Prof. Andrea Peto was interviewed for TAZ about illiberal foreign policy as Erdogan recently visited Budapest

Less than four months after his last visit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came back to Budapest on December 18. He and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán chair the sixth Turkish-Hungarian Council for High-Level Strategic Cooperation. There are 100 years of relations to be celebrated between the two countries, as they signed the first friendship treaty on December 15, 1923.

The timing for the high-level meeting was nevertheless chosen deliberately, says Andrea Pető, GENS Faculty at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. “Nothing in foreign policy happens by chance, especially not in illiberal states,” said Pető. Orbán wants to present himself as an important player who makes himself bigger than he is. “Hungary is a small, poor, dysfunctional state. Turkey is a regional power with geopolitical ambitions”, adds Peto.

Read the complete news in German here.