What's the big deal about Hungary? It's a central European country with 9.5 million people — slightly less in population and area than the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. But it's been the subject of more care, attention and debate in America than any other country in Europe or the Western Hemisphere.

Vice President JD Vance was in Budapest the Tuesday before Hungary's election last Sunday and, with President Donald Trump chiming in over the phone, gave 16-year incumbent Viktor Orban an endorsement in all but name. Vance praised Orban's "generous family subsidies" and decried European Union "bureaucrats in Brussels," who have been fining Hungary 1 million euros a day for declining to admit refugees.

On Monday, after Orban's Fidesz party was soundly defeated by ex-Fidesz Peter Magyar's Tisza party, former President Barack Obama called the result "a victory for democracy" and for "fairness, equality and the rule of law."

Now diplomats generally favor incumbents in other countries' elections — no need to adjust to new interlocutors — and American governments have sometimes intervened in European elections. But usually clandestinely, as when the infant CIA thankfully took sides against Stalin's communists in France and Italy. What prompts the current vice president and a former president to take opposite sides in Hungary's election?

To understand that, it helps to go back in time — not just to 2010, when Orban won his first of four elections, but back into the 19th century, when Austria-Hungary was a major power, and perhaps even to the century and a half from 1526 to 1699, when what is now Hungary as part of the Ottoman Empire was........

© Townhall