Members of the European Parliament today agreed to add a last-minute amendment to a resolution—scheduled for a plenary vote on Thursday—about Hungary’s frozen EU funds. The amendment reopens the Commission’s December decision to unblock a first tranche—about €10.2 billion—of the roughly €30 billion in EU funds that had been frozen in 2022 on the basis of dubious ‘rule of law concerns’ advanced by the country’s left-wing detractors.
The amendment threatens to use “any legal and political measures at [the European Parliament’s] disposal” if the Commission decides to release further funding to Hungary without first “ensuring” that all the so-called reforms demanded by the country’s critics have been implemented.
The amendment also “reminds” the Commission that it “is politically accountable to the Parliament”—the sub-text being that regardless of whether Hungary meets the demands of its foes, the Left will continue to blackmail the country’s conservative government.
If it passes, the amendment would instruct the Committee of Legal Affairs to prepare an analysis of the Commission’s decision to release the first tranche—with the aim of eventually “review[ing] the legality of the decision” before the European Court of Justice.
Hungary had fulfilled the criteria demanded to unblock the first tranche, noted Judit Varga, Hungary’s former justice minister, even according to the Commission itself. “Looks like … when it comes to the hatred of Hungary, the liberal left [does not even believe] in its own institution,” she said in comments on Sunday.
“Europe replaced democracy with hypocrisy, and dialogue [has been] replaced by a political witch hunt and blackmailing with European funds,” she said.
Closer, but still far from preventing a Hungarian presidency
On a separate resolution related to the annual report on fundamental rights, the party negotiators included a call on the European Council (EUCO) to begin another infringement (Article 7) procedure against Hungary in a bid to strip the country’s voting rights and thereby prevent it from assuming the Council’s rotating presidency in July.
The inclusion of the infringement procedure comes after a petition launched by center-right MEP Petri Sarvamaa (EPP), with the explicit intention to prevent a Hungarian turn at the rotating presidency, and, by extension, blocking PM Viktor Orbán from assuming the role of interim president of the European Council in the wake of Charles Michel’s early resignation.
The resolution, also scheduled for voting on Thursday, “calls on the European Council to take action and to determine whether Hungary has committed serious and persistent breaches of EU values.”
But even if the resolution passes, the MEPs are still far from achieving their goal. In practice, this only means the ball would be in the European Council’s court, but there are quite a few member states who would rather not touch this sensitive subject for fear of creating a dangerous precedent that has never been set in EU history.
And since a unanimous decision is needed to determine a “serious and consistent breach” that would allow a follow-up vote to restrict voting rights—and, therefore, to theoretically postpone Hungary’s rotating presidency—it’s unlikely that the European Council would give in to Parliament’s pressure.
Erasmus: Hungarian students still under the bus
On Tuesday morning, Politico reported that members of the center-right EPP in the Parliament’s culture committee had joined the conservative parties (ECR and ID) to insert an amendment in a report on the implementation of the Erasmus student mobility program. The amendment would call on the Commission to find a way to end Hungarian universities’ suspension as soon as possible, as many consider Hungarian students to have been thrown under the bus in the ideological war between Brussels and Budapest.
Contrary to what Politico suggested, only the Slovenian and Austrian delegations of EPP have taken Hungary’s side in the dispute, so the proposed amendment was eventually struck down by the Parliament on Tuesday.
Instead, at the initiative of liberal Hungarian MEPs, the amendment was replaced with another that says the opposite of the original and, instead of the Commission, blames Budapest for the suspension of Hungarian universities.
Whereas the conservatives’ proposed amendment called on the Commission to agree on a financing structure that would give back the universities the valuable funds, the new text adopted by the plenary “calls on the Hungarian government to comply immediately with the rule of law and EU values … so that Hungarian students … may benefit from the Erasmus+ program.”
The European Commission decided to suspend 21 Hungarian universities from its flagship student mobility and cross-border academic research programs, Erasmus and Horizon, in December 2022, affecting roughly 9,000 students and 4,000 university staff who enroll in them every year.
The justification was that Hungary’s conservative government allegedly took over the governance bodies of these universities by reforming the organization of higher education under which most universities became public foundations partially managed by boards of trustees. Among the roughly one hundred trustees, eleven are politicians, which was enough for the EU to decree a rule of law violation despite the same or very similar system existing in Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria, but without bothering anyone in Brussels.
Thanks to the leftist majority of the European Parliament, the plight of Hungarian students continues, as the Parliament finds them a useful tool to increase its ideological blackmail of the Hungarian government.
