Orban Enters Showdown as Europe's Biggest Party Weighs Expulsion
(Bloomberg) -- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s role as a trailblazer for resurgent nationalist forces in the European Union faces a reckoning as the bloc’s largest political family weighs whether to expel his illiberal party two months before crucial EU elections.
The verdict by the European People’s Party due on Wednesday afternoon in Brussels will signal whether the EU is ready to start reining in wayward members seen as undermining the rule of law and spreading euroskeptic ideology, which have contributed to watershed decisions including Brexit.
The issue is gaining urgency after populist parties took power in Italy and moves in Hungary, Poland and Romania for greater political control over state institutions sparked fears of a return to authoritarian rule 30 years after the collapse of communism. It also coincides with the campaign for European Parliament elections in May, during which nationalists are angling to win greater legislative clout in the world’s largest trading bloc at the expense of mainstream parties.
Orban, a four-term premier, has become so high-profile because he’s shown the way on how to dismantle liberal democracy without losing his standing in the center-right EPP alongside the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But the EPP meeting in Brussels, where delegates are scheduled to vote on whether to eject or suspend Orban’s Fidesz party, shows that patience with a long-held strategy of engagement with renegade leaders is running low.
Hybrid Regime
“The idea that EPP membership has restrained Orban is preposterous,” said R. Daniel Kelemen, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Quite to the contrary, the political protection the EPP has provided to Orban has helped enable him to construct the first hybrid authoritarian regime inside the EU.”
While 13 member parties have called for Fidesz to be expelled, the outcome is wide open, according to EPP sources who spoke on condition they not be named because deliberations are private. Merkel’s CDU party, considered to be the most influential in the group that’s also known as the EU Christian Democrats, hasn’t stated its position.
Manfred Weber, the group’s candidate to become head of the EU executive after elections, has issued an ultimatum to Orban for retaining EPP membership. The conditions include an end to an anti-EU billboard campaign, an apology for calling fellow Christian Democrats “useful idiots” and a vow to back down from a crackdown that pushed the George Soros-founded Central European University to move most of its programs out of Hungary.
Critics have accused Weber of political posturing after years of doing little to rein in the Hungarian leader and then following up with conditions that do little to address the nation’s illiberal slide. On the other hand, there are many within the EPP concerned about Orban joining the ranks of nationalists, which he said he’d consider if he is ousted from the group.
The EPP is currently considering various options besides expulsion, including the suspension of Orban’s Fidesz party for six months, according to one source. There’s also a push by some to avoid a vote on Fidesz’s membership.
“I don’t think there will be a vote,” said Ingeborg Graessle, a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s CDU party who’s urged a tougher line against Orban. She added that there were still moving pieces but there were efforts to reach a compromise.
With the EPP set to remain the most influential bloc in the EU after May’s elections, the outcome of how the group deals with Orban may signal the fate of other efforts to rein in illiberal governments. In Poland, the ruling party has mimicked Orban’s policies, such as extending political influence over the courts and the media.
Orban’s transformation of Hungary into what he calls an “illiberal state” has been so quick and all-encompassing that EU institutions, mostly used to setting democracy standards for candidate countries, are widely considered to have failed in keeping up with the changes.
To address that, ministers from Germany and Belgium on Tuesday said more than 20 member states back a “peer-review mechanism” to better police rule-of-law issues in the EU. That would come in addition to a proposal to tie some EU funding to democratic standards as well as the Article 7 procedure -- to which both Hungary and Poland are subject -- which makes it possible to suspend a member’s voting rights for serious breaches of fundamental values.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.