Péter Szijjártó, until April the EU’s longest-serving foreign minister, is joining the Chinese carmaker BYD, after helping it – as a minister – to get a firm foothold in Hungary and thus avoid EU’s tariff wall.
Szijjártó, 47, announced via Facebook on 15 July that he had received “an extremely honourable offer from one of the defining companies of the world economy”.
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Europe has been here before. The best-known precedent is former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the Russlandversteher who went from masterminding Germany’s Russia policy to sitting on the boards of Russian state energy companies Nord Stream and Rosneft. Schröder became synonymous with the politician who monetises relationships after leaving office. Other examples include Austria’s former chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, who accepted a seat on the board of Lukoil, and one-time Finnish prime minister Esko Aho, who became a senior adviser to Huawei as it sought to expand into Europe.
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Yet Szijjártó’s connection is more direct. Schröder, Schüssel and Aho joined companies whose interests they had once helped shape. As the face of Hungary’s “Eastern Opening”, Szijjártó personally spent years facilitating BYD’s expansion from the other side of the table; now he is on the carmaker’s payroll. He is also the man who supervised Hungary’s foreign intelligence service, with its files on the internal workings of the EU and NATO. There is no Hungarian precedent for a former minister joining a company with which he had such direct official dealings. During the election campaign, Szijjártó was exposed briefing Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after EU meetings, which raises the question of why BYD has employed a man who is arguably more of a liability than an asset in the corridors of Brussels.
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The appointment is an advertisement, though not the one Budapest used to run. Hungary never extracted anything from Beijing: it paid for the privilege of hosting Chinese industry, in subsidies, cheap land, tax holidays and accommodating regulators, while the technology and the profits stayed with the parent companies. The publicly documented state support for BYD’s Hungarian projects alone exceeds 71 billion forints (EUR 200 million); Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar puts the full bill, indirect measures included, at around 300 billion. What Szijjártó’s new post demonstrates to every middle power hedging between Washington, Brussels and Beijing is that a minister who delivers all that will be taken care of.
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Fidesz [Hungary's former ruling party and Szijjártó's political home] loyalists mourned the departure of “the finest foreign minister the world has ever seen” [ while current Hungarian PM Peter] Magyar took a different view. Signing with BYD means entering the service of the Chinese Communist Party ... A former minister taking an executive role, months after leaving office, at a company he had supported with hundreds of billions of forints raised not only moral but serious legal concerns, he argued. A company of BYD’s size hiring such a man to repay services rendered would be called corruption of the most outrageous kind anywhere in Europe, he added.
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A prime minister cannot declare BYD an arm of the Chinese party-state and then preside indefinitely over its largest European investment. Beijing will have noted. Magyar knows it: within a day he was threatening to extend Hungary’s conflict-of-interest rules in ways that could block Szijjártó’s appointment outright – while adding, in the same breath, that if BYD pays its taxes and honours its commitments, his government is glad to have it. Local press are calling it the lex Szijjártó. The threat and the welcome, delivered together, measure the bind precisely. Washington, for its part, has already institutionalised a version of Magyar’s charge: in June, the US Department of War, added BYD to its list of companies it deems to be working with the Chinese military.
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At the Szijjártó foreign ministry, eventually around 80% of staff were his own appointees. Clientelism was a feature, not a bug. The Magyar government has already exposed how diplomatic passports became discretionary favours, to the point that border officials in several countries had stopped taking the documents seriously, according to the new foreign ministry. Beneficiaries ranged from the pop singer Magdolna Rúzsa to former national football captain Balázs Dzsudzsák, a close friend of Szijjártó, and Hilarion, the Russian bishop who was reassigned to Budapest months into the invasion of Ukraine and granted citizenship and a passport within three months of arrival, with no Hungarian ties and no explanation ever offered. The owner of the ‘nationalist’ craft-beer brand Csíki had earlier tried to use his to escape a speeding fine.
The scale takes a moment to parse: of the 10,219 diplomatic passports issued between 2019 and September 2023, nearly 1,500 were granted on Szijjártó’s personal authority by individual ministerial decision rather than entitlement, against the 100 to 200 that previous governments had kept in circulation.
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The longer Orbán remained in power, the less Hungary’s foreign policy was organised around any articulated conception of the national interest. It was opaque, personalised and transactional. Relationships accumulated where doctrine should have existed; investments replaced strategy. Success was measured in factories announced, meetings held and deals signed.
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[In mid-July] ... Orbán surfaced in the stands at the World Cup semi-final in the U.S. in the background of the livestream of the influencer IShowSpeed. As the architect of the Eastern Opening watched football in Texas, its biggest evangelist was a day from going to work for the Chinese company that embodied it. Schröder ended up on the payroll of the pipeline; Szijjártó is now on the payroll of the gigafactory.
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