Orban Enters Showdown as Europe’s Biggest Party Weighs Expulsion
Orban Enters Showdown as Europe's Biggest Party Weighs Expulsion
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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s role as a trailblazer for resurgent nationalist forces in the European Union faces a reckoning as the bloc’s largest political family weighs whether to suspend his illiberal party two months before crucial EU elections.
The verdict by the European People’s Party due Wednesday afternoon in Brussels will signal whether the EU is ready to start reining in wayward members seen as undermining the rule of law and spreading euroskeptic ideology, which have contributed to watershed decisions including Brexit.
At the same time, a suspension would fall short of an expulsion demanded by some members of the EPP. The umbrella group may be seeking to avoid turning away firmly right-wing supporters in countries such as Germany, France and Italy in the run-up to May 23-26 elections to the European Parliament and to keep the door open to a pro-EU majority coalition with left-of-center groups in the assembly after the ballot.
“A potential suspension would buy the EPP time until after the elections, where they could see whether they can do without Orban,” said Andras Biro-Nagy, co-director of Policy Solution, a Budapest-based think tank.
Mainstream EU parties are showing cracks after populist parties took power in Italy and moves in Hungary, Poland and Romania for greater political control over state institutions sparked fears of a return to authoritarian rule 30 years after the collapse of communism. Nationalists are angling to win greater European legislative clout in the upcoming EU Parliament elections.
Orban, a four-term premier, has become so high-profile because he’s shown the way on how to dismantle liberal democracy without losing his standing in the center-right EPP alongside the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But Wednesday’s EPP meeting shows that patience with a long-held strategy of engagement with renegade members is running low.
“The idea that EPP membership has restrained Orban is preposterous,” said R. Daniel Kelemen, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Quite to the contrary, the political protection the EPP has provided to Orban has helped enable him to construct the first hybrid authoritarian regime inside the EU.”
While 13 member parties have called for Fidesz to be suspended or expelled, the outcome is open, according to EPP officials who spoke on condition they not be named because deliberations are private.
The head of Merkel’s CDU, which is considered the most influential party in the EPP, backs suspending Fidesz, Reuters reported, citing an interview with CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. While Orban has taken steps to start addressing concerns, Kramp-Karrenbauer said he hasn’t managed to dispel her doubts about whether the prime minister shares the group’s values, according to the newswire.
The EPP assembly on Wednesday will decide on a newly drafted proposal under which Fidesz would lose the right both to vote in all party meetings and to propose candidates for posts, according to an official from the group speaking on condition of anonymity.
EPP Meetings
Under the proposal, Fidesz would also no longer be present at all EPP meetings and an evaluation committee would be established to monitor cooperation between the European group and Fidesz, the official said.
While short of outright ejection, a suspension would still be the boldest move yet by the center-right bloc to call out Orban. He would quit the EPP were it to suspend Fidesz, said Gergely Gulyas, the minister in charge of the prime minister’s office, MTI state news service reported.
Manfred Weber, the group’s candidate to become head of the European Commission after the legislative elections, has issued an ultimatum to Orban for retaining EPP membership.
The conditions, which Orban has partially met, include an end to an anti-EU billboard campaign, an apology for calling fellow Christian Democrats “useful idiots” and a vow to back down from a crackdown that pushed the George Soros-founded Central European University to move most of its programs out of Hungary.
Orban’s transformation of Hungary into what he calls an “illiberal state” has been so all-encompassing that EU institutions, mostly used to setting democracy standards for countries seeking to join the bloc, are widely considered to have failed in keeping up with the changes.
--With assistance from Nikos Chrysoloras, Ewa Krukowska, Marine Strauss and Marton Eder.
To contact the reporters on this story: Zoltan Simon in Budapest at zsimon@bloomberg.net;Jonathan Stearns in Brussels at jstearns2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Jones Hayden
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