Hungary’s Orban Knocks EU Expansion, Blocks Fresh Funds for Ukraine

Say what you will about Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, but he knows how to spark a chat around the proverbial water cooler. How else to explain Mr. Orbán’s recent comparison of European Union expansion to Hitler’s “dream of European unity,” as he phrased it in remarks given in the country’s west. While it is true that he said Hitler’s ambitions were “on a different basis” than those of Napoleon and Charlemagne, the evocation of the Nazi dictator in the context of the EU’s key Lisbon Treaty seemed designed to both raise hackles and clear the way for more opposition to Brussels.Those hackles were raised pretty high. The Hungarian opposition leader, Ferenc Gyurcsány, stated on social media that even a mention of Hitler along with the idea of the European Union was “a sick, disgusting thought.” The Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, reacted differently, pointing out that “nobody is forcing” Hungary to be a part of the European community.The bigger picture is how much the EU should expand, and whether countries on the geographic margins of Europe — cue Ukraine but also the more far-flung Georgia — can eventually join the club. The French foreign minister, Laurence Borne, recently said that the existing members must decide on the mechanism for EU enlargement by year’s end. Hungary, which joined the EU in 2004 together with Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, is in many respects already on thin ice with Brussels. The European Parliament has previously criticized Hungary as “a hybrid regime of parliamentary autocracy.” Brussels has blocked more than $15 billion worth of European recovery funds until Budapest can show it has made progress on guarantees of judicial independence and anti-corruption reforms. Mr. Orbán’s long list of run-ins with Brussels stands him in uncertain stead as far as unlocking those funds goes by the summer, but that hasn’t stopped him from stepping up to his favorite soapbox — the one from which he opposes military aid to neighboring Ukraine. While that has happened before, the antipathy to Brussels is now taking on more than just symbolic contours. “Hungary does not agree with the fact that the European Union, along with other existing tools, uses the European Peace Facility solely with regard to Ukraine as this does not allow sufficient funds to be channeled to promote the EU’s interests in other areas,” the Hungarian government spokesman’s office said in a statement. Budapest also wants Kyiv to remove Hungary’s OTP bank from a blacklist. Ukraine’s National Corruption Prevention Agency put it there because it continues to operate in Russia. Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, also said that Hungary will block the EU’s next round of Russia sanctions. With respect to further military support, Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, said, “We can’t give it a green light as long as OTP remains blacklisted.”The EPF was created in 2021 as an off-budget mechanism that enhances the EU’s ability to, its website states, “preserve peace, prevent conflicts, and strengthen international security.”It has disbursed the equivalent of nearly $4 billion in military support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion last year. Britain, by comparison, has given about $5.8 billion.The decision to hold up 500 million euros’ worth of new funds is not an isolated one, as Hungary has also refused to provide military equipment to Ukraine. That makes it an outlier among fellow NATO members, though according to multiple reports it has left its airspace open for relevant transportation to Ukraine. The reasons for Hungary’s ambivalent response are numerous, from energy dependency on Russian, to Mr. Orbán’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin, to the lingering ghosts of Hungarian territorial interests in the Transcarpathian region of present-day western Ukraine. Although it might first appear that Budapest is just a bit player in the war that increasingly pits Moscow against not just Kyiv but the Western alliance, it still wields influence. Relations between Budapest and Kyiv are by now seriously frayed, and Mr. Orbán would not find a very receptive audience today at London or even Paris. But the ties with other central European neighbors like Poland are more complex. Those countries are still hosting nearly five million Ukrainian refugees — with well more than a million in Poland alone. With refugee issues come social pressures and economic costs. If a populist leader like Mr. Orbán exploits the growing impatience with that aspect of the war in places like Poland, Lithuania, and of course in Hungary itself, it will put more pressure on President Zelensky to either accelerate the counteroffensive or come to a compromise that not everybody wants sooner rather than later. That Hungary has the chops to take on the Brussels bureaucracy is of no great concern to Washington, and might even be to the delight of some lawmakers in post-Brexit Britain. Yet an emerging unofficial Budapest-Warsaw-Baltic bloc with dissenting views about not only Ukraine but what President Macron keeps referring to as the post-war “European security architecture” could merit more scrutiny down the line.

Hungary’s Orban Knocks EU Expansion, Blocks Fresh Funds for Ukraine

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