Amazing that he’d rather deal with a snake like Erdogan than a dog like Merkel.
Relations between Hungary and Turkey may currently be cordial, but the two countries’ history has not always been so friendly, and Hungary was occupied by the Ottoman empire for a century and a half between 1541 and 1699.
Nowadays, Erdoğan professes nostalgia for the Ottoman empire, while Orbán’s government promotes so-called “turanist” theories, hotly disputed by historians and linguists, that see Turkish and Finno-Ugric languages, including Hungarian, as sharing a common origin.
On a visit to Kyrgyzstan in September, Orbán lauded Hungarian as a “strange and unique language related to Turkish languages”.
Tamas Szigetvari argues that such theories enable Orbán to portray Hungary as a sort of distant cousin to countries in Asia that Budapest is wooing for economic reasons.
Worth noting that Turkey released the hostage America pastor today...