Hungary’s parliament has voted to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó says stems from concerns over what he described as politically motivated and unserious actions by the tribunal.
‘If Hungary wants to avoid a recession, it needs to offset this lost external demand with internal demand. That means the country must stimulate consumption, at least until it finds a new structure for its trade.’
Donald Trump has now been in office for 100 days—an important milestone in any presidency. As a close ally, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Hungary had high expectations of the Trump administration. But what has actually materialized? In this article, we take a closer look at the first 100 days of Trump’s second term through the lens of Hungary.
‘The normalization of the targeting of Israel leads to the normalization of the targeting of Jews,’ State Secretary Péter Sztáray warned during a commemoration held on Holocaust Memorial Day. Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 564,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, representing more than two-thirds of the country’s Jewish community at the time.
Antal Rogán, Chief of Staff to the Hungarian Prime Minister, has been removed from the US sanctions list, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced. The senior government official had been placed under Magnitsky sanctions in January—a move widely regarded as the revenge of former US Ambassador David Pressman.
Former Deputy Assistant to Donald Trump, Fred Fleitz, writes in Newsmax that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made the right decision in withdrawing from the International Criminal Court last week. Fleitz also urged other countries to follow suit, arguing that the Hague-based court poses a serious threat to national sovereignty due to its politically biased decisions.
‘President Donald Trump, on his self-proclaimed “liberation day”, imposed sweeping tariffs of at least 10 per cent on almost every product that enters the U.S. from almost every country…with the aim of keeping jobs within the American homeland. What the president has done is reverting to the American “protectionism” of the 19th century, which economists call the Hamiltonian Statecraft.’
Human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights joined Hamas in expressing their outrage over Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and to refuse the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They also called on the European Union to revoke Hungary’s voting rights.
‘The UN, unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is a collective security system; the latter is an alliance, which deals with a specific and specified threat and has military forces to address these threats. The UN is juridically neutral, and it is coerced to wait for a threat to emerge before it can consider action.’
Hungary will withdraw from the International Criminal Court, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed in a radio interview. He criticized the ICC as a political tool and outlined Hungary’s 2025 agenda, touching on economic reforms, drug policy, and foreign relations.