The second half of 2024 sees Hungary become the rotating president of the EU Council, giving greater influence to Victor Orbán. Many members are unhappy.
It may be infuriating for most European governments and for Brussels, but Victor Orbán’s plan to use Hungary’s EU Council presidency to troll the very institution he is supposed to chair is going well and even allows him to demonstrate clout in the international arena.
This has put his (many) European opponents in a tight spot. What does one do, as a head of an EU government, when the chairing country of the bloc goes rogue and starts working on bogus and unwanted deals for “peace in Ukraine” with Putin and Xi Jinping?
Apparently, not that much. One possible step would be to cut Hungary’s EU presidency short. There is, apparently, a mechanism to do so, extending the forthcoming Polish presidency and getting Orbán out of his presidency chair by the end of September, according to Daniel Hegedus of the German Marshall Fund. But it is doubtful that enough EU member states will be ready to invest time and resources into having a three-month embarrassment with Orbán as their formal chair, rather than six months of the same.
At a meeting of EU ambassadors on July 10, all member states except Slovakia condemned Orbán’s visit to Moscow — and so did, in no uncertain terms, including statements from many EU and government leaders, from Ursula von der Leyen to Kaja Kallas. But, despite this: “No one raised the issue of ending or shortening the presidency,” a participant of the meeting told Euractiv.
But they don’t have to grin and bear it. Some member states have found a way to show contempt for the rogue confrere on the EU Council by downgrading the informal gatherings in the first month of his presidency, which are as a rule attended by ministers. This time around, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland announced they will only send lower-rank officials.
Is this sufficient to demonstrate Europe’s anger at a member state making a circus out of its decision-making institutions? Not really. More will have to be done for Orbán (and his would-be imitators) to understand that abusing the rotating presidency to undermine Europe comes at a cost.
But it is nonetheless interesting that the divide between so-called Old and New Europe is no more.
For the first two decades of their EU membership, East and Central European countries liked to set themselves aside from their new colleagues in Western Europe.
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Partly because of their greater need for US military protection, partly tempted by the easy and obvious path of capitalizing on recent experiences of Soviet occupation or influence, the Baltics and the Visegrád countries liked to set themselves apart as more moral and less vulnerable to the lure of Russian business ties, while arguing they were more knowledgeable about the true nature of the Kremlin’s endeavors.
This cleavage in European politics first appeared when US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 famously described the continent’s former captive states as “New Europe,” as they sided with the US and Britain on war in Iraq. The devilishly complex nature of that conflict showed that lack of nuance, combined with the desire to hold the high moral ground, does not necessarily produce the best judgments, but the New Europe label stuck.
That is, until more recent geopolitical developments. When Hungary under Orbán became Putin’s middleman in Europe, while Poland and the Czech Republic eventually chose centrists over nationalists, the unity of New Europe crumbled and new alignments emerged.
The Nordics and the Baltics, for one, have grown much closer over the years, and post-PiS Poland is no longer willing to align its European policy with Hungary. This is ultimately a welcome shift, as Europe’s foreign and security policy is healthier when not weakened by Old versus New or East versus West.
New lines are being drawn to keep out authoritarians, or at least to limit their ability to undermine the imperfect but democratic Europe that has been built over the years.
Whether the new alliance of Nordics, Baltics, and Poland will stay united when it comes to opening this grouping to others who seek to enter it on the basis of merit — Ukraine, Moldova, and some of the Western Balkans — remains to be seen.
Marija Golubeva is a Distinguished Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She was a Member of the Latvian Parliament (2018-2022) and was Minister of the Interior from 2021-2022. A public policy expert, she has worked for ICF, a consultancy company in Brussels, and as an independent consultant for European institutions in the Western Balkans and Central Asia.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Europe’s Edge
CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.
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Source link : https://cepa.org/article/angry-europe-confronts-orbans-presidency/
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Publish date : 2024-07-16 09:13:41
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