Find Out What Hungarians Think About Their Neighbors

The Hungary 2025 Barometer, compiled by the Nézőpont Institute, has been published, examining the relations and public opinion between Hungary and its neighbors. It turned out that nearly half of Hungarians have a positive view of all neighboring countries, but Austrians and Croatians are critical of Hungary, Magyar Nemzet reports.

Hungarians (62 percent) and Slovaks (65 percent) have a similarly high proportion of positive opinions of each other’s countries. Since October 2023, the two countries’ leaders, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, have been reinforcing each other’s positions on strategic issues such as the Russian-Ukrainian war. The figures for 2024 and 2025 can be seen as a historic success after the many conflicts of the 20th century.

Half of Hungarians (50%) have a positive opinion of Romania, a second year of steady improvement in the perception of our eastern neighbor. Previously only a third of Hungarians said they had a positive image of Romania.

Romanians’ opinion of Hungary has fluctuated in recent years.

While the high proportion of positive opinions in the first two years of the war fell in 2024 (39%), this year the proportion of those with a positive opinion of Hungary has risen to 61%, even higher than the year before. This recovery may be due, among other things, to Romania’s accession to the Schengen area during the Hungarian EU Presidency.

A relative majority of Hungarians (48%) had a good opinion of Serbia, which is a similar improvement to Romania over the past nine years. Previously, only a third of Hungarians had a positive view of our southern neighbor. Serbs’ opinion of Hungary has been consistently high in recent years, a trend confirmed by the alliance between the Hungarian Prime Minister and the Serbian President. As Magyar Nemzet points out,

without the cooperation of the two countries, the illegal migration pressure in the Balkans would have been unmanageable, and the construction of the strategically important Budapest-Belgrade railway line would not have started.

Furthermore, there would be no successful cooperation in the field of energy security, such as the TurkStream pipeline, which runs through the two countries transporting Russian gas.

Three quarters of Hungarians (76%) had a positive opinion of Croatia in 2025, while 52% of Croats had a positive opinion of Hungary. From a Croatian perspective, relations between the two countries have been tainted by the MOL-INA case concerning two oil companies, which has been dragging on since 2013 and in which the Croats were also heavily fined by an international arbitration court. However, in Zoran Milanovic, Croatia re-elected a president in January 2025 who shares similar views on international issues with the Hungarian government.

A majority of Hungarians (69%) also had a favorable opinion of Slovenia in early 2025. The perception of our south-western neighbor is not a political issue in Hungary, Hungarians prefer to think about it in the context of tourism and are apolitical.

This contrasts with the reality of Slovenes, among whom only 38% have a positive opinion of Hungary. This divide is not surprising, given the abundance of Hungarian aspects in Slovenian domestic politics. The main opponent of the current left-wing Golob government is Janez Janša, a long-time ally of Viktor Orbán, who, along with the Hungarian prime minister, is under attack from Slovenia’s left-wing majority press and political elite.

Hungarians clearly have the best opinion of Austria. Four-fifths of Hungarians (81%) had a positive opinion of Austria in 2025, while Austrians were in the minority (36%), as in previous years. The fact that the European ally of Fidesz, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), won the elections in the autumn, and that there is a realistic chance that the next Austrian chancellor will be the leader of the Freedom Party, foreshadows an improvement in relations between the two countries.

Via Magyar Nemzet, Featured photo via Pixabay