O, my God, the Magyar bless
With Thy plenty and good cheer!
With Thine aid his just cause press,
Where his foes to fight appear.
Fate, who for so long did'st frown,
Bring him happy times and ways;
Atoning sorrow hath weighed down
Sins of past and future days.
—Hungarian National Anthem
Back in 2022, I received a letter from Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, naming me a “Friend of Hungary”. It is a distinction that I treasure – and always shall. Indeed, I do love Hungary, and its strange, wonderful, bewildering, and beguiling inhabitants – where else, save among Hungarians in Romania, could you find Unitarian bishops?
Moreover, I am particularly a friend of Mr Orbán’s Hungary, with all that it has done to revive both its own Christian nationhood and to act as a beacon for “Conservatism” around the globe. This is not least because I am aware of Mr Orbán’s own knowledge of the fleeting nature of our “Reagan Revolution”, and his desire to leave his country truly improved – and not merely a plateau on the way down, as – alas – Reagan’s efforts appear in hindsight to have been. Ronnie having been the first president I ever voted for, back in 1980 – the only president I ever met, and the focus at the time of so many of my own hopes for the United States – I sympathise profoundly with Mr Orbán’s reading of that time.
So it was that I was profoundly pleased when Melanie Raidl and Fabian Schmid included me in an article they wrote for the German paper of record, Der Standard, on 10 August 2025. Entitled How the Habsburgs and Viktor Orbán Form a Political Symbiosis, it had the interesting tagline: “Several members of the Habsburg family are committed to the Hungarian Prime Minister, some of them in official positions. This also fits ideologically.”