By Jorge Liboreiro
Patience is wearing thin in the European Parliament and it shows.
The hemicycle decided this week to file a lawsuit against the European Commission over the release of €10.2 billion in frozen funds to Hungary. That release, which you might remember from reading this newsletter, proved extremely controversial in December as it was announced one day before a high-stakes EU summit that Viktor Orbán threatened to blow up. The timing created the impression the Commission had struck a backroom deal of sorts to allay the Hungarian premier’s ire and convince him to lift his veto on Ukraine’s accession process.
The accidental (or deliberate?) coincidence of events outraged the Parliament, which has for years been at the forefront of the bloc’s crusade to reverse the democratic backsliding that Orbán has spearheaded. A cross-party coalition of MEPs pushed forward a no-holds-barred resolution that decried Hungary’s reforms as insufficient to restore judicial independence and berated the executive for rushing to unfreeze the money without waiting for results on the ground. “The Commission is politically accountable to Parliament,” the text said.
The resolution was followed by tense hearings, recriminations, calls for transparency, furious statements and, finally, a lawsuit, to be soon filed before the European Court of Justice.
Unfazed, the Commission insists it followed all the rules and was bound by “strict timelines and conditions” that, essentially, left it with no choice but to release the funds after Budapest approved all the elements of the judicial reform.
“Hungary had submitted all evidence the Commission had required to show the independence of its judiciary,” a spokesperson said, in reaction to the news. “The Commission is therefore under a legal obligation to adopt this decision. The Commission considers it acted in full compliance with EU law and will defend its decision before the EU courts.”
In other words, the executive believes the release was justified and will quash the lawsuit. But a court victory is not the Parliament’s goal, at least not in the near term. By launching legal action, the hemicycle wants to reassert its legislative standing, which is often overshadowed by the might of member states, and issue a pointed warning to Ursula von der Leyen: think twice before you release more taxpayers’ money to a country governed by a man who shakes hands with Vladimir Putin.
Orbán, though, is unlikely to forget about what he calls “financial blackmail” and might very well exploit the subject (again) to twist the bloc’s arm, extract a new concession, derail a collective decision or simply block things for the sake of blocking. His government has stopped making any effort to disguise its quid-pro-quo attitude, which diplomats in Brussels have compared to “Russian dolls” because every time one demand is satisfied, another one pops up.
As of today, the Commission is still withholding nearly €12 billion from Hungary’s share of cohesion funds and most of its €10.4-billion recovery and resilience plan, about 10% of the country’s GDP. MEPs stress all the funds need to “be treated as a single, integral package” and no payment should go ahead “if progress is made in one or more areas but deficiencies still persist in another.”
This all-or-nothing vision vastly differs from the Commission’s carrots-and-sticks strategy, which allows gradual pay-outs as long as certain targets are met. The money that remains frozen is split into separate envelopes linked to different conditions. Technically speaking, this means Hungary could unlock further cash in one area, as it has done now, while maintaining anti-LGBT legislation in place and having a disproportionate number of single-bid public contracts.
This brings us to the question that the lawsuit indirectly poses: Is the rule of law something that comes in pieces or is it rather an indivisible whole?
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The hemicycle decided this week to file a lawsuit against the European Commission over the release of €10.2 billion in frozen funds to Hungary
