Serbia – On 30 October 2023, Serbian politician István Pásztor (1956-2023), the main political leader of Serbia’s Hungarian ethnic minority, passed away.

He had headed Serbia’s main Hungarian political party, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, since 2008. He was President of the Provincial Assembly of Vojvodina, the region in northern Serbia which has the (theoretical) status of an autonomous province and is home to various ethnic minorities, including around 15% Hungarians.

During the 1990s and 2000s, relations between Hungary and Serbia were fairly poor, and inter-ethnic relations in Vojvodina were a bone of contention between the two countries.

However, with the return to power in 2010 of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and the rise to power of Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, relations between the two countries have improved considerably, to the point where in Budapest it is now considered that Serbia is the country with which Hungary has the best neighbourly relationship. Budapest and Belgrade have been working together for several years to develop major infrastructure projects, from the construction of energy infrastructure to the building of a high-speed rail link between the two capitals (with significant Chinese involvement in the project).

This situation was largely made possible by the fact that the Hungarians and Serbs were able to find compromises regarding the Hungarian minority in Serbia, which in the space of a decade has become a link between the two countries, rather than a bone of contention.

The presence of the two Serbian presidents (Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia, and Milorad Dodik of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia) at István Pásztor’s funeral symbolically demonstrated the good relations that now unite Hungarians and Serbs. In his speech, Viktor Orbán paid tribute to István Pásztor’s role in improving relations between Hungary and Serbia:

We stand over the coffin of a Hungarian who united us and brought our peoples together in peace. We cannot be grateful enough for this. We feel the weight of the political legacy he has left us. We are Central Europeans, so we know exactly how easy it is for friends to become enemies, and how rare it is in these parts for former enemies to become friends. Let us not forget that ten or so years ago it would have been unthinkable for our countries, our peoples, to be able to count on each other for everything. Today it would be unthinkable for us not to share each other’s joys and pains. Our friend President István Pásztor was the first not only to hope and not only to believe that this could be so, but also to act to attain it. He showed us the path along which Serbs and Hungarians can move together, as the common destiny of the two peoples rationally justifies.

István Pásztor’s son, Bálint, a member of the Serbian Parliament, has temporarily taken over from his father at the head of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, pending the election of a new president by a congress.