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The US Treasury has imposed sanctions on Antal Rogan, one of the most powerful men in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz government and a minister in his cabinet office.
It’s a rare move between the NATO allies and is symbolic of the deepening of US-Hungary relations since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.
“Antal Rogan is the architect, implementer and chief beneficiary of this system of corruption,” read a statement from outgoing US ambassador David Pressman.
Pressman will leave Budapest next week after spending two and a half years as an unusually active diplomat, traveling the country and frequently criticizing the Orban government.
His departure comes just days before Donald Trump returns to the White House, and the president-elect has a more positive view of Viktor Orban than the Biden administration, seeing him as a close political ally.
“While Minister Rogan’s media megaphones will try to make this a story about partisan politics or an affront to sovereignty, today’s decision is the opposite,” Pressman said Tuesday in Budapest.
“It is not the United States that threatens Hungary’s sovereignty, but the Rogan kleptocratic ecosystem that it has helped build and run and personally benefited from.”
The ambassador’s statement was immediately attacked by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.
“This is a personal vendetta against the ambassador sent to Hungary by the failed US administration, but it left him unsuccessful and disgraced,” Szijjarto wrote on Facebook.
“How good it is that in a few days the United States will lead people who see our country as a friend and not an enemy.”
The former US ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, also came to Rogan’s defense: “The move by outgoing ambassador David Pressman exemplifies the hostile attitude of the current US administration towards Hungary, right up to the last hour.”
The question for the incoming Trump presidency and ambassador-elect Matt Whitaker in Budapest is whether they will immediately revoke the sanctions against Antal Rogan.
The answer is not as obvious as it seems.
Rogan oversees the domestic secret service, and several NATO countries have indicated that Hungary is not trusted with sensitive information because of the Orban government’s close ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
And for all the expressions of outrage at Orbán’s decision to impose sanctions on his cabinet chief, several senior figures in the Fidesz establishment have long privately resented the lifestyle, power and aloofness of Rogan and others. conservative and Christian values that the party so loudly proclaims.
