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It wasn’t a good week Towards Viktor Orbán In Brussels. Furthermore, the Hungarian Prime Minister did not really have a particularly good year in the European Union. The battle between the Hungarian government and the EU did not start now, as early as 2011, after the adoption of the media law, relations began to deteriorate, but for almost a decade, Fidesz was able to play with the European Union as it wanted.
There were several reasons for this. The “war of independence” against Brussels benefited the Hungarian government in its internal political struggles, as the EU was a particularly good image of the enemy. Especially since the union was created to achieve compromise results through multilateral cooperation, so it did not understand the political culture that Fidesz had in Hungary and Europe. That is why the EU has never failed.
The Hungarian government was likely comfortable with this continued success, which was mainly due to the European Union making moderately powerless appeals to the increasingly authoritarian pull of the Hungarian government, and Viktor Orbán reaped the laurels by having no coercive means to do so. change within Member States. In some areas, such a tool existed, in economic discipline it was during the Hungarian presidency that the organization managed to deceive the six-pack with which the organization could regulate member states that did not manage with sufficient responsibility, but only worked in economic issues.
It wasn’t the real fall now
The real downfall of Viktor Orbán was, in fact, the previous elections to the European Parliament. The Hungarian Prime Minister is fully confident that, as in Hungary, Britain and the United States, there will be a populist right turn in the EU and he will be able to continue politicizing in a much friendlier environment than before. The opposite has happened. It is now clear that Brexit and Donald trump after their victory, the populist forces were almost marginalized in the EU, and as they continued to tolerate Fidesz, the centrist left and right, as well as the liberals, grew stronger.
Meanwhile, however, a conflict has intensified over whether the EU should be a value-neutral economic community or an organization based on common values and therefore expect certain kinds of standards of behavior from member states. Incidentally, this is a particularly difficult subject, if only because the Hungarian government is correct in many respects in calling the rule of law subjective as the moral compass of the union. Indeed, given that there are many different rule of law in Europe, perhaps it would have been more fortunate in this fight to invoke fundamental values that are also identified as the rule of law in the founding documents of the EU, such as freedom, democracy and the like. .
Parallel to the conflict over the rule of law, European Union organizations and member states have finally begun to understand the ways in which Fidesz is politicizing Europe. By the way, the Hungarian ruling party is not unrecognizable at all, as a political scientist. Gergely Christmas He spoke of the need for about two cycles for the parties to adapt to a new electoral structure. It also took him that long to understand in Brussels how Viktor Orbán is using the weakness of the organization against the union.
They fell asleep
However, this was understood at a time when the Hungarian Prime Minister was playing with the highest stakes. There have long been rumors about how much the previously particularly strong state of Hungarian diplomacy in Brussels has deteriorated, but now we can really see what several key people mean, for example. József Szájer Y Oliver Várhelyi lost. The Hungarian government did not dramatically understand that the rule of law mechanism was the first attempt to regulate authoritarian member states, which is actually taken seriously by others. This was probably either not believed in or taken seriously enough by Fidesz, so more serious attempts were made to stop it only when it was too late.
And since the mechanism was not only ready, but also seemed capable of causing serious problems for Hungarian economic growth based on EU money, the response was also particularly harsh: Viktor Orbán directly threatens to veto the most important agreement of the European Union, the budgetary framework adopted every seven years.
At first, it was doubtful that this high-stakes game of poker actually ended in a veto in the end, as there were several versions that would have allowed the Prime Minister to step back on the veto while also facing a battle in domestic politics.
The rule of law mechanism can also be adopted in the council without the Hungarians voting. In fact, this game did not have an outcome that would have been good for the Hungarian government. Even the best version would only have mitigated the effects of the rule of law mechanism, but the mechanism itself could no longer have been overridden.
Big bets
Meanwhile, the prime minister has played a lot of political capital in Europe. In part it was due to the threat of a veto, and in part it was due to coincidence: No one really expected the world press to flee from Viktor Orbán’s most important man in Brussels with a backpack full of drugs during a coronavirus lockdown.
József Szájer attended the famous party on Friday, and the Hungarian government’s most important ally did not take a week to change his mind. The Polish deputy prime minister announced late Thursday that he would lift his veto if the EU made a legally binding statement that the rule of law mechanism could only be used objectively and to protect the EU budget.
This is interesting in several ways. For one thing, we still don’t know if the Poles will actually withdraw from the veto. The deputy prime minister belongs to the most centrist line within the party, but the Polish government is more divided than the Hungarian. The other aspect is that there is no declaration that the Poles are asking for.
There is no such role
Statements are rare in the European Union, and the EU basically uses them to explain exactly what it thinks about a particular issue. But the declaration is not a legally binding document, just a political declaration. If taken, it will not force anyone to do anything, the rule of law mechanism will remain the same as before. The difference is that the EU says that this mechanism is more harmless to Hungary and Poland than it really is.
The big question is what will happen now. Although Orbán announced on Friday morning that he did not agree with the Poles and insisted on his position, Hungary alone would have a difficult time avoiding the approval of the budget and the rescue package, the support of the Poles was important in several respects. On the one hand, because Poland is a large country, the Hungarian-Polish alliance was not only an alliance of sovereign-conservative member states, but also a significant number of EU citizens. Hungary, on the other hand, is only a very small country to achieve results on such an important issue. Especially if you don’t have a really optimal result, as we described earlier.
Meanwhile, the EU has also prepared plans B. One is that the aid package will not be adopted by the entire council, but by 25 member states as an agreement between states. It would be like the European Stability Mechanism adopted after the economic crisis. However, a new solution could cause a significant waste of time, as southern states in particular need money.
Furthermore, a mutually agreed aid package would be a particularly important part of the agreement. Orbán talks about being reluctant to take out a loan with the Greeks or the Spanish, so he’s doing me a favor. But then what should those who actually repay this loan and take financial responsibility say? The essence of the current package would be to shape the Union into a closer alliance by taking joint risks, and it is strange that after convincing the Germans and tight-fisted, who have always protested against this, it could be a net beneficiary in Hungary.
Based on current news, basically everyone is confident that the fate of the budget will be decided at the EU summit next week.
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