As Budapest celebrated the end of sixteen years of Orbánism last night — Péter Magyar and his Tisza party sweeping a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament — ENI CEO Claudio Descalzi was taking the stage at the Lega’s political training school in Rome, calling for the European ban on Russian gas to be suspended. Same night, opposite directions: Team Putin loses Orbán and gains Descalzi.

Budapest sings ‘Russians at home’, ENI proposes to put Russians back home

The coincidence deserves a closer look. Magyar wins with a record turnout — 77.8% of Hungarians at the polls, the highest figure since 1990 — and solemnly pledges to bring Budapest back into the EU and NATO. In the streets, hundreds of thousands of young Hungarians chant “Ruszkik, haza” — “Russians, go home” — a slogan that symbolically ties Orbán’s defeat to the Soviet invasion of 1956. The man who told Putin “I am ready to help you in any way I can”, who voted against the European regulation phasing out Russian gas, and who routinely briefed Sergei Lavrov on European Council discussions, has had to concede a resounding defeat. The Kremlin loses its most loyal gatekeeper inside the Union — the one who spent years acting as its megaphone and its shield.

Meanwhile, as noted, the ENI chief lines up squarely with the wishes of Italy’s pro-Putin camp. A few technical details are worth spelling out. On 26 January 2026, the EU Council formally approved the regulation phasing out Russian gas from Europe. The text distinguishes between two physically distinct supply chains: pipeline gas, which travels through fixed infrastructure and arrives directly at European hubs, will be eliminated by the autumn of 2027; LNG — liquefied natural gas, cooled to -162°C, compressed and shipped in liquid form to coastal regasification terminals — will be banned from the beginning of 2027. Descalzi referred explicitly to this second channel, arguing that eliminating it risks depriving the European system of a degree of flexibility that cannot easily be replaced in the short term.

The argument has a certain engineering logic. Russian LNG still accounts for significant shares of imports in several EU countries, and regasification terminals are not built overnight. But the technical distinction between pipe and ship is no political alibi: the message from the CEO of ENI — Italy’s most important state-owned energy company — was unambiguous. It was a signal of openness toward Moscow, delivered in a setting that was anything but neutral: a Lega party event, Salvini’s party, long the most vocal standard-bearer of Italian pro-Putinism. Descalzi is too seasoned an operator not to know that what he offered was not a technical observation but a political positioning — one that, notably, echoes the communiqués Federpetroli has been issuing for days, praising Minister Salvini as the only politician clear-eyed enough to acknowledge that Russian oil and gas “is needed.“

The hidden cost of Putin’s gas

Every cubic metre of gas purchased from Russia is a direct cash transfer to a war economy that is openly hostile toward Europe — Italy included. In 2025, Russia converted energy export revenues into missiles over Kyiv, drones targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, and — increasingly — hybrid warfare against the very EU countries still buying its gas. Russian-originated cyberattacks against European targets have grown systematically: the pro-Russian group NoName057(16) struck institutions and infrastructure across the Atlantic alliance with DDoS attacks until, in July 2025, Europol dismantled over one hundred servers involved in Operation Eastwood. According to the European Threat Landscape Report 2025, Europe is the primary target of Russian state-sponsored actors across critical sectors: government, finance, industrial infrastructure, and educational institutions. Italian companies are no exception.

Given all this — and even accounting for the severe disruption caused by the Hormuz blockade — can we seriously argue that deepening ties with the Russian state and its mafia-like structure would serve Italy’s interests?

Calling for the suspension of the Russian LNG ban, therefore, is not a neutral technical position. It is a political choice with direct strategic consequences: it means prolonging the financing of a regime that wages open warfare on European soil — not only in Ukraine, but in hybrid form within our digital systems, our institutions, and our information space.

Magyar’s victory and Descalzi’s accommodation toward Moscow are two sides of the same coin, because the defining political distinction in the Europe of 2026 is no longer between left and right, between fossil fuels and renewables, or between traditional values and new rights. It is between those who choose a free Europe and those who — out of energy convenience, ideological sympathy, or barely concealed self-interest — hold the door open for Russian imperialism. This is an existential choice, not a matter of political sensibility. The Hungarians made it unequivocally last night. And the telling detail — uncomfortable for those who would cast Magyar as a progressive figurehead — is that this choice came from the right.

Magyar is not what the Italian left thinks

Those who look at the Budapest result and read it as a turn to the left have understood little — or are pretending not to. Magyar is a right-wing conservative, at times more rigid than Orbán on certain social issues: a restrictive line on immigration (he even criticised his predecessor for admitting too many guest workers), tax cuts, stronger natalist incentives, a doubling of the defence budget.

His institutional platform is built around the restoration of legality, the rule of law, and a pro-European orientation: a two-term limit for the prime minister (eight years), applied retroactively to Orbán, who has accumulated sixteen; Hungary’s accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), systematically blocked by Budapest for years; the dismantling of state propaganda on public broadcasters; and an end to Hungary’s veto on EU loans to Ukraine.

A programme that would sound radical in Italy — not because it is left-wing or right-wing, but because it poses a question that our political system continues to evade: are we with the rule of law or with autocracy? With a free Europe or with Moscow? This is not a rhetorical question. It is precisely the choice that — in the Italian centre-right as much as in the centre-left — has never been squarely made.

The geometry of energy power

Magyar’s victory, however, does not dissolve the dangers. Putin, as ever, is a patient strategist. He can afford to lose Orbán — an electorally spent vassal — if in return he can keep the taps open through the technically respectable voices of the Western energy industry. The team changes; the direction does not. And there is something both troubling and telling in the fact that ENI’s CEO went to lobby politically for Moscow’s gas in the Lega’s drawing room on the very same evening that Hungarians chose — with a historic majority — to send the Kremlin’s most loyal ally in Europe packing.

Budapest answered last night with unmistakable clarity. Rome, for now, has not.