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 the minister in charge of his cabinet office.
It is a rare move between Nato allies, and symbolic of the depth to which US-Hungarian relations have sunk since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.
“Antal Rogan is a primary architect, implementer and beneficiary of this system of corruption,” read the statement, made by outgoing US Ambassador David Pressman.
Pressman leaves Budapest next week, after two and a half years spent as an unusually active diplomat, travelling the country and frequently criticising the Orban government.
His departure comes days ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and the president-elect has a far 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 actually the reverse,” Pressman told reporters in Budapest on Tuesday.
“It is not the United States that threatens Hungary’s sovereignty, but rather the kleptocratic ecosystem Minister Rogan has helped to build and direct and that he has benefited from personally.”
The ambassador’s statement was immediately attacked by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.
“This is the personal revenge of the ambassador who was sent to Hungary by the failed US administration, but left without success and in disgrace,” Szijjarto wrote on Facebook.
“How good it is that in a few days’ time the United States will be led by people who see our country as a friend and not as an enemy.”
A former US ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, also came to Rogan’s defence: “The move by outgoing ambassador David Pressman is an example of the current US administration’s hostile stance towards Hungary, right down to the last hour.”
The question for the incoming Trump presidency, and its chosen ambassador to Budapest, Matt Whitaker, is whether they will immediately overturn the sanctions against Antal Rogan.
The answer is not as obvious as might appear.
Rogan also oversees the domestic secret services, and there have been indications from several Nato countries that Hungary is no longer trusted with sensitive information because of the Orban government’s close relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
And for all the expressions of outrage at the decision to impose sanctions on Orban’s head of cabinet, several senior figures in the Fidesz establishment have long been privately upset by the lifestyle of Rogan and others, by the power he wields, and the distance from the conservative and Christian values that the party proclaims so loudly.