- Twin crises ignored: Orbán won his 2010 supermajority just two days after Greece announced its bailout request, yet Brussels treated only one as urgent.
- Misplaced priorities: European leaders fixated on Greek pharmacy hours and taverna taxes while Hungary quietly dismantled judicial independence.
- Delayed reckoning: Article 7 proceedings against Hungary began only in 2018 — eight years into Orbán’s rule, and the year Greece finally exited its bailouts.
- Ironic turnabout: Post-communist capitals that demanded Greek austerity spent the next decade as Orbán’s most aggrieved adversaries.
- Strategic paralysis: Obsessing over an economy worth two per cent of eurozone GDP left the Union politically exhausted when democracy itself was on the line.
We Greeks have a particular vantage point from which to watch Viktor Orbán’s political downfall. Like Hungarians, we know what sixteen years trapped inside a bad European bargain actually costs.
Here is a coincidence many in Brussels have forgotten, or would perhaps rather not revisit. Orbán won his landmark 2010 supermajority in elections held just two days after the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, stood on the Aegean island of Kastelorizo and announced that Greece was seeking a financial bailout from the European Union. What followed over the next decade is a cautionary tale of how the EU’s warped sense of priority made two crises — one economic, the other political — far worse than they needed to be.
While Orbán spent his first term dismantling judicial independence and liberal institutions, European leaders fixated on the opening hours of Greek pharmacies, pensions, and even the taxation of salads served in seaside tavernas. The rule of law crisis unfolding in Budapest, by contrast, was treated as little more than a diplomatic inconvenience — even as voices back then were already warning of the danger.
In a Europe obsessed with surpluses — not unlike Donald Trump today — Orbán’s Hungary was strangely in tune with the times. It was fiscally compliant and offered attractive conditions for the German car industry. Democratic backsliding was, to be sure, problematic. Yet in that particular moment, Greek borrowing spreads and public-sector salaries happened to feel existential. Greece bore the full weight of European pressure. Hungary, by contrast, faced Article 7 proceedings only in 2018, eight years into Orbán’s rule — ironically, also the year Greece exited its third and final bailout programme.
A poignant twist in this story is the stance of many Central and Eastern European governments. Some of the loudest voices demanding fiscal discipline from Greece in 2010 came from post-communist capitals that spent the following decade as Orbán’s most aggrieved adversaries. His blocking of EU sanctions on Russia after 2022, his vetoes on Ukraine aid, and his exploitation of unanimity rules in the European Council antagonised precisely the countries that had once cheered the loudest for Greek austerity.
And yet even now, most of these governments miss the irony that the fixation on Greek debt, and the outlandish stories about southern profligacy, handed Orbán a much-needed political diversion. The EU’s finite political bandwidth was consumed by a sovereign debt crisis in an economy representing just two per cent of eurozone GDP, while a member state systematically opted out of the liberal democratic order the Union claims to embody.
The counter-argument is, of course, that the eurozone’s survival was genuinely at stake in 2010–2012. But the obsessive focus on Greece went well beyond what financial stabilisation required, even in the euro’s most perilous moments. The ideological commitment to fiscal orthodoxy has, in any case, been exposed as hollow: the EU today deploys billions in public investment in technology, rearmament, and the green transition — precisely what critics of its handling of the eurozone crisis had been imploring it to do.
With the Orbán regime gone, we can now see how the choices the EU made on Greece produced another, more diffuse collateral victim. One of Orbán’s most effective rhetorical weapons — deployed not just in Hungary but across the European populist right — was always the claim that national sovereignty is the only reliable shield a small country has against Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. For millions of Europeans who watched what happened to Greece after 2010, that argument was never abstract.
A union serious about its future would recognise that the case for European solidarity is harder to make — in Budapest, in Athens, now in Kyiv — when that solidarity was withheld at the moment it mattered most. In April 2010, the EU treated Greek taxes and deficits as its most urgent business rather than democracy’s slow death in Hungary. It has paid the ultimate price in the strategic paralysis of the years since.
Greece paid for those choices for sixteen years. So, in a different way, did everyone else.
