Minister of Justice Judit Varga announced her resignation from the Hungarian government to focus on the upcoming European election campaign after it was revealed that the ruling Fidesz party is nominating her to lead the candidate list for 2024. The minister broke the news in an interview with Magyar Nemzet, published on Wednesday, June 28th.
“But this task, like my ministerial duties, requires a whole person, and I have already informed the Prime Minister of my intention to resign as of July 31st ,” Varga explained to the paper. “I think the right thing to do is to hand over the leadership of the Justice portfolio to someone who can concentrate 100% on it.”
Varga is seen as the perfect choice of Budapest to lead the EU election campaign and for multiple reasons. Before being appointed as justice minister in the Orbán-cabinet in 2019, she spent nine years working in the European Parliament as a political advisor to MEPs, including János Áder, the former President of Hungary.
After nearly a decade in the EU bubble, Varga was first appointed to the position of state secretary for European affairs in 2018, right in time to take control of the fallout of the rule of law dispute that was beginning to really heat up between Brussels and Budapest.
Even after she became minister, she continued to be the face of Hungary during the most intense level of the still ongoing rule of law negotiations, leading the diplomatic effort to gain access to the tens of billions worth of cohesion and recovery funds the Commission decided to freeze years ago.
The reason Budapest decided to put someone like her at the top of Fidesz’ EU electoral list is that the 2024 race is shaping up to be a real game-changer for the European right, especially for sovereigntist forces. In times like this, it’s good to have veterans on the field.
“The stakes are very high for the 2024 EP elections: we need a conservative shift in the European institutions, and I want to play an active role in that,” Varga said in the interview. She then continued:
We see a growing conservative movement rise across Europe. We need to build on this. I’ve always said that it doesn’t matter who belongs to which party family, the point is to overturn the disproportionate liberal dominance in the EU.
We need a return to a sense of sanity that puts the interests of Europeans first, whether it is the question of migration, gender, or even of war and peace.
Varga believes that the current political atmosphere strongly indicates that such a shift is more than possible by next year. As she explained, the once classical center-right parties of Western Europe—now increasingly shifting toward the left—no longer provide answers to the problems of the European people. Voters are similarly disappointed in progressive and green parties, which failed to achieve anything substantial in recent years, besides disruptive identity politics. Nonetheless,
If we look at the success of the Spanish Vox or the Fratelli d’Italia, we can see that the stigmas attached to sovereigntist parties are in vain: voters choose according to their own perception of reality. More and more citizens want to return to the core values that these parties represent.
