Eurasia Press & News
Hungary’s government is hopeful its presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2024 will be an opportunity to end its isolation within the EU, and has for the first time established a Ministry of EU Affairs to help manage the process.
The countdown has begun. In less than a year, Hungary will find itself at the EU’s steering wheel when it assumes the bloc’s rotating presidency from July 2024, right after the next European elections. Yet questions swirl over whether Viktor Orban’s government, which has been in the EU’s crosshairs for years over the deterioration in its fundamental values, can be considered an honest broker. For the first time, a country that is the subject of an Article 7 procedure and has had a large part of its EU funds frozen due to rule-of-law deficiencies will chair the bloc’s ministerial meetings and set the agenda.
The Hungarian government is pretending it’s business as usual: preparations for its six-month presidency of the Council of the EU are already underway, while coordination with the latest three consecutive presidencies that constitute the current trio – Spain, Belgium and Hungary – is progressing. The priorities are being set around buzzwords like enlargement, competitiveness, demography and tackling migration, while a more detailed program will be announced in September.
Some see the EU presidency as an opportunity to end Hungary’s isolation within the EU over its conflict with European institutions and its pro-Kremlin stance over the war in Ukraine.
“It is best timed to bring Orban out of the cold,” a government insider tells BIRN. “He will be around at a crucial time when the new [European] Commission is being formed, and he will try to get involved in important personal discussions.”
But others don’t share this optimism. “You can’t compare the 2024 presidency with the [Hungary’s previous] one held in 2011,” says Eniko Gyori, a long-serving Fidesz MEP.
Gyori served as a secretary of state and was one of the “faces” of Hungary’s 2011 presidency, held just a year after Orban had won his first landslide electoral victory in 2010. Hungary’s presidency was also at that time embroiled in controversy due to the passing of Fidesz’s 2011 media law, which is now seen as the government’s first step in restricting press freedom, though far less than what is occurring now.
Given today’s contentious atmosphere, Gyori tries to play down expectations. “Actually the 2024 presidency will be only four and half months long, so it will mean much less legislative work,” Gyori says, referring to the aftermath of the 2024 European elections, the formation of the new European Parliament and the election of the new European Commission. “But we would still need to secure the transition and manage important institutional changes.”
Gyori believes that despite all the criticism, Hungary will still be able to act as an “honest broker” during this crucial time. Yet Hungary’s legion of critics in Brussels, especially in the European Parliament, are less sanguine over the thought of Orban’s government holding the presidency, especially given the fact Hungary will be succeeded at the helm of the EU by Poland, the other EU “rebel”, also facing an Article 7 procedure and the freezing of EU funds.
Blackballed
Unsurprisingly, resistance to Hungary’s EU presidency is building in Brussels. French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, who is the European Parliament’s standing rapporteur on Hungary, said: “It is time for the Council to question whether a member state under Article 7 procedure can credibly hold the presidency of the EU.”
In a non-binding resolution tabled by five parties – the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, Renew, Greens and The Left – MEPs called on the Council of the EU to find a proper solution or “parliament could take appropriate measures if such a solution is not found.”
The idea of stripping Hungary of its presidency has become a hot topic of conversation within the European think-tank community, but has received little backing among Europe’s ruling elites.
“The European Parliament has absolutely no right to questions our presidency,” Fidesz MEP Gyori says indignantly. “Prime ministers from several countries have already rejected this idea. The preparations are underway, the trio’s program has been accepted. But there is such ‘Hungarophobia’ that no matter how much we succeed, we will be criticised.”
Gyori, who was first elected an MEP in 2005 and has a long track record in international circles as well as serving as a state secretary and ambassador in Madrid and Rome, believes the root of the problems between Hungary and European institutions do not lie primarily in the acts of the Orban government, but rather in developments in Brussels and Strasbourg. The main culprit, she argues, is the European Parliament, which has become an excessively ideological body.
“Believe me, I have some experience in the European Parliament, and all I can say it has become a loose cannon in the last few years. It is no longer interested in formerly gentlemen agreements and a healthy relationship with the Council of the EU, but rather pursues its own ideological agenda,” she complains.
Since Fidesz left the European People’s Party, or EPP, in 2021, Gyori, like other party members, now sit with the independents, which she calls a “relief” after long years of tensions within the main centre-right grouping in the European Parliament.
Ministry of amelioration
Perhaps in a move to deescalate tensions, Orban has for the first time set up a Ministry of EU Affairs to help manage the EU presidency. The ministry will be led by his soft-spoken, non-ideological EU expert Janos Boka, whose appointment is seen by many as a masterstroke.
Insiders say that Boka – who began his career as an assistant to liberal MEP Istvan Szent-Ivanyi – is a highly trained legal expert and a calm but tough negotiator. He is also seen as a “fresh” face in government circles.
“The government is selling him as an ‘honest broker’ to chair most of the meetings in Brussels,” Istvan Ujhelyi, an outgoing socialist MEP, tells BIRN. “Boka is not politically tainted.”
In remarks before he took up his post on August 1, Boka told a Mathias Corvinus Collegium gathering in Esztergom on July 29 that the government has no interest in maintaining a conflict with the EU, since only EU institutions benefit from it. He compared EU institutions to “a crisis factory”, as they always emerged from crises strengthened, at the expense of the independence and powers of member states.
However, while his appointment might earn some trust for Hungary within EU circles, given his new career is likely to be limited only to the presidency it will do little to ease the isolation of the Fidesz group of MEPs in Brussels.
“Most Fidesz MEPs walk around with downcast eyes,” Ujhelyi says, admitting that even though he represents an opposition party, he often catches glances of contempt, too, as a Hungarian. “It is just not a good feeling that every second plenary in the parliament deals with Hungary.”
He dismisses the Hungarian government’s hopes that change is just around the corner, and a new rightist-sovereigntist bloc of MEPs will be created after the 2024 European elections.
“There will be a struggle inside the European People’s Party; EPP President Manfred Weber would like to open up towards the right, but the moderates oppose it. There will be a lot of protest votes. Greens will lose a bit, Renew will stay stable, but overall I do not anticipate any major shifts. I simply do not believe Orban’s camp will be strengthened: for most people in the EU, he is simply a no-go after so busily serving [Vladimir] Putin and visibly undermining EU unity,” Ujhelyi says.
Signs are that he is right. One of the recent far-right stars, Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s Vox party who was openly endorsed by the Hungarian prime minister, suffered a humiliating defeat in Spain’s general election in July, blowing up plans for a potential conservative-rightwing coalition, a constellation that Orban longs to see in the European Parliament. Next in line will be Slovakia, where former pal Robert Fico could actually return to power. But key to Orban’s plan is Poland in the autumn. A defeat in the October election for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party would be disastrous for Fidesz, though few think even this scenario would prompt Orban to embark on a radical new course.
“The problem is, there is no way back for Orban and Fidesz,” Ujhelyi says.
Gyori also admits that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, everything has become much more difficult for the Hungarian government and Orban in particular. “Hungary’s approach to the war and debates about fundamental values in the EU define all topics,” she says.
Gyori also regrets that policy issues about competition or innovation have become over-politised and there is a lack of willingness to understand each other’s position. “Yes, I agree that it takes two compromise and you can also argue about styles of communication, but the main problem is that a consensus-oriented approach is simply missing,” she says.
Balkan dreams
There is one issue where all Hungarians, across party lines, can agree: the importance of the Western Balkans and EU enlargement. Regrettably, this is currently a lost cause.
As both Gyori and Ujhelyi admit, there has been no real progress for years, although the EU hastily granted candidate status to three countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine, and Moldova – in 2022, clearly as a reaction to Russian meddling, expansionism and imperialism.
“I absolutely agree with the government’s pro-enlargement policy,” the opposition MEP Ujhelyi says. “This is the right politics.”
But he suspects that the root cause of Orban’s enthusiasm for EU enlargement lies less in spreading common European values and interests, than building up a client base in neighbouring countries.
While Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik both admire Orban for having secured virtually untrammelled power in his country, which neither have so far achieved, Ujhelyi warns that the EU won’t accept either of those two countries for as long as these two autocrats are in power. “The EU will never admit countries with Putin’s agents into the EU,” he says, especially not since the war in Ukraine.
Evidently, Ukraine’s EU aspirations and support amongst parts of the bloc to offer the country fast-track membership has complicated efforts by the Western Balkan countries to join, which is particularly galling for countries that have been kept in a limbo for more than a decade (North Macedonia since 2005, Montenegro since 2010). Indeed, Gyori has not seen any greater political will in Western Europe to admit more countries from the Balkans over the last decade. And the Schengen Zone accession of Romania and Bulgaria, with both technically ready since 2011, has not progressed either.
“Those who voice concerns about a speedy Ukrainian accession are automatically labelled as Putinists,” Gyori says. “A North Macedonian politician just recently told me, half-jokingly, that perhaps he should ask Putin to invade his country to speed up the process.”
The Hungarian government is well aware that any significant progress on EU enlargement is unlikely to happen during its EU presidency, but there is speculation it will try to rally member states around a loose timetable for the next round of enlargement, sometime after 2030. And that, some argue, would represent a kind of victory for a presidency dogged by so much controversy.
