Eduardo González
Austro-Hungarian aristocrat and diplomat Georg Habsburg-Lothringen has been appointed Hungary’s ambassador to Spain by the Hungarian Parliament, pending confirmation by the President of the Republic, Tamás Sulyok, and the granting of aprécis by the Spanish government.
The news was first reported by the newspaper El Debate and confirmed to The Diplomat on Wednesday by the Hungarian Embassy in Madrid. Habsburg-Lorraine, Hungary’s current ambassador to France, received majority support from Parliament on Tuesday, including the opposition, according to the aforementioned sources. He will replace the current ambassador, Katalin Tóth.
Born in 1964 in Starnberg, in the German region of Upper Bavaria, George of Habsburg-Lorraine is the youngest son of Otto of Habsburg-Lorraine, former pretender to the Austrian throne and brother of the current pretender, Charles of Habsburg-Lorraine. His godfather is Pope Paul VI.
Despite being born in Germany, the new ambassador is an Austrian citizen by birth and has lived in Hungary since 1992, where he obtained Hungarian citizenship without losing his Austrian citizenship. Habsburg-Lorraine speaks German, Hungarian, French, Spanish, English, and Italian. He studied law, history, and political science in Austria, Germany, and Spain, and has worked in television and communications companies. His three children also studied at university in Spain, and the ambassador himself spent a good part of his summers in Spain, specifically at the family home in Benidorm.
In Austria, he is known as Georg Habsburg-Lothringen (he has renounced the use of the “Von”) and in Hungary as György Habsburg. He is frequently referred to as the “Archduke” in both the media and in public life, even though the use of the Habsburg titles is not recognized in either country.
Since 1996, he participated in Hungary’s negotiations with the EU as Ambassador Extraordinary to the European Parliament. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, he ran on the list of the conservative Magyar Demokrata Forum (MDF) party, but failed to win a seat.
He later served as President of the Hungarian Red Cross from 2004 to 2012 and, since 2020, has served as Hungary’s Ambassador to France, which allowed him to overlap with the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, during his time as Spanish Ambassador in Paris.
