Péter Magyar spent three days in Poland borrowing the symbolism of a democratic homecoming, traveling by train from Krakow to Warsaw, laying flowers at the John Paul II monument, and standing beside Donald Tusk to declare that Hungary and Poland would again walk into Brussels “holding hands.”
But the trip also restored Hungary to a club whose original meaning has largely drained away. The old Central Europe was built by countries trying to get into the West; the new Central Europe will be defined by how they handle the country still fighting to get there.
That country is Ukraine, and it is the question Magyar cannot answer with symbolic choreography. His Polish visit was about legitimacy, the staged return of a post-Orbán Hungary to the European mainstream.
The harder problem is that the map he wants to rejoin has been redrawn, with Ukraine no longer a buffer at the region’s edge but the fact that now sits at its center.
A medieval bypass and a modern habit
The instinct to organize Central Europe as a bloc is far older than the European Union, older than NATO, older than communism. In 1335, the kings of Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary met at the Hungarian castle town of Visegrád to agree on new trade routes that would bypass Vienna, then a staple port that forced merchants to unload and sell their goods there before moving on.
The founding act of Central European cooperation was a workaround, a way of routing around the dominant power to the west in order to reach the wider world.
The name the four countries chose for their modern alliance is a deliberate echo of that congress, and the original logic is still present. Central Europe has always defined itself in relation to the gravitational pull of the West, sometimes seeking it, sometimes evading it.
When the modern Visegrád Group formed at the same town in February 1991, signed by Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and József Antall in the months before the Warsaw Pact dissolved, it had one purpose: to escape the Soviet sphere and join the Western one, coordinating the push into NATO and the European Union.
Three lives of one idea
The alliance has lived three distinct lives since then. In its accession phase, from 1991 to the great enlargement of 2004, it functioned as a political task force, the four governments helping one another meet membership criteria and proving to Western capitals that the post-communist transition was real.
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic entered NATO in 1999, Slovakia followed in 2004, and all four joined the EU together on the first of May that year. The mission was complete, and the group declared the moment a historic milestone.
Then came the long middle phase, roughly 2005 to 2014, when the V4 lost its purpose. The third phase, which began with the migration crisis of 2015, gave it a new identity. The bloc that had once defined itself by wanting to get into Brussels now defined itself by resisting Brussels, with Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party covering for each other on rule-of-law disputes and lining up against the EU on migration.
That solidarity broke in 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion split the group between Poland treating Ukraine as strategic depth and Orbán treating it as a bargaining chip with Moscow.
Central Europe’s new geography
This is the Central Europe Magyar wants to revive. He told a press conference in Warsaw that “the Visegrád Group may regain its vitality and its influence within the European Union,” and floated expanding it to take in “the Nordic countries, perhaps Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania,” and the Western Balkans.
The shape that list traces is essentially the old Habsburg world, a Catholic, formerly imperial Central Europe from Vienna to the Adriatic; its eastern wall falls precisely where Ukraine begins.
Every country on that list once belonged to the Habsburg Empire. But crucially, Ukraine did not. So the wider Central Europe Magyar imagines has the same eastern boundary the empire had, and it leaves out the one country that now sits at the center of the region’s security and energy politics.
The verbs of a divided region
Each leader meets that reality differently. Orbán avoided Ukraine, turning the veto into the centerpiece of his Brussels policy. Fico exploits it, using Slovakia’s dependence on Russian crude as leverage before flipping to back accession once the oil flowed again after the reopening of the Druzhba pipeline.
Andrej Babiš hedges, winning a Czech election on a promise to end Prague’s ammunition initiative for Ukraine, then keeping it alive as coordinator while refusing to spend Czech money on it.
Magyar inherits the question, and here is the surprise. His tone is European, but his substance is Orbán rebranded. He has kept Orbán’s central condition in place, making minority rights for ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia a precondition for supporting Ukraine’s accession, with Tisza policy reportedly requiring a binding referendum before approval, the same plebiscitary device Orbán used. As Reuters notes, Orbán’s defeat removed Ukraine’s harshest opponent in the EU, yet Magyar is “no outspoken ally of Ukraine.”
He can afford little else. Hungarians broadly back EU membership, but on Ukraine even his own voters are split, dividing roughly 50 to 40 on Ukrainian accession, while Fidesz voters oppose it by more than 80%. Ukraine skepticism is the one Orbán-era position with genuine wide support, which is why it survived an election that swept almost everything else away.
What Tusk took from the visit
The warmth in Warsaw served Tusk as much as it did Magyar. The Polish prime minister has spent 18 months unable to deliver much of his domestic program, his agenda blocked by a hostile president, his accountability drive embarrassed by the flight of former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro from Hungarian asylum to the United States before he could be held to account, and even his signature push on European defense financing falling short of the breakthrough he wanted.
A reconciliation with Budapest gave him a foreign-policy win at a moment when wins have been scarce. “I have waited many, many years for this moment,” he said, promising that Poland and Hungary would act “as one fist” in Brussels.
For Magyar, his Polish pilgrimage was an exercise in banking political capital for the fights waiting at home.
Standing beside Tusk as an equal, welcomed back into the European mainstream, gives Magyar the standing he needs for the hardest task ahead, which is unlocking the roughly 17 billion euros in EU funds frozen under Orbán, with a recovery-fund deadline of the end of August forcing the pace.
He has already made early headway loosening Fidesz’s grip on the media, ordering a review of public-service broadcasting and moving to cut the state advertising that sustains the pro-Orbán conglomerate KESMA, a centralized holding for hundreds of government-friendly outlets.
The deeper machinery is harder to reach. The presidency, the Constitutional Court, and the senior judiciary are staffed with Fidesz appointees on fixed terms designed to outlast an election defeat, and they can slow or narrow his reforms even with his two-thirds majority.
President Tamás Sulyok has already refused to step down, saying there is “no legal reason or constitutional justification” for him to go.
Removing those loyalists may require the same super-majority methods Orbán perfected, which leaves Magyar with the problem that may define his term: how to dismantle an illiberal state without rebuilding one.
For the newly regrouped Visegrád, no matter how many countries it eventually includes, the deeper irony is that Brussels is working on dismantling the veto instrument some in the region have relied on, building ways to advance Ukraine’s accession and financing without unanimity. The veto may be gone before Magyar ever has to decide whether to use it.