Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may have told two Italian newspapers that “We are ready and we will join the Conservatives.” Orbán signaled the prospect of his party Fidesz joining the political group of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) in the European Parliament to La Repubblica and La Stampa, in the early morning hours of Thursday, February 1st.
With only five months remaining until the European elections, Brussels is already bracing for a major right-wing shift in EU politics. Both of the anti-establishment right-wing blocs—the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID)—are expected to grow significantly, but there’s one currently non-attached major party: the Hungarian ruling party, Fidesz.
The heads of most of the 27 member states and their representatives inside the EU establishment have expended endless energy in denigrating Hungarian sovereignty, not least over Hungary’s position on Ukraine. But now it appears that some politicians are coming round to seeing the merits of Fidesz as a prospective partner.
ID is already projected to overtake ECR and become the third-largest group in the European parliament. If the two groups combined, the hypothetical ECR-ID merger would propel conservatives to a leading position in Brussels. While opponents of Fidesz portray it as isolated within Europe, it’s increasingly clear that both conservative groupings would welcome it into their alliance.
For nearly two decades, Fidesz was part of the center-right European Peoples’ Party (EPP), the largest kid on the Brussels playground. In 2021, however, Fidesz left the EPP amid threats of expulsion, but the move was anything but surprising given the growing distance between the consistently EU-critical Orbán government and its more Euro-establishment peers.
With a new legislative term just over the horizon, it is clear that non-populist conservatives are rethinking their approach to Fidesz. The stakes are not small: Fidesz is projected to win 14 seats (out of Hungary’s 21), sending quite a sizable delegation to the EU parliament. Conservatives seeking reliable allies would do well to discard the constant left-liberal calls to shun Fidesz.
According to a February 1 interview with ID Vice-President Gunnar Beck (AfD), the group furthest to the Right would welcome Orbán’s Fidesz with open arms. “Fidesz would of course be welcome here in the ID if they requested membership,” Beck told Euractiv, saying that ID would be the most natural fit for Fidesz.
The sentiment is shared by Jean-Paul Garraud, the head of the European Parliamentary delegation of Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), also part of ID, who said he was “very much in favor” of having Fidesz within their ranks. “The personal ties of friendship between Victor Orbán and Marine Le Pen are strong, as are the close ties I have with the Hungarian Fidesz MPs,” Garraud said. “We naturally hope that they will join the group.”
The enthusiasm is only natural, as Fidesz would propel ID to new heights after the election. But even without the Hungarian ruling party, the ID group—whose largest members are AfD, RN, and Salvini’s Lega—is projected to gain 98 seats. This means overtaking the ECR, the Greens, and liberals Renew and securing a place as the third largest group in Parliament. Boosted by Fidesz’ 14, ID would be nearly on par with the socialists (S&D).
ECR, however, would gain even more if Fidesz joins them. For the European Conservatives and Reformists, Fidesz’ 14 seats could mean that they, instead of ID, would take the third place on the podium. The group has recently polled at 85 seats, which would put them in 5th place, just below Renew’s 86.
As far as political alliances go, ECR—the party of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia and the Polish Law and Justice (PiS)—would be Orbán’s most obvious choice. From migration to green policies and the fight for sovereignty, Fidesz and ECR fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
As a high-ranking ECR official told The European Conservative:
I am convinced that Fidesz joining the ECR would be natural, it belongs to the family of conservative parties. They have strong relations with most of our delegations. Of course, Fidesz has to get the support of all delegations before it joins, but I think they are on the right track. We want Fidesz to join.
One issue that has in the past made both sides a bit hesitant is the war in Ukraine. ECR members are among the biggest supporters of unconditional support for Ukraine, while Fidesz thinks Hungarian taxpayers’ money can be better spent elsewhere. However, recent events seem to suggest that rifts are being mended and the path would be clear for Fidesz to join the ECR. Hungary not only dropped its veto on further funding for Ukraine—demanding a few concessions in exchange—but also made it possible for the remaining 26 EU member states to approve the start of EU accession negotiations with Ukraine. It is said that Italian Prime Minister and President of the ECR Party Giorgia Meloni, who has a strong, friendly relationship with Orbán, may have played a role in persuading her Hungarian counterpart.
As Bloomberg wrote a few weeks ago, Meloni has been pushing Orbán to shift his approach toon Ukraine’s EU membership aspirations and to reset relations with Kyiv as conditions for joining the ECR. A welcome sign for Meloni could be that the foreign ministers of Hungary and Ukraine recently met and came to a preliminary agreement about restoring the Hungarian community’s language rights in Ukraine, which could be the first real step toward the normalization of relations.
“We have great respect for the Italian prime minister, who heads the ECR. We respect Poland, which is the ECR’s other major party. We’d be happy to join the ECR,” Viktor Orbán told French weekly Le Point in an interview in December, referring to Meloni and Poland’s conservative party, Law and Justice (PiS), which, as a staunch supporter of Ukraine, has also been at odds with Fidesz’s stance.
However, after failing to form a government and being forced back into opposition after October elections in Poland, PiS has given its clearest signal yet that it would welcome Fidesz into the ECR. “I’m open to Fidesz joining,” recently unseated former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a leading figure within PiS told a news conference a few days ago.
While many within the ID share Fidesz’s views on the war, the rest are more open to disregard such differences altogether. For them, the primary objective is to grow in numbers in order to make it much harder for the mainstream to employ its cordon sanitaire against the ID. Many times in the past, leftist and EPP members have refused to cooperate with the ID and actively barred it from taking up any influential posts—one issue that will hopefully be gone after June’s election.
“The bigger we get, the more difficult it becomes for the other groups to exclude us completely,” Beck explained. And while on numbers, the ID vice president added that a hypothetical merger between the two conservative blocs is still a possibility, however far-fetched it may seem.
“A major merger of at least the two right-wing conservative parties in parliament, the ECR and the ID, is being discussed again and again,” Beck said. “That is a recurring topic. It is not yet completely off the table.”
A source who attended a closed-door meeting between the two parties in Strasbourg last week told The European Conservative that more concrete negotiations are being tentatively planned for mid-March. “A merger would be a monumental shift in the power dynamics in Brussels,” he said, which is no overstatement. Just by numbers alone, a merger like this could put the new sovereigntist bloc at the very top of the European Parliament.
Viktor Orbán told Le Point:
It’s rather unfortunate that these two blocs, ID and ECR, have so far failed to find a way to cooperate. After the European elections, we’ll probably see how the parties that belong to one group or the other fare at the ballot box. And then we’ll think about how we can cooperate. Because we’ll never have a majority if the non-traditional political parties of the Right aren’t prepared to cooperate.
According to the ECFR’s projections, EPP is set to gain 173 seats (slightly down from the current 178). An ECR/ID merger would translate to 183; with Fidesz included, up to 197—nearly a third of the entire chamber. Such a force would also prompt the EPP to finally act like a right-wing party and join the conservatives in key votes as, together, they’d have a majority with 51%.
But above all, on key issues such as migration, for instance, ECR and ID need close thematic cooperation if they want results, and not let the war keep them apart in other areas.
“The ID has planned to achieve a change of direction in the areas of migration and climate policy. … This can only be achieved in cooperation with other political groups, although much depends on the new composition of the EPP.”
Article updated on February 2nd.
