Dalibor Rohac

The EU is letting itself be blackmailed by Hungary

(Photo: Getty)

For Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, there is only one lesson to be learned from the compromise reached with the EU this week: blackmail works. With the deal, Hungary has managed to partly unblock EU pay-outs in exchange for lifting its veto on an EU aid package to Ukraine and a minimum global corporate tax rate.

After the EU threatened to suspend €7.5 billion in funds for Hungary, Budapest vetoed the €18 billion aid package that the EU had prepared for Ukraine to keep its economy afloat during the war. Now, thanks to the compromise, the suspended amount of Hungary’s funds will be lower – only € 6.3 billion, or 18 per cent of the total amount that Hungary is set to receive.

This is not a complete victory for Orbán. But scholars who see the stand-off between European institutions and Hungary as a conflict over objectively discernible questions of rule of law cannot find any legal basis for the compromise. ‘Legally speaking 100 per cent of Hungary’s funds should have been suspended,’ said R. Daniel Kelemen from Rutgers University.

Clearly this conflict is not just about the law – it is in equal measure a political decision. Yet that makes this week’s decision even more perplexing. While Orbán was able to strike a bargain with Brussels, Poland continues to face the prospect of having its €36 billion from the post-pandemic recovery facility and €75 billion in other EU funds frozen.

Hungary and Poland are often equated when it comes to their rule of law deficiencies, and the comparison is not always unfair. Yet Orbán has been far more ruthless in defanging opposition and independent institutions than the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. More fundamentally, the two governments have played radically different roles in the most important geopolitical crisis facing the EU since its founding: Russia’s war against Ukraine.

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