an openly represented, announced plan,” Orbán said of the alleged plot against him, for which he has not provided evidence. “The same thing happened in Poland. The Poles also went their own way, they also took an independent Polish policy on migration, gender and the economy.”

Von der Leyen and Weber, he continued, “did their best and openly announced that the conservative Polish government should go and be replaced with a new one. This is how our friend Tusk became prime minister in Poland. The same scenario is now happening in the case of Hungary.”

In a text message to The Associated Press, a spokesman for Poland’s Foreign Ministry, Pawel Wroński, said: “A free parliamentary election took place in Poland on Oct. 15, 2023. The current government in Poland, just like the previous governments, was not installed but has been elected and is the expression of the will of the Polish voters.”

Orbán has frequently clashed with the EU, which has withheld billions in financial support from Hungary over its alleged breaches of rule-of-law and democracy standards. Poland’s previous nationalist-conservative government also spent years wrangling with the EU over democratic deficiencies.

In response, Orbán has taken an increasingly combative approach to the bloc, which Hungary joined in 2004, and rallied euro-skeptic parties across the EU to create a far-right political force in the bloc’s legislature. He has also moved Hungary closer to autocracies like Russia and China, seeking foreign investment and loans from Moscow and Beijing as EU funds dried up over his conduct.

Tusk’s government has sought to restore Poland’s democratic institutions that he sees as having been dismantled under the previous Orbán-allied government, but has maintained some conservative policies such as a tough stance on illegal immigration.

Orbán, who faces national elections in early 2026, compared the EU to the former Soviet Union in the interview Friday.

“They’re going to be working on this. They need a puppet government. Let’s speak plainly, every empire is like that. The Soviets were like that, weren’t they?” he said of the EU.

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Monika Scislowska contributed from Warsaw.