How Hungary undermined the European bid to help Ukraine
The European Union has approximately 450 million inhabitants and is one of the largest economies in the world.
How come Hungary, a small country with just 10 million inhabitants and a lackluster economy beset by high inflation, has this past week thwarted the European plan to give Ukraine a $52 billion financial lifeline?
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban torpedoed the aid package, strongly supported by much larger countries such as Germany, France and Poland, by abusing the veto power of each of the 27 member states over major decisions regarding foreign and security policy and spending. .
The requirement for unanimity on important issues, intended to ensure that small countries have a voice but seen by many as a serious design flaw, means that no decision will be made unless everyone participates.
Other European leaders have largely backed away from threatening to use, let alone actually exercising, the veto. But Mr Orban has embraced it as a disruptive weapon in his struggle to shape policy and engage in what Daniel Freund, a German member of the European Parliament and critic of the Hungarian leader, described as “the ongoing game of extortion and blackmail’.
On the eve of a summit meeting Thursday in Brussels on Ukraine, the European Union’s executive branch released 10 billion euros, about $11 billion, in funding for Hungary, which had been frozen due to its violation of several EU rules. Officials said the timing was coincidental, but many saw it as a payoff. Another €17.6 billion remains frozen.
After insisting in Brussels that he would not use his veto to extract money: “It’s not about a deal. We represent approaches and principles,” he said. Mr Orbán told Hungarian radio: “This is a great opportunity for Hungary to make it clear that it must get everything it deserves.”
However, there are growing concerns that Mr Orbán wants to paralyze decision-making in pursuit of a broader ambition: upending the European Union in its current form and reshaping it in Hungary’s image as a bulwark against liberal values, immigrants and what he calls the “woke movement and gender ideology.” Hungary, he says, is a “counter-model” that works.
“The fear is that he actually wants to create chaos and disorder and destroy the EU from within,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research group in London. “He used to be more transactional, but people I talk to in Brussels say he has become more unreasonable, combative, self-confident and destructive.”
At the same time, Mr Orban has also become so more isolated. The victory of centrist and liberal forces in the recent Polish general election ended the eight-year rule of Law and Justice, a conservative nationalist party closely aligned with Orbán’s hostility toward Brussels.
Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hungary has consistently worked to weaken European sanctions and, following a favorite Kremlin talking point, has denounced these sanctions as harmful to Europe, and not for Russia. But in the end he agreed and supported all the sanctions that the European Union imposed on Russia.
However, last week he broke ranks. He sheathed his veto weapon as fellow leaders voted to open negotiations with Ukraine over EU membership, something he had previously said he would never accept, but which he ultimately accepted by closing the chamber during the vote. to leave. But he used his veto to block the financing package and went further than previous blunders by launching a frontal attack on Europe’s core policy of helping Ukraine.
Membership talks typically last many years and Mr Orban signaled on Friday that he would do everything in his power to ensure they go nowhere. “Fortunately, we have time to correct the decision,” he said a message on social media.
Mr Orban’s one-against-all stance in Brussels showed that relations between Hungary and the European Union are “probably irreparably broken and ultimately heading towards a breaking point,” said Mujtaba Rahman, head of the Europe practice at the Eurasia Group, said on social media on Saturday.
Orban was “a structural problem for the EU,” he added, because the survival of a Hungarian system that is increasingly straying from the bloc’s values “will require more and more maverick and extreme behavior from him in the future – regarding Ukraine and more.”
Mr Orbán, who has tight control over the Hungarian media through state conglomerates and loyal business friends, is not going anywhere in Hungary. His ruling party Fidesz last year won his third general election in a row.
Also seemingly unwavering is the European Union’s commitment to unanimity on the most important decisions.
There have been demands for years that decisions should instead be made by a majority, with votes weighted to reflect each country’s population, but that would require changing treaties, something virtually no leader is willing to risk.
In a speech to the Polish parliament on Tuesday, Donald Tusk said: the new Prime Minister outlined a vision of Europe that was diametrically opposed to the vision promoted by Mr Orban. Europe, he said, was more than just a trading bloc, but a guardian of what he described as “European political values of democracy, the rule of law, media independence and freedom of expression.” But he ruled out treaty changes.
For his part, Mr Orban has expressed growing disdain for the European Union. Him in October derided it as a “bad contemporary parody” of the Soviet empire and mocked his powerlessness in the face of his opposition to European rules requiring Member States to protect press freedom, minority rights and judicial independence. “We had to dance to the tune that Moscow whistled. Even if Brussels whistles, we dance the way we want,” he said.
The agreement reached in Brussels on Thursday to at least start membership negotiations with Ukraine gave a symbolic boost to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who had just returned empty-handed from a visit to the United States. Much-needed money for its war effort is being held back by political divisions in Congress, and Ukraine hoped money from Europe could fill the gap.
European leaders will meet in January to try to get Mr Orban to relent. If he uses his veto again, as seems likely, Europe will still supply money to Ukraine through several cumbersome alternative mechanisms that do not require Hungary’s approval.
That would prop up Ukraine in the short term, but cast a shadow on Europe’s long-term ambitions as a reliable geopolitical player.
Ivan Krastev, co-author of ‘The Light That Failed’, a book that examined disillusionment with liberal democracy in Eastern Europe, warned in The Financial Times On Friday he said that if “Europe cannot solve its Orban problem” it risks paralysis and fragmentation.
The European Union, built on the ruins left behind by World War II, has defied repeated predictions of impending doom, most recently after Britain voted to leave in 2016. That caused alarm in Brussels – and joy among EU skeptics – that Brexit could lead to an avalanche of defections by other countries.
But no one followed Britain’s lead, and even longtime critics of the bloc such as Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, whose far-right party performed unexpectedly well in last month’s general electionhave shifted from advocating withdrawal from the union to demanding a review of its priorities.
Mr Orbán also insists that Hungary will not leave or be forced to leave, not least because the country needs the money. It is the largest per capita recipient of European funds. His mission, he said recently in Budapest, is not to eliminate Hungary, but to ‘take over Brussels’.
An important step on that path will be the elections next summer European parliament, an assembly whose 705 members are elected by voters in all 27 member states. It has limited powers and is largely ignored by the general public, but nevertheless serves as a barometer of European sentiment.
The growing public discomfort in much of the continent is over an increase in illegal immigration in the figures this year could tilt the European Parliament sharply to the right in the summer elections and end the current isolation of Orbán’s Fidesz party, which is now largely friendless and powerless in the European legislature.
And it could also mean more trouble for Ukraine.
Mr. Orban, the EU’s most Kremlin-friendly leader, received a shout-out from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday, the day European leaders met for their summit.
Mr. Orban broke ranks with his European allies and traveled to China in October to meet with Mr. Putin. He assured him that Hungary – heavily dependent on Russia for energy supplies and huge loans for a Russian-built nuclear power plant – “never wanted to confront Russia” and was “always keen to expand contacts.”
Mr Putin complained on Thursday that so far only Mr Orban and Slovakia’s new prime minister, Robert Ficocalled for an end to aid to Ukraine. (Although Mr. Fico was highly critical of Ukraine before the September elections, he declined to join Mr. Orban in using his veto.)
That could change, however, if, as Mr Orban hopes, right-wing forces hostile to immigrants, minorities and Ukraine do well in the summer European elections.
In what amounted to a test run of the message that he hopes will mobilize European votes to follow Hungary’s example, Mr Orban told a Fidesz meeting last month: “The French, the Germans, the Italians and the Austrians would give half their lives if they could again have a country without migrants.” He added: “The Hungarian model is working.”
Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting from Brussels.