Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban drank vodka to celebrate. Lawmakers from Poland’s biggest opposition party stood up in parliament and chanted his name. The Bosnian Serb leader, sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption, hosted a cocktail party in his presidential palace.
The return of Donald Trump as American president has been welcomed in some quarters and raised concerns in others. In Europe, the contrast is between the guarded reception to his election victory in many Western capitals versus the reaction in the east, home to some of his staunchest supporters.
Eastern Europe has embraced Trump in the way it’s embraced its own strongmen over the years and the conservative backlash against „liberal elites.” Now leaders from Budapest and Bratislava to Belgrade are relishing another era of doing business with a president they see as taking a transactional approach to relations with the region.