EU will face a reckoning with authoritarian Hungary after coronavirus crisis

It was on May Day, 2004 that the enlargement of the European Union to the East took a giant step forward with the accession of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. At the time, the move was interpreted as the near-completion of a liberal revolution. Europe was once again whole, or almost whole, and we could take pride in a process that had started with the creation of the Coal and Steel Community in 1952, progressed with the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and found its full-flowering in the Lisbon Treaty that entered into law on 1 January, 2009.

But, oh dear. Why did no one tell us that the four East Bloc nations, known since 1991 as the Vizegrad group, remained deeply mired in the mindset of their one-time Soviet masters?

Lech Walesa, the heroic founder of the Solidarity union that overthrew Communism in Poland; Vaclav Havel, the equally courageous leader of Czechoslvakia’s Velvet Revolution; and József Antall, the veteran protester who led Hungary to freedom, may have been the faces of the reform movement in the East. But once they were gone, what was exposed was unreconstructed statism, with religion and nationalism replacing the Marxist certainties installed by Moscow at the end of World War II.

For the last ten years, Hungary has been led by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, a far-right populist alliance. This week, ostensibly to counter the coronavirus, Orbán secured the support of the parliament in Budapest for a Bill granting him the right to rule by decree for the duration of the medical emergency.

It is safe to assume that when the all-clear is sounded, months, or even a year, from now, the decree, as such, will lapse. But it is equally certain that aspects of the new dispensation will remain, giving the prime minister reserve powers that in all but name make Hungary a dictatorship.

Orbán is a throwback, except that you don’t have to throw back very far to find his antecedents across the region, from Prague to Bucharest and from Warsaw to Athens. His party, Fidesz, which holds 133 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly, opposes immigration, openly espouses white, Christian culture and denies the right of the European Union – which over the last 20 years has pumped billions of euros into the Hungarian economy – to meddle in the country’s internal affairs.

At the same time, Orbán has courted the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, refused to criticise Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and expressed support for the controversial Chinese belt & road approach to investment in Europe. He even found time last summer to meet with the now-disgraced Nobel Peace Prize winner and nominal leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, to discuss bilateral ties and shared attitudes to Muslim immigration.

Orbán’s style of government is becoming a running sore on the body politic of the EU, which while expressing its disquiet at rule by decree is withholding outright condemnation ahead of meetings of the European Council currently disrupted by the COVID-19 emergency.

The nearest thing to a rebuke was delivered by Donald Tusk, the still-lippy former Council President, now the nominal head of the EU-wide European People’s Party. The day after MPs granted Orbán virtually unrestricted powers, Tusk reminded the Prime Minister that the present crisis was a time to rise above purely national concerns. “This is a critical moment for our democracy,” he tweeted, “not only for each country but for Europe as a whole.”

The two men were once friends but have since taken radically divergent political paths.

Tusk’s rebuke has also had a clear impact upon Orbán. In a letter sent to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the president of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union – a key member of the EPP – the Hungarian premier vented his outrage. He accused his former friend of playing “political games” and “risking the credibility of our political family”. Precisely what the suspended Orbán was referring to when he invoked “credibility” is anyone’s guess.

When Brussels and European leaders do finally get around to debating the Hungarian Question, they will also have to take account of developments in Poland. Here, opposition to immigration has resulted in an outright refusal to accept refugees and an Orbán-like warning to Europe from Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, leader of the hardline Law and Justice Party, to keep its nose out of Polish business.

Law and Justice, founded by the authoritarian Kaczyński twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, is, like Fidesz, built around family, church and state. Its reform of the Polish legal system, which saw many existing judges replaced by party nominees, attracted much criticism within the EU, including the threat of economic sanctions. But as yet, nothing concrete has emerged.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there is more grumbling than open dissent when it comes to the EU. Leaders of both countries have made it clear that they don’t want any part of Muslim immigration, and were quick to close their borders when the coronavirus hit. But the pair, who operate like siblings, are too dependent on the neighbouring German economy to express outright defiance, preferring to let their doubts be amplified by their bigger Vizegrad partners.

With COVID-19 dwarfing all other concerns, the Vizegrad quartet look to be safe for the moment. But come the restoration of some form of institutional normality, six months from now, or a year from now, when each of the 27 member states will be looking anxiously, and aggressively, to Brussels (and Berlin) for financial support, the EU’s tune could change. Hungary and Poland in particular could be put on notice that if they don’t play the game as set out in the rules, the music for them could even stop.

In that event, talk would quickly turn to the old idea of a two-step Europe, with the western core moving forward into a new phase of compliance while the eastern outliers, possibly including Italy, are left in what for them could be more like a free trade and customs union.

It is not inconceivable that Warsaw and Budapest might go for such an arrangement, so long as a guaranteed measure of financial support was bolted on. Money, after all, will be in desperately short supply for the next five-to-ten years, and sauve qui peut could end up as the Union’s interim slogan, temporarily replacing “One for All and All for One”.

The only thing that is certain now is that nothing is certain. Each of the 27 is locked down as much mentally as physically. Every country is struggling to keep its feet and to survive in a world gone mad. It is impossible not to feel that the European Union, which until three months ago thought Brexit was its defining crisis, is entering a dark tunnel at the end of which light cannot be guaranteed. It would be at that point that Europe could lurch to its next defining moment: the reckoning.