Ties that bind Hungary’s Fidesz and European Parliament

Viktor Orbán’s threat to close down the Central European University manages to combine philistinism with stupidity, but it is far from being the first act of institutional vandalism perpetrated in Budapest.

The Hungarian leader’s illiberalism has been on show for many moons now: the crude changes to the constitution; the intimidation of the courts and media; the scapegoating of Roma and foreigners; the cozying up to Vladimir Putin.

And yet there is something about the CEU controversy that is uniting condemnation of Orbán in ways that his previous provocations did not. What matters most is whether it will change the dynamics between Orbán and the European People’s Party, the family of center-right parties across Europe, whose roots lie mostly in Christian Democracy.

Orbán’s relationship with the EPP is important because up to now, the European Union has struggled to find a way to restrain the illiberal excesses of its national governments. Although the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 introduced provisions that were supposed to ensure respect for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, in practice the European Council refuses to make use of such a powerful weapon. Around the Council table, other potential troublemakers don’t want to set a precedent that might be used against them further down the line. And even the morally upright doubt the wisdom of the EU setting itself up against the will of an elected national government.

So the EU has repeatedly drawn back from confrontations with national capitals. The most recent instance, aside from Hungary, is with Poland over reform of the judiciary, but one might also cite the EU’s inertia over Italy’s treatment of Roma, Robert Fico’s nationalist outbursts in Slovakia, and the troubled reigns of Janez Janša in Slovenia and Victor Ponta in Romania.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during a debate at the European Parliament | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

The thought that Europe’s political parties might provide a mechanism of control is seductive. It is, after all, what happens in many national political set-ups: The parties are institutions that provide checks, balances and tests of quality. It is often those parties that remove politicians who are found to be malign, incompetent or corrupt, or all three.

So what chance that the EPP will take action?

Manfred Weber, leader of the EPP contingent in the European Parliament, is clearly discomfited by the prospect of Orbán closing down an internationally-renowned university. Bickering has broken out among the EPP MEPs, with the Hungarian delegation complaining of betrayal, and others arguing that Fidesz should be excluded from the group.

Defended at any cost?

After speaking to Michael Ignatieff, the rector and president of the CEU, a political scientist and philosopher who was for a time leader of Canada’s liberal party, Weber announced on April 5 that the EPP group would defend “freedom of thinking, research and speech … at any cost.” In practice, this defense initially takes the form of hiding behind the European Commission. The EPP group wants the Commission to assess Orbán’s new law on higher education — the one that so threatens the CEU.

The Commission is to discuss the situation in Hungary next Wednesday. Carlos Moedas, the European commissioner with responsibility for universities and research, has already condemned the new Hungarian law. Perhaps less predictably, so too has Tibor Navracsics, who before joining the European Commission was foreign minister under Orbán. On April 6, Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s first vice president, endorsed Moedas’s condemnation. Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, also climbed aboard, saying he didn’t like the government’s decision. But condemnation from the Commission will not trouble Orbán greatly. What matters is whether the European Council or the EPP takes things further.

Fidesz, the party that Orbán helped to found, has long been a member of the EPP. Just last week, Orbán was in Malta, attending the EPP congress there, mixing with the likes of Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk and Juncker. The photograph of Orbán meeting Silvio Berlusconi is striking for the presence of Antonio Tajani, the president of the European Parliament, sometime spokesman for Berlusconi and later Italy’s European commissioner. It is a hint that not everyone in the EPP will side against Orbán.

Indeed, it is easy for outsiders to underestimate how deep is the emotional attachment between Fidesz and the EPP, parts of which still set great store by Fidesz’s track record in opposing communism. Orbán started out in politics as a founding member of Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, which began as an underground student movement opposed to the Communist Party.

In the early post-communist years, Fidesz was affiliated to the liberals and Orbán was a vice chair of Liberal International, but he took his party into the EPP in 2000. He was courted by Wilfried Martens, at that time president of the EPP, who had spent more than a decade as prime minister of Belgium. Martens relates in his memoirs that his earliest participation in a political demonstration had been in 1956 in support of the Hungarian Uprising. The anti-communism may not count for much in, say, Luxembourg, but it matters, for instance, in Spain, Italy and on the borders with Russia.

Testing boundaries

However, the Hungarian leader whom Martens once wooed so assiduously has not finished his political journey — Orbán has become increasingly nationalist, autocratic and demagogic. He has clashed repeatedly with Merkel over migration policy. He led the resistance against proposals that the countries of Central Europe should take a quota of migrants from those fleeing to Europe to escape war in Syria, through Turkey and Greece. This week Merkel’s spokeswoman told reporters that: “Freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights are not up for debate in Europe. Germany will observe very closely the effects of this law on higher education in Hungary.”

No one should discount the importance of Orbán to the EPP.

But it still does not follow that the EPP will break definitively with Orbán, who is a past master at testing the boundaries. He has previously stepped out of line, but not over the edge. It may be that, if forced to do so, he would modify the law on universities in order to keep EPP membership.

And no one should discount the importance of Orbán to the EPP. Perhaps some politicians will regret the introduction in 2014 of Spitzenkandidaten — the notion that Europe’s political parties would announce, ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, who would be their candidate for the presidency of the European Commission. In May 2014, the centre left’s designated candidate was Martin Schulz and the center right’s was Juncker. Because the center right won more seats in the Parliament than the center left, Juncker became Commission president.

There are various flaws with this process, not least that in the absence of transnational lists of candidates, voters outside Luxembourg did not have the possibility to vote for or against Juncker, and those outside Germany were not voting on Schulz. Not long ago, I heard a member of Juncker’s team in the Commission struggle with the embarrassing question of whether people in Hungary who voted center right were voting for Juncker or for Fidesz/Orbán. Whatever the voters’ intentions, in practice Juncker benefited from the election of 12 Fidesz MEPs. The EPP won 221 seats ahead of the centre-left’s 191.

By crudely tying the appointment of the Commission president to the European Parliament elections, the European Council has given Europe’s bigger political groups a perverse incentive to sign up national parties of dubious ideology and/or practice to their ranks, and to keep them signed up, no matter their behavior. How much less likely is the EPP (or S&D) to be scrupulous about its member parties if that means conceding the presidency of the Commission to its political opponents? The CEU episode poses some serious questions not just about institutions in Hungary, but about the structures of the EU.

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.