EU 'watches as #Hungary kills democracy'

So far, the answer has been, well, nothing. For while the EU has long been regarded (particularly by its detractors) as an entity that has become all too powerful—able to set rules that national parliaments must accept, implementing bloc-wide standards that must be adhered to—this pandemic is proving the exact opposite: that, in the face of a global crisis in which nation-states are leading the response, a multinational force such as the EU is largely powerless. As norms have been overturned to contain the coronavirus, the EU, which is built on, and gains strength from, promoting and upholding a rules-based order, has demonstrated itself incapable of keeping up.

In the outbreak of the coronavirus and the disease it spreads, COVID-19—which has infected more than 950,000 people worldwide, including at least 585 people in Hungary—Orbán has found an ideal pretext for his latest power grab. Under the new emergency legislation, his far-right Fidesz party can effectively govern unchallenged, bypassing both Parliament and existing laws. It also permits the government to hand out jail terms for those deemed to be spreading misinformation. Though other countries have imposed their own emergency measures to combat the crisis, Hungary’s are among the most far reaching—and the most permanent. Though the Hungarian government insists that these measures will last only as long as the crisis does, the duration is entirely up to Orbán. After all, the emergency powers can be lifted only with the support of two-thirds of Parliament (a majority that Orbán holds).

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The Hungarian crisis probably couldn’t have come at a more difficult time for the EU, which, in addition to facing a huge public-health disaster, must now contend with one of its members taking advantage of the pandemic. So far, the bloc’s response has been relatively muted. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed concern about the situation in Hungary, telling reporters today that emergency measures must be proportionate to the pandemic and subject to scrutiny (a notable step up from her initial statement on the matter, in which she did not mention Hungary by name). A statement by 13 EU countries—not even a majority of the bloc’s member states—warned that such measures would risk undermining rule of law, democracy, and fundamental rights (though this statement also failed to mention Hungary specifically).

Part of the EU’s hesitation to clamp down on Hungary is political. Orbán extracts a great deal from the bloc—including money (much of which is siphoned off to his cronies). But he also benefits from Fidesz’s membership in the European People’s Party (EPP), a center-right grouping in the European Parliament that also includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, and both the current and former presidents of the European Commission. The EPP has thus far been relatively reticent to punish Fidesz or Orbán, worried that isolating him politically or forcing him out, as was called for this week by Donald Tusk, the EPP leader and former European Council president, could risk hurting the group’s overall influence. “In his political family, in the EPP, there is a view that Orbán delivers a large number of votes,” Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a research firm and consultancy, told me. Isolating Orbán by revoking his membership of the EPP, for example, would also go against the consensus that has governed how the EU has responded to Hungary’s democratic backsliding up to now: put simply, “to hold your enemies close,” Rahman said. “The German position has long been that we’ve got to work as a unit. Poland has been drifting, Hungary has been drifting, but ultimately they’ll come back into the European fold.”