Hungary is Trying to Mend Fences With Ukraine

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

The April 12 parliamentary election in Hungary saw the victory of a new prime minister, Peter Magyar, defeating Victor Orban’s right-wing Fidesz–KDNP alliance. Magyar’s centre-right Tisza Party took 138 of 199 seats, and more than 53 per cent of the vote. It stood on a platform of distancing Hungary from Russia in favour of more cordial ties with the European Union and Ukraine. This has now begun to take shape.

Magyar on June 3 announced a shift in Hungarian policy toward Ukraine that he described as “historic. In three weeks, we managed to achieve what Viktor Orban couldn’t do in 10 years,” Magyar said. The two countries have reached an agreement on the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority in the western Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia, particularly in education and language. The community is centered around the city of Berehove (Beregszasz) and surrounding border villages.

The rights of Ukraine’s Hungarian minority have been a longstanding source of tension between Kyiv and Budapest since the former adopted legislation strengthening the role of Ukrainian as the primary language of instruction in schools.

Under the new agreement Ukraine will enable the use of minority languages in public administration. This will lead to bilingual signs for place names or on government buildings. The use of minority languages will be permitted in public institutions if a minority constitutes over 10 per cent of the local population. Until now, that required special decisions by councils but now it will become automatic.

Minority schools will be maintained even if there are only a few children and young people left. The number of ethnic Hungarians in the region has declined dramatically, and estimates put it now at around 80,000, down from almost 160,000.

The agreement with Ukraine saw the Hungarian government agree to the opening negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, something blocked by former prime minister Orban, who had described Ukraine as a mafia state teeming with human traffickers, drug dealers and arms merchants.

Though Magyar’s election victory ended Orban’s 16-year rule in April, the issue continues to resonate widely in Hungarian society. “The Hungarian community in Transcarpathia is not only an important part of the relationship between our two countries, but also a bridge between our nations,” stated Hungarian foreign minister Anita Orban.

Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister Andrii Sybiha has highlighted three issues on the agenda: bilateral relations, minority rights and Ukraine’s EU accession. “Ukraine wants to open a new, mutually beneficial chapter in our bilateral relations based on trust,” Sybiha stated. “Thanks to the historic choice made by the Hungarian people in April, Ukraine and Hungary now have an opportunity to open a new chapter in bilateral relations, based on good neighborliness, mutual respect, and a shared European future.

“There is no better guarantee of the rights of the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia than Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. This serves the national interests of both our countries and peoples, strengthens Europe, and brings peace closer.”

Sybiha also shared a photo with all the participants present at the meeting, including a member of the Zakarpattia Regional Military Administration which represents the Transcarpathia region.

While there is no universally accepted definition of the territory’s boundaries, the contemporary Ukrainian administrative regions (oblasts) of Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Ternopil and Zakarpattia, which were part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War, are usually included.

Hungary lost these areas to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and they were transferred to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, finally ending up in today’s Ukraine after the USSR collapsed in 1991. Two-thirds of Hungary’s area and population was taken by the neighbouring countries in the 1920 treaty and millions of Hungarians found themselves living in foreign jurisdictions. Hungarian irredentist nationalists have ever since sought to reclaim the territories now in Ukraine, along with other regions lost to Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia, to recreate a Greater Hungary.

In 2011 Orban passed a law that made it possible for all Hungarian-speaking descendants of citizens from the country’s pre-Trianon borders to claim Hungarian citizenship. A national Unity Day was also introduced to commemorate Hungary’s territorial losses at Trianon. In 2022 Orban attendance a soccer match sporting a scarf that depicted a map of Hungary with the borders it had before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

Magyar, unlike Orban, seems willing to accept Kyiv’s rule in Transcarpathia as long as Hungarian minority rights are guaranteed, and he sees this new deal as a precondition to Budapest giving consent “to the opening of the first accession cluster in Ukraine’s EU membership negotiations.”

Laszlo Zubanics, one of the most prominent figures of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia and the head of the Hungarian Democratic Federation in Ukraine, called this “a very important and truly historic step.”

But the EU may not open all the negotiations for Ukraine right away, as sought by Kyiv. While Magyar lifted his country’s longstanding veto in early June, he has now signalled his opposition to speeding up Ukraine’s membership bid.

 Because of Hungary’s past behaviour, its neighbours perceive any act of concern over the fate of its diaspora as a sign of nascent irredentism. Will this agreement with Ukraine, by a new prime minister, lessen tensions in central Europe?