The fate of Hungary’s conservative commissioner candidate for Health and Animal Welfare, Olivér Várhelyi will not be decided until Wednesday, November 13th, as MEPs once again postponed the decision on greenlighting his role in the new cabinet.
Várhelyi was the only commissioner-designate not to get approved right after his hearing in the Parliament. MEPs requested that he provide written responses to additional questions and promised to make a decision on Monday, November 11th.
The leftists, especially the liberal Renew and the social democrat S&D groups, argued they were not convinced by Várhelyi’s views on the specific issues of abortion and vaccines, but their questioning made clear that they were simply punishing the Commissioner-designate for being nominated by the national conservative Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s government.
As we wrote in our analysis of the hearing, leftist MEPs insinuated that Várhelyi wanted to roll back women’s rights simply because he is conservative, despite the fact that abortion laws are not even an EU competence and therefore not part of his future portfolio. Hungary’s abortion laws are also just as liberal as those of most other EU countries.
Still, despite pressure from Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen to get him greenlit as soon as possible, leftist MEPs seek either to reject him or get assurances that so-called reproductive health, as well as vaccines, are explicitly taken out of his portfolio.
Apart from punishing Budapest, one concrete reason for this could be the Left’s push to introduce taxpayer-funded “abortion tourism,” meaning paying for the travel of women from more restrictive countries (i.e., Poland) to more liberal ones to have abortions.
Regardless of whether Várhelyi would be supportive of the idea, interfering with or ‘bypassing’ national abortion laws this way is against EU treaties, so the whole discussion is pointless.
According to Euractiv’s sources, the strongest push to postpone the decision on Várhelyi’s nomination for two more days came from the S&D, but many in Renew and even von der Leyen’s centrist EPP also support the position.
“Rejection of Olivér Várhelyi seems less likely, so we are aiming for the dismantling of his portfolio,” an unnamed “centrist” MEP, presumably from EPP, told the publication.
Rejecting a candidate is indeed risky, given that their government can then take its time nominating a replacement and delaying the start of the next administration by weeks or months. The EPP, therefore, prefers to just weaken Várhelyi’s role in it.
The EPP is also playing a political game. It could have gotten Várhelyi approved last week by joining the conservative parties who supported him, but this ‘right-wing alliance’ might have backfired during Tuesday’s hearing of Italy’s candidate for Commission executive vice president (EVP), Raffaele Fitto.
Von der Leyen nominated Fitto as one of her six VPs in an attempt to mend her strained relationship with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. However, leftist parties, especially the S&D, have been threatening to blow up the whole process to prevent a conservative from taking a top seat in the EU executive.
