EU reset: Hungary’s incoming PM to meet Giorgia Meloni in Rome

Hungary’s Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar will meet Italian PM Giorgia Meloni for talks on Thursday, Rome said in a statement on Wednesday but gave no further details about what the pair would talk about.

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The lack of information has led to speculation about what Magyar and Meloni could discuss and how relations between Budapest and Rome might look different after 16 years of government under previous PM Viktor Orbán.

Orbán and Meloni, who both sit on the political right, were allies, although Italy did not have the same degree of close cooperation with Hungary as it did to Robert Fico’s Slovakia or Poland under previous premier, Mateusz Morawiecki.

While both Meloni and Orbán were united in the fight against immigration and are key figures in the illiberal, right-wing camp, Italy’s PM has a far more pragmatic and less confrontational approach to the European Union than Orbán did.

And Meloni is far more pro-Ukraine as it continues to fight off Russia’s full-scale invasion than Orbán, widely seen as the most Moscow-friendly leader in Europe, ever was.

Moreover, the two parties belong to different blocs in the European Parliament.

Orbán’s Fidesz is a member of the Patriots for Europe group, while Meloni’s Brothers of Italy are the dominant force in the European Conservatives and Reformists.

Fidesz tried to join that party group in 2024 but there was pushback from several leaders, including Meloni, and the Hungarians ultimately abandoned the idea.

Hungary’s incoming governing party, Tisza, is a member of a third group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party.

Nevertheless, it seems possible that Meloni will also be able to establish a working relationship with Magyar.

In recent weeks, several of Orbán’s allies have expressed an openness to working with the new Hungarian government, with US President Donald Trump saying he thinks Magyar is a good man and that he will do a good job.

Magyar: ‘We had to fight a different kind of mafia in Hungary’

Magyar left Hungary for Italy on Tuesday to attend the Riviera Film Festival. At the festival in Sestri Levante, the documentary film Spring Wind – The Awakening, which depicts the rise of the future prime minister, was screened.

Magyar credited that film with helping him get elected, saying it was seen online by millions of people helped them “get to know me” despite state propaganda.

“Spring Wind – The Awakening” directed by Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, chronicles the two-year campaign leading up to Magyar’s crushing victory in parliamentary elections in early April that forced Viktor Orban out of office after 16 years in power.

Before the film, voters “didn’t have the chance to get to know our goals…like my kids, watching the propaganda, they didn’t have the chance to meet with the truth,” Magyar told journalists at the Riviera International Film Festival in the Italian city of Sestri Levante.

During production, the future prime minister said he had not been able to tell whether the film would make an impact on voters ahead of elections.

But after the film’s first limited theatrical release in Hungary “I saw the result in the movie, the emotions and everything and in that moment I felt that it could have been an impact, a strong impact,” he added.

He said he had later tried to convince the filmmakers to try to show it to a wider audience. It was eventually shown on YouTube for a few days over the Easter weekend and viewed by 3.4 million people, according to producers.

“This (Easter) is the weekend when the Hungarian families are together, the younger generation, the elderly, and I hoped, and maybe I was right, that that’s the right moment for the family to sit together, to watch the film, and then to speak to each other,” he said.

Magyar said he hoped viewers would understand that the film was not about his conservative pro-EU Tisza party, but “rather about the two years of our nation, the past and the possible future of our nation.”

Magyar is due to be sworn in as prime minister in Budapest on Saturday.