World

Against the tide

Britain goes to the polls today after a campaign that featured the same ingredients as other elections across Europe and the Americas: frustrated voters eager to reject the status quo, a deeply discredited government and a dash of populism — in this case, represented by the insurgent candidacy of Nigel Farage.

But Britain is likely to emerge from the election as an outlier. While the electorates in other countries are shifting to the right, British voters are expected to evict the Conservative-led government after 14 years, in favor of the center-left Labour Party. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why Britain is zigging while others are zagging.

Tory tumult

The Conservatives, or Tories, have presided over a tumultuous era that began with David Cameron in 2010. It included harsh budget cuts after the financial crisis of 2008, the Brexit vote of 2016, the Covid pandemic and a revolving door of prime ministers. For many, it has been a circus that now needs to leave town.

Boris Johnson was drummed out of office after serial scandals. (Among other things, he held parties during a Covid lockdown he had imposed.) Liz Truss lasted less than 50 days after the financial markets turned savagely against her proposed tax cuts. The current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has steadied the ship but failed to give restless voters much of an argument for keeping his party in power.

Beyond the constant drama, Labour politicians claim the Conservatives have broken Britain. They say: Cuts have starved the country’s revered National Health Service, leading to overcrowded emergency rooms and monthslong waits for elective surgery.

Other experts note that Britain’s departure from the European Union has slowed trade and handicapped economic growth. Though its rebound after the pandemic was comparable to that of its European neighbors, its economy has since stagnated, and its public debt has ballooned. (These charts, by my colleagues Josh Holder and Ademola Bello, show how Britain has changed since the Conservatives took power in 2010.)

The Tories have even struggled with their own priorities: Immigration has soared since Brexit. That is partly because of refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong. But the influx is also fueled by huge numbers of migrants from South Asia and Africa, many of whom come to study at universities or are recruited as nurses or doctors in the understaffed N.H.S. In addition to these documented arrivals, thousands of asylum seekers try to cross the English Channel in unseaworthy boats.

Conservative leaders, who sold Brexit as a tool to reduce immigration, say they will cut back the number of arrivals. Sunak has vowed to “stop the boats.” He spent months securing the passage in Parliament of a legally challenged policy that would put some asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda. But many voters no longer think the Conservative Party has credibility on this issue.

Labour’s pitch

Labour vows to curb immigration by better policing Britain’s borders. (It would mothball Rwanda flights, which it calls costly and ineffective.) Aside from that, however, the party’s priorities don’t seem all that different from those of the government, which is no accident.

Across a range of issues, Labour has been careful not to draw deep distinctions between itself and the Conservatives. It is not proposing big tax increases. It has vowed no major spending hikes until Britain cuts its runaway public deficit. It has scaled back its ambitious program to curb climate change. It would maintain Britain’s military support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Labour rejects the Tories less for the substance of their policies than for their hapless governance. It hopes to win over the many voters who are fed up with Conservative rule without frightening the ones who distrusted the tax-and-spend left — and especially its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Polls suggest the plan is working. Labour has led the Conservatives by double digits in polls for more than 18 months. The current Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has positioned himself as a plausible substitute for Sunak — a change agent but hardly a left-wing revolutionary.

The real conceptual contest

To the extent that there is an ideological struggle in this election, it is being waged on the right. Farage, a populist firebrand who campaigned on behalf of Brexit, is leading an anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., which is siphoning off votes from the Conservatives.

Under the electoral rules that govern British politics, Reform is unlikely to win many seats in Parliament. But it could split the right-wing vote, deepening the scale of the Conservative defeat to Labour and perhaps even fracturing the Tories.

Farage is an ally of Donald Trump, and his populist challenge echoes not only Trump’s movement in the United States but also the gains made by far-right parties in France and Germany.

In this respect, at least, Britain is not such an outlier.

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Most of these would-be champions aren’t professionals, but passionate amateurs. Some have stretched their stomachs with vast quantities of food or liquid. They might use the Solomon Method — think King Solomon — which calls for snapping a dog in half before eating it. It may just come down to willpower: The body doesn’t want to eat 72 hot dogs, but victory beckons.

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That’s it for today. See you tomorrow. — Dan

We welcome your feedback. Send us your suggestions at [email protected].

Two candidates, a reformist and an ultraconservative, will face off in Iran’s runoff presidential election on Friday, amid record-low voter turnout and overarching apathy that meaningful change could happen through the ballot box.

The runoff election follows a special vote held after President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May.

What happened in Iran’s first-round vote?

About 40 percent of voters, a record low, went to the polls last Friday, and none of the four candidates on the ballot garnered the 50 percent of votes needed to win the election.

The reformist candidate, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister, and Saeed Jalili, an ultra-hard-liner and former nuclear negotiator, received the most votes, sending the election into a runoff round on Friday.

The runoff may have a slightly larger turnout. Some Iranians said on social media that they feared Mr. Jalili’s hard-line policies and would vote for Dr. Pezeshkian. Polls show that about half of the votes for Mr. Jalili’s conservative rival in the first round, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, have been redirected to Dr. Pezeshkian.

Who are the two candidates in the runoff?

Experts said Dr. Pezeshkian would most likely increase voter turnout among reformist party supporters and people who boycotted the parliamentary elections in March and the presidential election in 2021. Dr. Pezeshkian has said he would engage with the West in nuclear negotiations to lift the tough economic sanctions that are plaguing Iran’s economy.

On the other hand, Mr. Jalili has a much tougher position on negotiations and has said in debates that he plans to defeat sanctions and strengthen economic ties with other countries.

Iran’s nuclear policies and major state policies are decided by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He has given the greenlight for the government to engage indirectly with the United States to lift sanctions. Those negotiations are likely to continue regardless of who is the president.

Will Iranians show up to vote?

Though Iranians have historically been extremely engaged in elections, many have refrained from voting in recent elections to protest a government they view as inept and out of touch with their demands. Many no longer believe that voting will make a difference in their lives and have called for the end of clerical rule.

Mr. Ghalibaf asked his supporters to vote for Mr. Jalili in the runoff, but many of his supporters, including some of his campaign managers, have defected to Dr. Pezeshkian’s camp, saying Mr. Jalili was destructive to Iran’s future and would increase tensions domestically and internationally.

Iranians turned out to vote in the presidential election in 2013 for the reformist candidate Hassan Rouhani, whose campaign pledges included a more open country and fewer social restrictions. President Donald J. Trump effectively ended hopes of cooperation in 2018 by withdrawing from a nuclear deal with Iran and reimposing sanctions.

When the conservative Mr. Raisi succeeded Mr. Rouhani, the prospects for improving social freedoms diminished.

Is this election free and fair?

The Guardian Council, a 12-person group of jurists and clerics, has been accused by many human rights organizations of manipulating elections by removing the public’s ability to select which candidates run. It whittled a list of 80 candidates down to six for this election, disqualifying seven women, a former president and many government officials.

Why is this election important?

The election is an opportunity for the government to show it can handle a president’s unexpected death without falling into disarray amid internal protests against the Islamic Republic and tension with the United States and Israel.

If Mr. Jalili is elected, the government will most likely claim a victory for its brand of ideologically driven politics.

While the supreme leader is the country’s ultimate authority and is responsible for foreign policy, the president sets domestic policy and can influence social issues like Iran’s mandatory hijab law for women.

Six years after the United States withdrew from its nuclear deal with Iran, the new president’s role in the management of the nuclear program is unclear. The issue that has become increasingly pressing for the West as tensions escalate between Israel and Iran.

What are the main issues?

The spluttering economy, sanctions led by the United States and women’s rights are major issues in this election, as many Iranians have lost trust in a government they believe is incapable of enacting change.

Sanctions have debilitated the country’s already struggling economy. Public frustration has increased as some perceive a disconnect between leaders preaching austerity and modesty while their families spend lavishly abroad.

When will the runoff results be known?

The Interior Ministry announced a runoff election the day after voting ended in the first round. Officials will most likely release at least preliminary results by Saturday.

Over the course of a few short days, Hurricane Beryl rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane, setting records for the earliest point in a season that a storm has grown so big.

This quick escalation was a direct result of the above-average sea surface temperatures as well as a harbinger of what is to come this hurricane season.

“This early-season storm activity is breaking records that were set in 1933 and 2005, two of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record,” said Philip Klotzbach, an expert in seasonal hurricane forecasts at Colorado State University.

Last fall, a study in the journal Scientific Reports found that Atlantic hurricanes from 2001 to 2020 were twice as likely to grow from a weaker storm into a hurricane of Category 3 or higher within 24 hours than they were from 1971 to 1990. The study added to a growing body of evidence that rapidly developing major hurricanes were becoming more likely.

Andra Garner, an assistant professor of environmental science at Rowan University in New Jersey and the author of the paper, called the findings an “urgent warning.”

A hurricane that intensifies faster can be more dangerous, as it allows less time for people in areas projected to be affected to prepare and evacuate. Late last October, Hurricane Otis moved up by multiple categories in just one day before slamming into Acapulco, Mexico, as a Category 5 hurricane that killed at least 52 people.

In Beryl’s case, it became a tropical storm late Friday night, meaning it had sustained wind speeds of more than 39 miles per hour. On Saturday afternoon, it became the season’s first hurricane, a Category 1, with wind speeds of 75 m.p.h. On Sunday morning, it became the earliest Category 4 hurricane on record, with wind speeds of more than 130 m.p.h.

And on Monday night, after it had devastated Carriacou, a small island north of Grenada, Beryl became a Category 5 hurricane, with wind speeds of more than 160 m.p.h.

It is no surprise to meteorologists that Beryl was able to strengthen so quickly and behave more like a peak-season storm. Hurricanes suck up warm ocean water and use it as fuel. In an optimal weather environment like this past weekend’s, the ample heat energy rapidly increases the storm’s intensity.

Abundantly warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean have been a concern since last season’s overly active year. On Friday, Beryl formed around ocean temperatures that were warmer than they were this time last year, and are more akin to what they typically would be during the peak of hurricane season, in September. Normally, early-season activity is limited in this portion of the Atlantic because those ocean temperatures are relatively cool.

But now they are hot. That helped Beryl strengthen into the earliest Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic, according to Dr. Klotzbach. Previously, Hurricane Emily held the record for the earliest Category 5 hurricane, reaching that strength on July 16, 2005.

Because of the ocean’s heat, Beryl formed farther east in the Atlantic than any storm has in the month of June, breaking a record set by an unnamed storm formed east of the Caribbean on June 24, 1933.

The warm ocean temperature is one of the main reasons experts have been predicting an extremely active hurricane season this year. It is also why forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who predict there will be 8 to 13 hurricanes this season, believe about half of those will reach major hurricane status, as Beryl did this weekend.

Usually, early-season activity doesn’t have much bearing on the rest of the season’s activity. But, in June, when that activity occurs as far east as Beryl did, Dr. Klotzbach says, “it tends to be a harbinger of a very busy season.”

The immediate trigger for the raging protest that gripped Kenya’s capital on Tuesday was a raft of proposed tax increases — additional shillings that ordinary citizens would owe their government. The underlying cause, though, are the billions of dollars their government owes its creditors.

Kenya has the fastest growing economy in Africa and a vibrant business center. But its government is desperate to stave off default. The country’s staggering $80 billion in domestic and foreign public debt accounts for nearly three-quarters of Kenya’s entire economic output, according to a recent report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Interest payments alone are eating up 27 percent of the revenue collected.

The Kenyan president, William Ruto, had promoted the tax bill as necessary to avoid defaulting on the country’s debt, but the violent reaction to Parliament’s approval prompted Mr. Ruto to abruptly reverse course on Wednesday and reject the legislation he had asked for. “Listening keenly to the people of Kenya,” he said, “I will not sign the 2024 finance bill, and it shall subsequently be withdrawn.” He proposed a 14-day period of discussions to chart a new economic course.

Mr. Ruto’s turnaround may have temporarily quieted protests, but it leaves the country’s finances more precarious than before. Just two weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund and Kenyan authorities had reached an agreement on a package of comprehensive reforms and tax increases needed to get the country on a more stable financial footing.

The policy review, required when the I.M.F. lends money to distressed nations, warned of a “significant shortfall in tax collection” and a deteriorating fiscal outlook. I.M.F. lending to the troubled East African nation now totals $3.6 billion.

The type of debts that are causing misery in Kenya can be found across Africa. More than half the people on the continent live in countries that spend more on interest payments than they do on health or education.

“The kids in this generation that won’t have education today are going to be scarred for life,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank. He noted that there had been increasing evidence that “countries who go through a crisis don’t recover — maybe ever — to where they would have been.”

The global debt crisis is the relatively bland label used to describe the brutal loops of unsustainable borrowing and bailouts that have long ensnared developing nations.

In Kenya’s case, its government took out vast loans after a period of economic expansion in the early 2000s to cover the costs of infrastructure projects, including roads, railways, massive dams and rural electrification. This latest global debt crisis cycle, however, which is considered to be the worst on record, was precipitated by events far beyond any single country’s control.

The deadly coronavirus pandemic shuttered already fragile economies. The sudden need to provide vaccines, medical care, protective clothing to hospital workers and subsidies to people unable to afford food or cooking oil further depleted government bank accounts.

A war between Russia and Ukraine along with sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies caused global food and energy prices to soar. The wealthiest countries then corralled spiraling inflation by raising interest rates, causing debt payments to balloon.

On top of those woes, recent floods in Kenya destroyed infrastructure and agricultural land and displaced thousands of people.

M. Ayhan Kose, deputy chief economist at the World Bank, said this month that “40 percent of developing countries, in one way or another, are vulnerable to a debt crisis.”

Finding a solution to the current debt trap that poor and middle-income nations find themselves in is harder than ever.

Thousands of creditors have replaced the handful of big banks in places like New York and London that used to handle most countries’ foreign debt. One of the most consequential new players is China, which has been lending billions of dollars to governments in Africa and around the world.

Starting over a decade ago, China elbowed its way into the ranks of major lenders to emerging nations and the size of its total loan portfolio now rivals the I.M.F. and the World Bank.

Altogether, Nairobi owes $35 billion to foreign lenders. The World Bank is the country’s largest creditor.

At the end of 2022, Kenya owed at least $6.7 billion to China, according to the I.M.F. It owed another $7.1 billion to bondholders, $3.8 billion to industrialized countries, $3.5 billion to the African Development Bank and $1.9 billion to international commercial banks.

To avoid default, countries like Kenya are compelled to borrow even more money, only to find that their total debt burden grows even heavier. And the bigger the debt, the less inclined lenders are to offer additional financing.

China has cut back its lending in the past several years, after concluding that it was taking too many risks by lending to low-income countries. It has collected on previous loans and has issued fewer new loans.

It is not the only player to pull back from Kenya. Japan and France as well as big commercial banks in Italy, Germany and Britain have also trimmed their exposure.

This month, Pope Francis convened a meeting at the Vatican and called for debt forgiveness and a rethinking of the world’s financial architecture to manage the growing crisis.

Unmanageable debt, he said, robs “millions of people of the possibility of a decent future.”

It took Zambia four years to work out a deal with its creditors after it first defaulted. Ghana, after defaulting on billions of dollars of debt last year, reached an agreement only this week with private creditors to restructure $13 billion worth of loans. And Ethiopia is struggling to work out an agreement.

The World Bank, the I.M.F. and the African Development Bank have all offered lifelines and increased their lending to Kenya to fill the gap when no one else would. But they, in turn, want the government to take steps, like raising taxes and cutting spending, to stabilize the country’s finances. In a nod to the toll such belt tightening would require, the recent agreement with the I.M.F. noted that the country also needed to strengthen its social safety net.

“How do you fill that tax revenue void?” said David Shinn, a former U.S. foreign service officer in Africa and a lecturer at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. “When you borrow money at an even higher rate than what you’re paying off, you’re digging an even deeper hole.”

In May, Mr. Ruto said he was confident that Kenyans would eventually come around to supporting his actions. “I have been very candid that I cannot continue to borrow money to pay salaries,” he said in an interview. “And I have explained to the people of Kenya that we have a choice either to borrow money or to collect our own taxes.”

As this week’s protest illustrated, that choice does not seem to be one that the public is so far willing to accept.

Declan Walsh in Nairobi and Ruth Maclean in Dakar, Senegal, contributed reporting.

From the day that Keir Starmer became the head of the Labour Party in 2020, he made repairing ties with British Jews a priority, calling antisemitism a “stain” on the party.

On Thursday, many British Jews who had turned away from Labour in the 2019 general election gave the party another chance. Labour won back several North London constituencies with significant Jewish populations.

Nearly half of Jewish voters planned to support the Labour Party in Thursday’s election, according to a poll of 2,717 Jewish adults who responded to the Jewish Current Affairs Survey taken in June, before the election.

Britain’s 287,000 Jews make up less than 0.5 percent of the country’s population, and some of them had been politically homeless under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s former leader, who was accused of having let antisemitism flourish within the party. Jewish support for the party under Mr. Corbyn reached a low of 11 percent in the 2019 general election, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which focuses on Jewish life in Europe.

“It’s very clear that Jews have flocked back to what I think to many people has long been their natural political home,” said Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which is based in London.

Sarah Sackman, the Labour candidate for the North London constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, where nearly one in five voters are Jewish, the largest proportion in Britain, was elected on Thursday. Labour candidates in the North London constituencies of Hendon, where 14 percent of voters are Jewish, and Chipping Barnet, where nearly 7 percent of voters are Jewish, also won.

Josh Simons, a Jewish Labour politician who on Thursday was elected to Parliament to represent the constituency of Makerfield, west of Manchester, said Labour’s victories in North London showed that Jewish voters were open to trusting the party again.

“The turnaround in the relationship between the Labour Party and the Jewish community in Britain is fairly extraordinary,” Mr. Simons said, citing Mr. Starmer’s willingness to force out Labour politicians who made antisemitic comments. “The Jewish community saw the choices he made, and that, bit by bit, started to rebuild trust.”

Mr. Starmer, who describes himself as an atheist, is married to Victoria Starmer, who comes from a Jewish family. Mr. Starmer has said that his family occasionally goes to a liberal Jewish synagogue, and he said in an interview with Virgin Radio U.K. that he stops working on Friday nights at 6 p.m. After Conservative politicians criticized him for this, saying he wanted to be a part-time prime minister, Mr. Starmer stood by his comments.

“I would have thought to anybody it’s blindingly obvious that a Friday night is quite important in some religions and faiths,” he said at a campaign event in Derbyshire, England.

In 2020, Mr. Starmer ousted Mr. Corbyn from the party following the release of a report by a British human rights watchdog that found Labour bore responsibility for “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” against Jewish members on Mr. Corbyn’s watch. Complaints about Mr. Corbyn included his defending a mural that featured grotesque caricatures of hooknosed Jewish bankers.

After initially suggesting that the party’s problems with antisemitism were overblown, Mr. Corbyn later issued a statement saying that “the vast majority of Labour Party members were and remain committed anti-racists deeply opposed to antisemitism.”

Labour’s surge in support among Jewish voters came as the party appeared to lose support among British Muslims, some of whom criticized Mr. Starmer for taking too long to pledge his commitment to recognizing an independent Palestinian state. At least four constituencies that had been Labour strongholds were on Thursday won by candidates who offered an alternative to Labour’s Gaza policy.

Shockat Adam Patel, an independent candidate in a constituency in Leicester, England, beat Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, who had been expected to hold a cabinet role in Mr. Starmer’s new government. “This is for Gaza,” he said. Mr. Corbyn, who ran as an independent candidate in Islington, won a seat in Parliament from the Labour Party on a platform that focused on Gaza.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary met with President Vladimir V. Putin at the Kremlin on Friday, a rare trip to Russia by a Western leader and one that quickly stirred consternation in the European Union.

Mr. Orban made the trip three days after visiting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. And it was the same week that Hungary took over the European Union’s rotating presidency, prompting other European leaders to quickly declare that Mr. Orban was not representing them in Moscow.

A spokesman for Mr. Orban, Zoltan Kovacs, said the Hungarian leader was in Moscow “as part of his peace mission.” Mr. Orban has made vague calls for a cease-fire and direct negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, a stance that leaders in both countries have rejected. He has publicly put forward no concrete plan for a settlement.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Orban met for more than two hours, but there were no signs that the talks had done anything to influence Mr. Putin. The Hungarian leader appeared to acknowledge as much, telling reporters afterward that the positions of Kyiv and Moscow “are very far apart.”

Mr. Putin standing next to Mr. Orban after their meeting, signaled he was not budging from the sweeping demands he made of Ukraine last month.

At the time, Mr. Putin said in a speech to Russian diplomats that he would be ready for a cease-fire only if Ukraine withdrew troops from the four regions that Moscow has claimed as its own and dropped its aspirations to join NATO.

“Our peace initiative was outlined quite recently,” Mr. Putin said on Friday. “The conditions for this, as I have already said, were set out in my speech at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Mr. Orban, long an object of European chagrin for his embrace of far-right politics and of authoritarians like Mr. Putin, has said he wants to promote peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian leaders have rejected talks with Russia because they say that Mr. Putin would only seek their country’s capitulation.

It was the first time that a European Union leader had visited Russia for an official meeting with Mr. Putin since the first months of the Ukraine invasion. The Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, made the trip in April 2022.

It was Mr. Orban’s second meeting with Mr. Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He last met the Russian leader in October in Beijing, telling him that Hungary “never wanted to confront Russia” and “has always been eager to expand contacts.”

His visit appeared to have been a last minute affair. It was not announced in advance, and Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told Russian state television that Hungary had proposed Mr. Orban’s visit just two days before he came.

Mr. Orban, who has won four elections in a row by casting his domestic rivals as traitors and warmongers beholden to Brussels, delights in defying his nominal allies in the European Union and NATO, which will be holding a summit meeting in Washington next week.

He presents himself as a maverick in the mold of former President Donald J. Trump, a go-it-alone defender of national interests heedless of establishment opinion. After his meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban defended his trip as a much-needed start of a dialogue.

“There are many steps that need to be taken to get closer to ending the war,” Mr. Orban said, according to a Russian translation of his remarks. “However, we took the most important step — we established contact.”

His trip to Moscow in defiance of the European Union’s policy of shunning Mr. Putin fits into a long pattern of Hungarian disdain for Europe’s fitful efforts to forge a joint foreign policy.

In recent months, Mr. Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, has repeatedly reached out to autocratic nations kept at arm’s length by Brussels. He has traveled to Belarus, which has been slapped with punishing European sanctions, and Iran, which also has frosty relations with Europe and is also under sanctions.

Other than vague public remarks calling for a “time-bounded cease-fire” during his visit on Tuesday to Kyiv, Mr. Orban has shed no light on how he envisages possible peace in Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia are not known to have held direct peace negotiations since spring 2022, when weeks of intense talks broke down as both sides dug in on the battlefield. But they have occasionally engaged on specific matters like prisoner exchanges; each side released 75 prisoners of war on May 31 after several months without such exchanges.

Overall, the fight remains a war of attrition. While Russia regained some of the initiative on the battlefield in recent months, it has taken enormous casualties, and neither side appears to have the capacity to achieve a decisive breakthrough.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement Friday to reiterate that Mr. Orban made his trip to Moscow “without approval or coordination with Ukraine.”

Russia was not invited to a recent summit in Switzerland aimed at bolstering support for Ukraine’s negotiation positions but Mr. Zelensky has raised the possibility that the Kremlin could be invited to the next international gathering organized by Kyiv.

Mr. Orban’s trip was doubly provocative because Hungary this week took over the European Union’s rotating presidency, a largely clerical role with little real power but one that puts the country holding the six-month position in the spotlight.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said that he had not known about Mr. Orban’s trip in advance and, and he was one of many to insist that the Hungarian leader was not representing the European Union.

“Appeasement will not stop Putin,” Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, wrote on X. “Only unity and determination will pave the path to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland addressed a social media post directly to Mr. Orban. “The rumours about your visit to Moscow cannot be true,” Mr. Tusk wrote, “or can they?”

Poland’s previous governing party, Law and Justice, a nationalist force that for years stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Orban in his battles with Brussels over immigration and other issues, has also been dismayed by Hungary’s outreach to the Kremlin.

In an interview on Thursday, Poland’s former conservative prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, voiced alarm at Mr. Orban’s friendly policy toward Russia and what he described as Hungary’s “peace mantra.”

This, he said had made Law and Justice reluctant to join a new Hungarian-led alliance in the European Parliament called Patriots for Europe, despite shared views on many other issues.

“Ukraine is a Rubicon, a kind of red line for us,” Mr. Morawiecki said. “Russia must not win this war.”

Almost all Western leaders have shunned meetings with Mr. Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine, seeking instead to isolate Mr. Putin on the world stage.

Outside the West, however, leaders have not been shy about sitting down with their Russian counterpart: Xi Jinping, China’s leader, met with Mr. Putin this week in Kazakhstan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is scheduled to visit Moscow next week.

Christopher F. Schuetze and Marc Santora contributed reporting.