The plan to lift the Hungarian-Polish veto is ready

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I’ll buy it

The Polish radio news site RMF, quoting an EU diplomat, presented in detail on Wednesday morning how to resolve the deadlock at the EU summit from Thursday to Friday caused by the European demand for the introduction of the mechanism of the rule of law and the Hungarian-Polish veto.

The plan is in line with the proposals that we have already written about and mentioned by Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroszlaw Gowin last week.

The plan was likely approved by those planning to veto Tuesday night at Orbánek in Warsaw, and the offer was drawn up by the German government and the president of the European Council.

Planned deal highlights

The rule of law mechanism package remains the same and Member States are expected to adopt it by qualified majority.

However, the application of the mechanism is frozen. The Polish and Hungarian governments can challenge the law in an EU court and it will not be used until there is a verdict. Certainly, Viktor Orbán will not have to face the withdrawal of money from the EU before the verdict, which is expected in mid-2022 at the earliest, that is, before the next Hungarian parliamentary elections. Based on your information earlier, and now, according to the Polish RMF, this was a major demand from the Hungarian Prime Minister.

Member state leaders will approve a detailed manual on the implementation of the mechanism at the weekend’s summit. It provides a guarantee that a sanction will only be imposed if they see a problem that is closely related to the protection of the EU budget. This has been the case in principle until now, but according to the Hungarian and Polish governments, the clause was not specific enough in the draft law on the mechanism.

There would also be concrete examples in my manual of issues that should not be covered by the rule of law mechanism. In general, it should not address issues that the EU has left to the Member States, or that the mechanism should not apply at all to issues of family law and migration.

The governments of Hungary and Poland have also complained that the mechanism is a tool that other member states can use to blackmail them in gender or immigration disputes. While this has not been the result of the mechanism so far, the twist on the issue and the length of the promise have given the two governments the opportunity to sell it as a victory if they withdraw from the veto. Now they can write a series of promises with others that probably would have been kept anyway.

Among the security guarantees, the Polish newspaper mentions that if a member state wants to be sanctioned by others under the mechanism, it may request a political debate on the issue at the next EU summit before the sanction is activated. However, this possibility has been included in the law so far, that is, it can be sold as a new discount at the highest level of communication.

It will be?

It is not entirely clear that the Hungarians and the Poles are communicating whether these conditions were accepted at the meeting of the heads of the two governments in Warsaw last night, but there are indications of this.

Orbán may have indicated that he accepts the agreement when he spoke on Tuesday night that the positions between the two parties are closer than before and there are possibilities of an agreement. And when he said “a situation where financial penalties could be imposed, for example for non-compliance with a European approach to gender or migration issues, would not be desirable “, touched on issues on which other countries are expected to obtain asylum in the mechanism manual, according to a Brussels diplomat who told the RMF.

At the same time, neither Orban nor Morawiecki recovered much of the militant rhetoric, and even after the Tuesday night discussion, news agencies noted that the two governments were in trouble and did not want to let go. Morawiecki said Tuesday afternoon, before meeting Orban, that the debate could drag on for months and that another summit might be necessary after this week to reach an agreement.

Is money still talking?

However, it seems more likely that the Orbans received an offer that they would be willing to say yes to. There was a lot to look forward to, according to Polish correspondence, that in Warsaw they feared that the other 25 Member States would set up a 750 billion euro bailout fund without vetoes, and then the Polish government would lose a lot of money. However, last Wednesday, several EU leaders made it clear that this path would be chosen in the event of a veto.

Although Orbán has said several times in the last two weeks, most recently on Tuesday night, that the debate is not about money and that sovereignty is more important than money, and that Hungary would lose nothing if it were left out of the pack. rescue. Furthermore, some of his statements are not true from the Hungarian point of view either.

It would be very painful for the Poles to give up the package because they would receive great support, especially for the conversion of energy production to coal, and this would be a non-refundable subsidy. On the Hungarian side, it is not true that the country would lose nothing, because it would have to repay at least one billion guilders less than it would have to repay in the 1930s, and the interest on the repaid portion would be as low as the state. Hungarian.

Northern claims can still be shaken

However, there are still open questions, according to a Brussels diplomat who spoke to the RMF. For example, the planned manual should include not only what the sanction under the rule of law mechanism should not cover, but also what it should be. In this case, the definition of corruption can be a key issue, that is, to what extent this sensitive issue can be addressed in general, or how much the problem would be reduced to the action of the public law enforcement agencies that manage specifically the distribution of EU funds. Orbán would push the text towards the latter, while net contributors to the mechanism would be penalized in case of a general perception of corruption risks.

Serious discussions on the mechanism manual are expected Thursday night in Brussels, where the Dutch, Danish, Finnish and Swedish prime ministers could be the main discussion partners of the Hungarian and Polish prime ministers, despite recent efforts by Orbán to turn the issue into a German-Hungarian conflict.

So far all we can see is what the direction of the deal could be and how to create a situation where each side can call themselves a winner after the summit. The elaboration of the details is expected to remain for the duration of the summit.

In any case, the most important element of the commitment may be that the rule of law mechanism is introduced without being in force for at least two years.

COOL: At the time of publishing this article, the Bloomberg news agency reported that sources close to the Polish and Hungarian governments had also confirmed that the two governments were ready to reach an agreement and that the terms had already been agreed with Germany.