Sunday November 14, 2021
Less influence in the EU
Orban announces Germany
Germany’s neighbors are following the formation of a government with interest – including Hungary. Prime Minister Orban is now verbally after the outgoing federal government and says what he expects from the new one.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants the next federal government to reduce Germany’s influence on the EU. “I hope that the German government that is now forming wants a European Germany and not a German Europe in which they (the Germans) tell the others what to do,” Orban said at a congress of his right-wing national party Fidesz in Budapest. As expected, the delegates re-elected him chairman.
Orban has been ruling Hungary at the top of Fidesz since 2010 with a parliamentary two-thirds majority. Parliamentary elections are due next spring. Until March of this year, Fidesz was a member of the European People’s Party (EPP), which also includes the CDU and CSU. At the party congress, Orban affirmed that he supported a “reorganization of the right” in Europe, which the Pole Jaroslaw Kaczynski was demanding of the national-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), which ruled Warsaw.
Fidesz’s exit from the EPP came after the differences between Orban and the German Union parties on the subject of democracy and the rule of law had come to a head. Critics accuse the German Union parties of having blocked an exclusion from Fidesz called for by other EPP members for years. For years, the EU Commission has been at odds with Hungary and Poland on questions of the rule of law. So far, however, Budapest has always accepted judgments of the ECJ – albeit reluctantly.
Dispute over Polish judgment
In December, Hungary was convicted of its asylum policy. The ECJ judges certified Budapest the “illegal detention” of migrants in camps on the border with Serbia and the deportation of refugees without observing the applicable guarantees. As a result, the EU border protection agency Frontex stopped its work in Hungary.
In October, Orban’s government submitted this ruling to the Hungarian Constitutional Court for review. The move followed a controversial decision by the Supreme Court of Poland, which challenged the principle of the primacy of EU law over national law. Orban had defended the Polish decision against sharp criticism from Brussels and other European capitals. He accused the EU of showing “Soviet-era hostility” towards Hungary and Poland and treating the countries as “enemies”.