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The Guardian view on Poland and Hungary: obstacles to progress … again | Editorial


When European Union leaders finally agreed on a groundbreaking economic recovery fund in July, there was understandable euphoria and relief. The huge €750bn package allowed the European commission, for the first time, to raise funds from the open markets on behalf of member states. The money would be distributed to the countries that needed it most, as the coronavirus pandemic led to soaring debt and unemployment. Hailing the deal, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said at the time: “Europe has shown that it is able to break new ground in a very special situation such as this one.”

Depressingly, it seems that Ms Merkel spoke too soon. On Monday, Hungary and Poland effectively vetoed the recovery package, along with the EU’s latest seven-year budget. Unless a solution can quickly be found, the deployment of vital funding could be delayed far into 2021. As countries cope with the second Covid wave and Europe heads towards a double-dip recession, this would be disastrous and destabilising. In Italy, for example, where social unrest has broken out in cities such as Naples and Turin, the €209bn allocated from the fund represent an economic lifeline.

Not surprisingly then, EU diplomats are warning of a serious crisis. And it is complicated by the fact that far more than money is at stake. Hungary and Poland are both set to receive generous sums from the joint recovery package; but their last-minute objections relate to a proposed linkage between the disbursement of funds and a respect for democratic norms and law in recipient countries.

For Hungary’s over-powerful leader, Viktor Orbán, and Poland’s aggressively conservative government, the rule-of-law clause is unacceptable because it provides a means for EU institutions, finally, to hold them to account. For years, with brazen contempt for Brussels, both have undermined the independence of their countries’ judiciaries and media organisations, and indulged in flagrant cronyism. Both have exploited the power thus accrued to wage culture wars on issues such as LGBT rights and migration. In doing so, both have defiantly transformed their countries into regressive outliers – the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee of rightwing reaction in Europe. Most recently, a dubiously appointed judge in Warsaw decreed a ban on almost all forms of abortion in Poland, prompting the largest demonstrations since the fall of communism.

The EU has arguably been too slow and weak in dealing with this creeping authoritarianism on its eastern flank. At a summit in 2015, the former European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, notoriously greeted Mr Orbán by joking: “Hello, dictator!” It took until 2019 for the Fidesz party, Mr Orbán’s political vehicle, to be suspended from membership of the centre-right group in the European parliament. Attempts to sanction Budapest or Warsaw have been thwarted by the need for unanimity among the EU27 – impossible to achieve when Poland covers Hungary’s back and vice versa.

The onus to find a way out of the current crisis will fall on Ms Merkel, given that Germany holds the rotating EU presidency. It is possible that some judicious re-wording of the rule of law clause may allow a budget compromise to emerge. The price of a prolonged impasse will be paid in jobs, livelihoods and dangerous levels of national debt. That said, it is vitally important that Hungary and Poland are not permitted to blackmail other member states into ditching the rule of law clause. July was a breakthrough moment of cross-border solidarity. But major beneficiaries cannot expect to pocket the money and continue to flout the EU’s fundamental values.

Mr Orbán’s government currently enjoys sweeping emergency powers which have just been extended. Last week, he brought forward a constitutional amendment to restrict the adoption of children to heterosexual married couples. This forms part of a wider crusade against what he describes as “new modern ideologies in the western world”. Deep inside the EU, the Hungarian and Polish governments are seeking to create a safe space for an intolerant, illiberal way of doing politics. That cannot be allowed to stand indefinitely.



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