“Double standards and hypocrisy”: European Parliament Rejects Debate on Budapest’s Rule-of-Law Violations

The European Parliament is once again showing what its motto, “Democracy in Action,” looks like in rpractice. 

On Wednesday, the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents (COP)—the administrative body that includes leaders of all 8 political groups, as well as EP President Roberta Metsola—denied a request from the national conservative Patriots for Europe (PfE) group to hold a debate on Hungary’s blatantly anti-democratic constitutional changes during next week’s plenary in Strasbourg.

The spoiled debate would have allowed right-wing MEPs to voice their concerns about a series of fast-tracked constitutional amendments drafted by the new Hungarian government—without proper public consultation or any oversight form the Constitutional Court—including measures to forcibly remove the presidents of the Republic and the Constitutional Court, as well as retroactively limit the terms of members of parliament, effectively banning half of the conservative opposition MPs from running for office ever again.

Despite the obvious concerns, the Patriots’ request for a debate was voted down by the leaders of every left-wing group, as well as the centrist EPP, home to Hungary’s new ruling party, Tisza. The Brussels elite’s refusal to even debate what’s happening in Hungary is made even more telling by the fact that, for years, it never missed a chance to attack the country’s former conservative government just for going against the mainstream.

“This is a textbook example of double standards and hypocrisy,” remarked MEP Kinga Gál, First Vice-President of the Patriots for Europe group. “It proves once again that in Brussels, references to European values are used as a political weapon against sovereign, patriotic governments, while genuine violations are ignored.”

The EPP overlooking rule-of-law violations to defend its own is one thing—they do the same with regard to PM Tusk in Poland, for instance—but the leftists’ refusal to even hold a debate is striking, given that an increasing number of leftist NGOs and civil rights watchdogs have also sounded the alarms in Hungary. 

For instance, Amnesty International criticized the removal of the President without “appropriate legal guarantees” for a “fair trial”—by taking away his rights to challenge the move at the Constitutional Court—while TASZ, one of Hungary’s oldest civil rights NGOs, said the amendment that retroactively limits MPs’ mandates to three terms “profoundly restricts” people’s fundamental right to stand for parliamentary elections, as well as voters’ right to freely choose their representatives.

Both organizations also criticized the government for leaving only five days for public consultation before adopting the constitutional amendments, in contrast to the minimum eight days specified by law.

As a last resort, outgoing President Tamás Sulyok invited the CoE’s Venice Commission—Europe’s highest authority on constitutional law—to Hungary to examine the legality of the amendments. The trip was initially canceled after PM Péter Magyar simply refused to host the Venice Commission’s delegation. Then, after a week of growing backlash, the prime minister decided to invite the Commission himself, acting as if it was his idea in the first place. The delegation is set to arrive in Hungary today, July 2, the Commission told Euronews on Tuesday.

At this point, with constitutionality and democratic principles being thrown out the window more blatantly than ever in modern Hungarian history, the silence from Brussels—the Parliament, Commission, and Court—is deafening. The European institutions proved once again that they don’t represent democratic values, only the interests of a small elite with a monopoly over the fate of a continent.