Magyar wants to put the Austro-Hungarian Empire back on the map

 

Magyar wants to put the Austro-Hungarian Empire back on the map

 

Hungary’s incoming prime minister wants to forge closer ties with Austria and other Central European nations to wield greater power in Brussels.

 

April 22, 2026 4:00 am CET

By Nette Nöstlinger

https://www.politico.eu/article/peter-magyar-wants-put-austro-hungarian-empire-back-map/

 

Hungary’s next leader wants to revive Central Europe’s clout by tapping its imperial past.

 

Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar says he will deepen ties with neighboring states, especially Austria, building on strong economic links and a shared history rooted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the late nineteenth century.

 

“We used to share a country, and Austria is a key economic partner of Hungary,” Magyar said after his victory over Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian election earlier this month. “I would like to strengthen the relationship between Hungary and Austria for historical but also for cultural and economic reasons.”

 

Magyar beat Orbán partly on a promise to reset Hungary’s relations with the EU, but he envisions doing so within an emboldened bloc of Central European nations led by like-minded right-wing leaders whom he believes share a cultural outlook, economic interests and conservative views on everything from migration to energy policy. With the important exception of Poland, these countries — positioned between Western Europe and Russia — have also traditionally shown a greater willingness to maintain business links with Moscow.

 

The incoming Hungarian leader has already publicly outlined how he might achieve his vision for a Central European bloc. At a press conference earlier this month he proposed merging the Visegrád Group — an informal alliance of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — with the Slavkov format, a cooperation framework involving Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

 

“I believe this is in the interest of every country, including Austria and Hungary,” Magyar said. “So I hope that we will be able to make progress here.”

 

As a clear signal of that strategy, Magyar said his first trips as Hungary’s new leader in early May will be to Warsaw and Vienna.

 

While he views Austria as a more natural ally, Magyar stands to learn a great deal from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his efforts to restore liberal democracy after years of populist rule, including how to unlock EU funds withheld over rule-of-law concerns. One of Magyar’s top priorities is to secure the release of €18 billion in frozen EU funds; he’s also pushing for access to €16 billion in European defense loans and for an end to a €1 million-a-day fine on Hungary over its refusal to comply with EU migration law.

 

“The visit to Warsaw is about sharing experiences regarding the transition back to a liberal democracy,” said Emil Brix, a former Austrian diplomat and historian who has studied the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The visit to Vienna has more to do with European policy and with the fact that it is necessary to develop our own proposals from within this region.”

 

The Austrian government appears receptive to the idea.

 

A senior Austrian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said there is an inherent logic in strengthening collaboration among Central European states within the EU along the lines of the Benelux model.

 

“We are all states of roughly the same size with many shared interests, and together we would be more relevant in terms of voting capacity,” the diplomat said.

 

 

Umbilically linked

For Austria’s conservative-led government, deepening ties with Hungary has long been a strategic ambition.

 

In the early 2000s, ahead of the EU accession of several formerly communist countries, Austria’s leaders proposed a renewed alliance with Central Europe. The effort ultimately failed, hampered by fears in Poland and Slovenia that Vienna was seeking to reassert its hegemony more than 80 years after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

 

Now it’s a more confident, prosperous Hungary that is proposing the closer alliance. Polish leaders too, with their country’s surging economic and military might, no longer feel threatened by the prospect, experts say. The Polish prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Austrian conservatives also see a new opportunity now that Orbán is gone.

 

“We worked closely with Orbán in the 1990s, and I always say that the young Orbán would surely have been one of the biggest critics of the older Orbán today,” said Reinhold Lopatka, an MEP of the ruling conservative Austrian’s People’s Party. “Despite all the problems we faced, we managed to work together on some issues, but over the years that became increasingly difficult and eventually impossible.”

 

Magyar and conservative Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker began laying the groundwork for post-Orbán relations between their countries at the Munich Security Conference in February, according to two people who were present at the meeting. The leaders discussed Magyar’s inaugural visit to Vienna and how to improve conditions for Austrian firms doing business in Hungary, according to a senior Austrian government official.

 

In Vienna, Magyar is expected to attempt to map out a joint stance on migration and discuss the fate of Central European University — which moved its main campus from Budapest to Vienna in 2019 following Orbán’s campaign against the institution — the senior Austrian diplomat said.

 

The two nations are already umbilically linked in economic terms. Austria is the second-largest investor in Hungary after Germany with an investment volume of over €11.7 billion. Some 134,000 Hungarians work in Austria, many of them as commuters.

 

Austria’s national bank said in a report last year that growing trade ties with Central and Southeast European countries are having a stabilizing effect on the Austrian economy at a time of increasing trade uncertainty globally.

 

Yet key differences remain among Central European nations that are certain to complicate efforts to forge a closer alliance. On Ukraine, for example, Austria and Poland actively back additional EU aid for the embattled country. While Hungary under Magyar is no longer expected to obstruct aid as Orbán did, it joins the Czech Republic and Slovakia in opting out of backing the EU’s €90 billion loan package for Kyiv. The countries also have diverging views on Ukraine’s accession to the bloc.

 

Despite those differences, experts argue strong shared interests remain among Central European countries, particularly when it comes economic initiatives and large-scale infrastructure projects.

 

“If these countries could present integrated proposals and integrated projects that are coordinated, it would strengthen their position when it comes to the distribution of funds and cohesion money from Brussels,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist from the University of Salzburg.

 

Magyar’s push to build a Central European alliance may also be rooted in his grasp of how power actually works in Brussels. The incoming prime minister spent nearly a decade there as a diplomat under Orbán before breaking with the populist Fidesz party and becoming an MEP with his own conservative political force, Tisza.

 

“He’s basically the first Hungarian prime minister who has a perfect understanding of how the Brussels and EU machine work[s],” said Stefano Bottoni, a professor focused on Eastern Europe at the University of Florence. “And if you want to count more in Brussels, if you want to be a counterweight to the big [countries] — France, Germany — then you have to join forces.”