From the Impatient Heart of Europe, a Call to Squash Europe’s Parliament

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, wants to “drain the swamp” in the European Union, something he envisages could lead all the way to dissolving the bloc’s legislature.In an annual international news conference at Budapest, Viktor Orban this week said that an ongoing corruption scandal involving several members of the European parliament had drawn into question the credibility of the institution, and that he supports abolishing the body as it currently exists.“The Hungarians would like for the European parliament to be dissolved in its current form,” Mr. Orban said. “The degree to which the reputation of the European parliament in Hungary has been damaged [by the scandal] is easy to answer: not at all, because it couldn’t have been any lower.”The yearly conference is nearly the only occasion when Mr. Orban fields questions from the international media or critical Hungarian outlets. The populist leader, who won a fourth straight term in office in April, has engaged in frequent battles with the EU, which accuses him of violating democratic norms and overseeing large-scale official corruption.On Wednesday, Mr. Orban criticized the European parliament for recent disclosures of a cash-for-favors corruption scandal implicating Qatar and Morocco, and borrowed a phrase from President Trump, saying it was time to “drain the swamp” in Brussels.The Hungarian leader is not alone in that sentiment. The Polish premier, Mateusz Morawiecki, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that “Poles and Italians are fed up with the diktats of the European bureaucracy and want real democracy. We want to renew the EU by returning to its founding principles.”Europeans are increasingly questioning what some of those founding principles are. A former editor-in-chief of the German newspaper Handelsblatt, Andreas Kluth, told Deutsche Welle news that there is a “central ambiguity, or design flaw,” that “plagues the European project.” It is, he said, that “the European Union is trapped between being a federal state like Germany … or a loose club of nations like the United Nations.” Mr. Kluth added, “It’s not clear which.”Mr. Morawiecki also called for “a Europe of homelands rather than a European superstate: We could both subscribe to this.”Wednesday’s news conference came as the EU has frozen more than 12 billion euros in funding to Hungary over concerns that Mr. Orban’s government has cracked down on judicial independence, overseen official corruption, and abridged minority rights.In September the European parliament declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a democracy, and would become “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” under Mr. Orban’s leadership — a charge his government has rejected.Adding to the tensions between Budapest and Brussels is the Hungarian government’s lobbying against sanctions on Moscow for its war in Ukraine. Mr. Orban — who is considered one of the Russian president’s closest EU allies — claims sanctions have been ineffective in pressuring Russia to end the war, and that they have inflicted more damage on European economies than on Russia.“If it were up to us, there would not be a sanctions policy,” Mr. Orban said Wednesday, adding that he would not support any additional sanctions packages against Russia in the future, but would not stand in the way of the EU passing them.“It is not in our interest to permanently divide the European and Russian economies into two, so we are trying to save what can be saved from our economic cooperation with the Russians,” he said.Mr. Orban has made a number of concessions in order to secure delivery of badly needed EU funds, but the European Commission — the bloc’s executive arm — has insisted on further reforms if Budapest is to gain access to the money.Yet the Qatargate controversy, as the corruption scandal has been dubbed by European media, has shown that if any city on the Continent is overdue for reform, it is Brussels itself. As one of the legislative departments of the EU, it may not wield as much power as the European Commission, but it is emblematic of some of Europe’s aspirations for greater integration nonetheless.The European parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, has evoked a “wide-ranging reform package” for the failing institution in January. Yet Ms. Metsola has been thin on the details of such reforms, and it remains to be seen whether they will mitigate or exacerbate mounting impatience with Brussels at Budapest, Warsaw, and other European capitals.

From the Impatient Heart of Europe, a Call to Squash Europe’s Parliament

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