Congressman Andy Harris loves authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.
“What I call the activist right within the American ranks, we look at what Viktor Orbán is doing and say: ‘Yes, he’s taking a stand!’” Harris told Hungarian Conservative, a right-leaning magazine based in Budapest.
During 16 years as Hungary’s prime minister, Orbán has stacked the judiciary, changed election rules, replaced the civil service, consolidated news media under state control and rewritten the constitution. He sold state-owned companies to enrich his family.
And, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Orbán supported Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Through it all, Maryland’s lone Republican in Congress has been there for him. Now that he faces possible defeat in national parliamentary elections Sunday, Harris has been part of the American right-wing rescue effort.
During a conference of European conservatives last month in Budapest, Reuters reported Harris telling delegates that Orbán “led the way for the victory of many right-of-center leaders in Europe. Of course, that put a political target on him.”
Harris is a key to understanding why President Donald Trump sees Orbán as a role model for dismantling a liberal democracy with attacks on immigration, globalization and “woke” liberalism.
So why does an eight-term congressman from the Eastern Shore care about Hungary?
“That’s the model in Project 2025; it’s almost a parallel,” said Michael H.C. McDowell, a retired foreign affairs editor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
McDowell met Harris when he moved to the tiny town of Chestertown nine years ago. He heard him talking at an appearance in the district about his father’s imprisonment by communists in a Russian gulag after World War II.
“It made me suspicious, because Hungary was part of the Axis,” McDowell said. “And they fought with the Germans.”
He understood the history. After leaving journalism, McDowell entered the world of think tanks and universities, including Harvard, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Aspen Institute, the Gates Foundation, the New America Foundation and the World Bank.
He sought help from Yale University historian Eva Balogh, who fled Hungary in 1956 after the old Soviet Union suppressed a democratic uprising.
She published her findings on her blog, Hungarian Spectrum: evidence that Harris’ father, Dr. Zoltán Hariss, was not a victim of political persecution. He served in the Hungarian Army, which fought with the Germans.
While she was critical of Harris’ actions in Congress and support for Orbán, she called his father’s two-year confinement the fate of a soldier in a losing army, not political persecution.
He emigrated to the United States in 1950.
“So, Zoltán Hariss was never a forced labor inmate in the Gulag,” Balogh wrote months before her death in 2021.
None of this is new. The New Republic, a left-leaning magazine, published a detailed article in 2022 based on her research, Harris’ ties to Orbán and questions about his father’s past.
Others have examined Harris’ connections to Orbán and how they link to Trump.
“Harris is the originator of the whole entry of Orbán to the Trump administration in the first administration,” McDowell said.
When you hear Trump praise Orbán, he’s talking about the prime minister’s self-described “illiberal democracy” — building a wall to block immigration, opposing open trade borders and enforcing a Christian nationalist view of gender roles.
What is new is the impact of Harris’ success in finding friends for Orbán as he faces a political challenge.
“Despite retaining overwhelming control over the state, the media, and vast sectors of the economy, the regime has been unable to stop the rise of a new political force,” Hungarian democracy advocates Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar wrote Thursday in the journal Foreign Affairs.
Harris and others launched into action this spring when polling showed the prime minister losing to opposition figure Péter Magyar, a member of the European Parliament.
At CPAC Hungary in March, Reuters reported on Harris urging Hungarians to “throw the vandals out and shut the gate,” adding that “the future of Western, Christian, free civilization depends on it.”
His words might have been lost in the spectacle of Vice President JD Vance drumming up votes for Orbán, calling Trump during a rally for additional words of support. “I love Hungary, and I love Viktor,” Trump declared.
McDowell is ruefully watching all this from Maryland, knowing the revelations didn’t make a difference four years ago in the Republican-majority 1st District. He doubts they’ll change anyone’s mind this year.
“There’s not enough Democrats or independents in this electoral population,” he said.
The 1st District remains solidly red, even if it is shaping up to be a very bad year for Republicans. Democratic candidate Dan Schwartz is trying to make Orbán part of his message.
“WTF is Rep. Andy Harris (MD-01) doing in Budapest this week CAMPAIGNING for the reelection of autocrat Viktor Orbán?“ Schwartz wrote online during Harris’ trip. “... People here care about cost of living, Rep. Harris, get back to Maryland and get real.”
Harris has dismissed reporting on his ties to Orbán as politically motivated. He declined my request for an interview.
In that 2024 interview with Hungarian Conservative, Harris’ words sound like a manifesto.
He used phrases such as “freedom” and “working people” to wage culture fights and pursue political agendas, without saying how those battles benefit the people he is defending.
He didn’t mention the 2021 attempted coup in the U.S., when he and other Republican conservatives in Congress tried to block Democrat Joe Biden’s win after the presidential election.
Orbán is an authoritarian willing to break democracy for power.
If you judge someone by the company he keeps, Harris sees playing by Hungarian rules as right for America.
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