Why is Hungary’s Orban sending soldiers to Chad?

In hot N’Djamena, an unlikely new language – Hungarian – is flowing alongside the usual mix of Arabic and French, signalling the presence of diplomats from Chad’s new international partner.

In the past year alone, Hungary has opened a diplomatic mission in the Sahelian nation, launched a humanitarian centre and promised $200m in aid. It also plans to send soldiers to help Chad fight armed groups.

The aid is a generous gesture from a Central European country that has had no substantive relations with Chad previously – but it’s also an eyebrow-raising one, experts said.

Hungary is one of Europe’s poorer countries, and it presently has zero economic holdings in Chad or the Sahel. There are also no Hungarian communities there.

However, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has stressed the need for Europe to befriend countries in the Sahel, where, he said, a toxic mix of armed groups and military governments is fuelling migration.

“Migration from Africa to Europe cannot be stopped without the countries of the Sahel region. … That is why Hungary is building a cooperation partnership with Chad,” Orban said in September.

Poverty and armed groups

Officials in Budapest said the newly built humanitarian centre in N’Djamena will help coordinate 150 million to 200 million euros ($162m to $216m) in humanitarian aid, which will target the arid country’s agriculture and education sectors and help boost digitalisation. An additional 1 million euros ($1.08m) from the state aid agency, Hungary Helps, will go to funding healthcare.

Orban’s government said the point is to respond locally to development issues, including poverty and inadequate healthcare, before people are prompted to seek better lives in Europe.

Chad is one of Africa’s poorest countries. Forty-two percent of its 20 million people live on less than $2.15 a day, according to the World Food Programme. Disrupted trade with its war-torn neighbour Sudan has driven food prices up, putting further pressure on the economy. Besides that, it has taken in 1.2 million people fleeing conflict in Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). Hungary’s argument: If Chad is destabilised, it could open a “floodgate” of people to Europe.

Last month, Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno touched down at Budapest’s airport, decked out in his signature white, flowing jilbab for a two-day state visit to Hungary. There, Deby and Orban finalised the terms of the humanitarian package, marking Hungary’s first aid treaty with an African nation.

Orban also announced 200 Hungarian soldiers will deploy to Chad to train local forces against armed groups. Chad faces multiple threats from groups that want to unseat Deby, from CAR rebel groups that operate on Chad’s southern border to Boko Haram, whose fighters have settled along Lake Chad bordering Nigeria.

It’s unclear when the forces will be deployed and if they will play an active or supportive role. The Chadian National Assembly would have to approve the move, but this has not happened yet, and there’s no clear timeline as to when legislators will take a vote.

A Chadian soldier is part of a contingent fighting the armed group Boko Haram [File: Emmanuel Braun/Reuters]

In the Hungarian National Assembly, which is controlled by Orban’s ruling coalition of his Fidesz party and the Christian Democratic People’s Party, legislators approved the security agreement when it was first presented in November 2023 in a 140-30 vote.

In addition to the military deployment, Hungary said it has “initiated” the transfer of an additional 14 million euros ($15m) of its contributions to the European Peace Facility (EPF) to Chad.

The EPF, formed in 2021, allows European Union members to pool contributions and jointly deliver military aid to partner countries. Much of the funding has gone to Ukraine although Orban – an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is waging a war in Ukraine – has repeatedly frustrated other EU members’ efforts to send more funds to Kyiv.

Hungary in September formally asked other EU members to approve its transfers to Chad. There’s no explicit approval from the bloc yet, but at the time, Orban said Hungary expected other members to be on board.

‘Confluence of stability and conflict’

During Deby’s September visit, Orban said the point of the development and military cooperation with Chad was to stop migration from Africa, a phenomenon that many European countries see as a threat amid surging migration levels in recent years.

“It felt like a bit of a random choice, but in retrospect, it actually makes sense,” said Beverly Ochieng, an analyst with Control Risks, an intelligence firm based in the United Kingdom.

“Chad has one of the strongest armies in the region,” she told Al Jazeera. “Despite the threats it faces, though, the government maintains strong stability and a strong buy-in with the military there.”

In the past decade, the Sahel region – the band of land that lies below the Sahara – has faced rising levels of violence from armed groups and as a result, emigration. In Mali and Burkina Faso in the western Sahel, armed groups are taking over swaths of land while Niger also faces mounting threats. Although militaries there seized power in coups and expelled foreign forces – including French, American and EU troops – they’ve largely failed on their promises to restore peace.

Refugees displaced by the war in Sudan receive food from aid agencies at the Metche camp in eastern Chad [File: Jsarh Ngarndey Ulrish/AP]

Chad faces pressures from conflicts in neighbouring countries, but it remains largely secure, having pushed Chadian rebel groups to the fringes after the death of Deby’s father, former President Idriss Deby, in 2021. Several aid groups are using the country as a base to respond to the crisis in Sudan.

The new deal aligns with Orban’s ambitions. The prime minister has long called for tougher controls on people coming into the EU. In July, Hungary assumed the role of the rotating EU presidency, allowing Orban to further push his agenda. This week, Orban pressed for the EU to field asylum claims in countries outside the bloc.

A jostle for influence?

Some analysts said Orban might also be angling to join an ongoing power game in Africa that is seeing big powers like Russia, China, the United States, India and the EU jostle for influence.

The continent’s vast natural resources, growing population and collective weight at the United Nations General Assembly make it attractive.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia has taken advantage of the fallout between France and its former Francophone allies of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

As French and other Western troops have withdrawn from the Sahel since 2022, Russia’s Wagner paramilitary forces, now called Africa Corps, have moved in. Russian troops have been present in CAR since 2018. Their mission to push back armed groups and protect President Faustin Archange Touadera’s rule has been largely successful.

Investigations by the French paper Le Monde revealed Gaspar Orban, the prime minister’s son, was one of the diplomats shuttling between Chad and Hungary in the past year. This has raised speculation over the elder Orban’s end game with some wondering whether the new friendship with Chad is meant to secure private benefits for the prime minister. The younger Orban is not a state official and had not previously undertaken diplomatic assignments.

Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno arrives for his inauguration at the Palace of Arts and Culture in N’Djamena on May 23, 2024 [Joris Bolomey/AFP]

Deby’s image at home

Flaunting a new European military friend could help current President Deby solidify his credibility on the home front, something he has struggled to do since he assumed power, Ochieng said.

Deby took power after his father and longtime President Idriss Deby died while leading soldiers on the battlefield against a rebel group. Under Chadian law, the speaker of parliament should have taken over, but the younger Deby, a four-star military general, formed a military council to lead the country.

His detractors accused him of carrying out a palace coup, and opposition party members in Chad questioned Deby’s claim to the presidency. When people took to the streets to protest in October 2022, security forces killed more than 200 demonstrators.

Although Deby went ahead to organise and win elections this May, questions of his legitimacy remain, and the government appears anxious over a possible coup stemming from the military or opposition groups. Deby’s grab for power and his government’s failure to condemn Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has angered military and political elites. Many share ancestry with the Zagawa tribes in Darfur where reports of RSF massacres and human rights violations are rife.

In February, Chad’s military said an opposition leader, Yaya Dillo – who is Deby’s cousin – launched an attack on the army headquarters. The resulting shootout saw Dillo and several other members of his party killed.

“Islamist militants are actually not the biggest threat to Deby because they’ve been largely contained. The biggest threats are those internal divisions,” Ochieng told Al Jazeera. “Unfortunately, that’s not something the Hungarian troops can really help with. In the unlikely event of a coup or something like that, those soldiers would just be forced to wait it out and see what happens next.”

However, the added military assistance from Hungary or elsewhere could help Deby boost his profile with the military, which is all-powerful in Chad. It also provides more clout internationally, Ochieng said, as N’Djamena works to present itself as a neutral side in the Russia-West tensions.

Chad is presently the only Sahelian anchor for the West after the fallout between France and the western Sahel countries. About 1,000 French soldiers are deployed in Chad along with about 100 US soldiers (although a disagreement over US operations caused authorities in May to expel some of the US contingent. US officials described the expulsions as rooted in a “temporary paperwork” issue.)

There is much anxiety in Western countries over how long their soldiers will last in Chad, experts said. That’s fuelled by Deby’s visit in January to the Kremlin, where Putin offered “security assistance”, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s trip to Chad in June.

At the same time, Chad did not hesitate to detain four Russians deemed hostile in September when they landed in N’Djamena for unclear reasons. Two of them – Maxim Shugalej and Samer Sueifan – are well-known for oiling Moscow’s propaganda machine in African countries and have previously been detained in Libya.

“That was Deby saying, ‘We will not tolerate a more incendiary Russian presence in our country,’” Ochieng said.