Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban drank vodka to celebrate. Lawmakers from Poland’s biggest opposition party stood up in parliament and chanted his name. The Bosnian Serb leader, sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption, hosted a cocktail party in his presidential palace.

The return of Donald Trump as American president has been welcomed in some quarters and raised concerns in others. In Europe, the contrast is between the guarded reception to his election victory in many Western capitals versus the reaction in the east, home to some of his staunchest supporters.

Eastern Europe has embraced Trump in the way it’s embraced its own strongmen over the years and the conservative backlash against “liberal elites.” Now leaders from Budapest and Bratislava to Belgrade are relishing another era of doing business with a president they see as taking a transactional approach to relations with the region.

Front and center is Trump’s plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite the lack of detail on how he might do it. Some leaders also expect him to be less critical of their political influence on democratic institutions such as the judiciary and media, their refusal to embrace non-Christian immigrants and rowing back on minority rights.

“It’s clear that if the new American president wants peace instead of war, anti-migrant policies instead of migration, and pro-family policies instead of gender, this will leave its mark on the world,” Orban told state radio on Nov. 8 as he hosted European Union leaders in Budapest.

Orban’s ally in Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico, lauded the victory against the Democrats as part of the wider political culture war. Fico, who returned to power last year and also survived an assassination attempt, framed Trump’s win as “a defeat for liberal and progressive ideas.”

Next door, Czech billionaire and ex-premier Andrej Babis — who polls show is on track to return to power himself in elections next year — was among the first to cheer Trump, saying he was “overjoyed.” “I’m convinced that Donald Trump is the best solution for Europe and the whole world.”

Trump won praise for showing an interest in the region, dispatching more U.S. troops and supporting civil nuclear programs. His complaints that Europe didn’t meet NATO spending targets, which upset some countries at the time, led to upgrades to former Warsaw Pact militaries.

Former Bulgarian premier Boyko Borissov, who remains the country’s most popular politician as it flirts with its eighth election in four years, recalled how easy it was to discuss deals with Trump. Examples he gave were support for a new gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine and the purchase of F-16 fighter jets.

“Eastern European leaders understand better his transactional style and have more experience in practicing it,” said Iulian Fota, a former security adviser to Romania’s president and a former deputy foreign minister. “But the new mandate will be significantly different judging by his rhetoric and recent appointments. To a certain extent, it will be like starting from scratch.”

Trump’s approach to Ukraine will be a key wild card, said Fota. While Joe Biden’s administration is a huge supporter of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, some of the region’s outspoken Russia hawks were privately rebuked by his officials, one Eastern European leader said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the leader saw the Americans as irked by their repeated requests for certain weapons for Ukraine.

Trump is seen as amenable to the region because he views it as more accepting of his world view compared with Western Europe, according to a senior EU diplomat who also didn’t want to be identified when speaking about sensitive issues.

Leaders from countries such as Poland, Hungary and Serbia stayed in touch with Trump and his closest allies even when he was out of office and it seemed less likely that he would be back. Polish President Andrzej Duda, for example, is seen as Trump’s closest EU ally along with Orban. Both men visited Trump this year.

Duda is an ally of the Law and Justice Party, which ran Poland from 2015 until last year and welcomed Trump to the country in 2017. He said he will meet Trump even before the U.S. leader becomes president again.

They have already talked about priorities of the EU rotating presidency that Poland will hold for six months starting in January. A key focus of their relations will be “to strengthen our ties,” Duda said in a post on X.

Trump gave an interview to Poland’s TV Republika, a conservative broadcaster in the country, during his election campaign in an effort to win support from Poles living in the U.S.

Following his victory, phone calls to the region included Duda and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. Much of their diasporas in the U.S. favored Trump over Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump-style politics has been a hallmark for the region in recent years. Orban adopted the slogan “Make Europe Great Again” when Hungary assumed the rotating EU presidency. Similar plays on Trump’s slogan have been used by populist opposition politicians in the Czech Republic and Slovenia.

As for electorates, Eastern Europeans are more welcoming of Trump than their peers in the West, led by Bulgaria and Hungary, according to a study by the Gallup International Association, a network of pollsters. (It’s not related to Gallup Inc. in the U.S.) That’s largely due to income disparities and the perception that they aren’t treated equally by their western allies.

Those issues also have contributed to the rise of nationalist groups across the region. In Romania, which votes in parliamentary and presidential elections in the coming weeks, a far-right party whose leader is a fan of Trump is placing second in some polls.

The turn to radical parties is part of a broader process, in which Trump plays a role, according to Goran Georgiev, analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. A lack of leadership “opens the door for such ideas,” he said. “With each new vote, people become more and more cynical and parties turn toward authoritarian policies.”

Meanwhile, other leaders in the region who aren’t politically aligned with the US president-elect have gotten some Trump attention. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said he had a long, positive, matter-of-fact phone conversation with Trump and was asked questions about the situation in Ukraine.

For Serb President Vucic, it’s all about getting down to business and strengthening ties with the region.

“I hope and I do believe that there’s a lot we can do together in the future,” said Vucic, who spoke with Trump last Sunday. “I find very important the fact that Donald Trump is a businessman, business oriented. That’s important for our country, for all who do business with the U.S.”

(Aaron Eglitis, Zoltan Simon, Volodymyr Verbianyi, Milda Seputyte, Natalia Ojewska, Misha Savic, Daniel Hornak, Slav Okov, Jan Bratanic and Konrad Krasuski contributed.)

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