PHOTO: What a change! Bearded Orbán in a Russia T-shirt in Croatia?

PM Viktor Orbán is spending his summer holiday in Croatia, where a great many things happened to him and his wife. First, they were rescued by a Croatian journalist after their motorboat broke down. Secondly, he was snapped together with the Croatian president on a dinner they ate in a seashore restaurant. A recent photo shows him in Croatia with the head of the parliament’s foreign affairs commitee. He has a beard and is wearing a T-shirt some think depicts the silhouette of Russia. Here is the explanation.

After the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, everybody knew that new waves would come. However, during the summer, all countries, including Hungary, eased the restrictions introduced to contain the aggressive spread of the virus. PM Viktor Orbán said that Hungarians would feel jailed if they could not visit the sea every year at least once. Orbán stuck to that statement: he is spending his holiday this year in Croatia and by the sea.

That is where Zsolt Németh, the head of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, met him and took a photo. He wrote in his post: “Croatia, summer, recreation – meeting Viktor Orbán!”

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The photo they shared is interesting because for at least two reasons. First, Viktor Orbán wore a beard on 16 June 1989 when he gave his famous speech on the reburial of Imre Nagy, the martyr Hungarian prime minister executed by the Communists in 1958. There he demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet-Russian troops from Hungary, which was very brave then. Comments under the photo show that some fans found Orbán’s new beard cute.