It’s high time for the European Union to deal with the one member-state that obviously doesn’t belong in the EU: Hungary.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government rejects just about all the values and principles the EU stands for while remaining the recipient of European largesse. Hungary is getting a free ride.
Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union states that it "is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the member states in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”
Orbán’s semi-authoritarian regime openly flouts freedom, democracy, the rule of law, minority rights, pluralism, tolerance and justice. It has repeatedly made it clear that it prefers the company of dictators such as Russia’s illegitimately elected president, Vladimir Putin, to that of the “degenerate West.”
Human rights watchdog Freedom House accuses Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party of effecting "constitutional and legal changes that have allowed it to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions." It adds that Fidesz has passed anti-immigrant and anti-gay policies, "as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations that are critical of the ruling party or whose perspectives Fidesz otherwise finds unfavorable.”
Ideally, the EU should show Hungary the door. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for that. But Article 7 suggests a substitute for expulsion: suspension of Hungary’s voting rights.
As with everything in the EU, the procedure is cumbersome, involving multiple votes by both the European Parliament and Council, some of which need to represent over half of the European population. As Paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 7 state, “The European Council … may determine the existence of a serious and persistent breach by a member state of the values referred to in Article 2” and “may decide to suspend ... the voting rights of the representative of the government of that member state in the Council.”
So a mechanism exists. All that’s needed is the requisite political will — or the realization that Orbán is progressively transforming the EU into a laughingstock.
Suspending Hungary’s voting rights would bring several immediate advantages. For starters, Europeans could simply ignore Orbán’s incessant ravings against U.S. philanthropist George Soros and Orbán’s love affair with Putin. Some degree of sanity would be reintroduced to EU debates.
Second, the EU could finally do whatever its member states insist they want to do, whether with respect to immigration or minority rights or the Russo-Ukrainian War. The last issue — along with the question of Ukraine’s accession to the EU — could finally be dealt with swiftly and efficiently, without Orbán’s unconstructive interference and indifference to Putin’s violation of international law and everything the EU stands for.
Third, suspending Hungary’s voting rights would send a powerful signal to other EU states, such as Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Slovakia, that the EU takes its core values seriously. Not incidentally, this message would also reach President Trump’s and Putin’s ears.
Suspension just might incline Hungary to follow in Brexit’s footsteps and leave. That would be a shock to the EU, but it would eliminate the expense of supporting an ungrateful country, make the institution more efficient and isolate Orbán.
Alternatively, the dread of being severed from Brussels’s generosity might just inspire Hungarians to kick Orbán out — either at the ballot box or by means of what dictators fear most: people power. Hungary could then become again what it was in 1956 and 1989 — a fighter for freedom and democracy.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
