Thread by @PeterFr89977258

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I think when we’ll look back on the recent #RuleOfLaw ‚compromise‘ with #Hungary and #Poland, it'll be seen as missed opportunity.

Thread.

@rdanielkelemen @daniel_freund @DanielHegedus82 @alemannoEU @luca_badini @chriswratil @lucasguttenberg @MwiWind @ruitavares

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Proponents of the deal in the West argue that the law will eventually come as agreed, and it’s ‚only‘ a non-binding introductory text and the delay that was given to Hungary and Poland, so it's an EU-win – I think they are wrong.

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For one, these were fully unnecessary give-aways; fidesz didn’t actually have a negotiating position, all they had was bluffs and aggression.

The RoL law could have been decided by qualified majority voting, if need be against the resistance of PL & HU;

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thereafter, if PL & HU had vetoed the budget, they would have been among the biggest losers, and the Covid fund could have been built up without them, leaving them with exactly nothing to win.

All it would have taken by the EU is a slight bit of determination.

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Moreover, Fidesz' obstruction of the EU-budget was not even in Hungary popular, this at a time when they are in a downward trend in terms of general popularity in Hungary and the country needs the EU-funds more than ever.

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Most recent opinion polls show Fidesz losing support: they’re backed by 30% of the population, vs 36% in August. Losses are especially high with people with tertiary education (46% -> 27%) and young people (33%
-> 22%) – and these numbers do not yet include the Szajer-effect.

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This just once more shows that Fidesz’s support is much less rock-solid as it might seem from afar, and that Fidesz had much more to lose from the current stand-off with the EU than some in Brussels possibly realized.

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I'm convinced that if the EU had taken the stand-off just a bit further, it would have exposed that Fidesz simply can’t maintain their veto.

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Orban‘s ultimate threat of of #Huxit, cited as a key factor in convincing EU-leaders to give him something, is the mother of all bluffs.

It’s absurd: Huxit would drain the lifeblood of his crony-network (EU-funds) and take away from the wider population e.g. Schengen.

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Huxit would be a desaster on all fronts, the idea is hugely unpopular in HU; Orban would likely be thrown out very quickly if he seriously started working in that direction.

Honestly it's difficult to imagine how anyone could take this Huxit threat of his seriously.

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Now on the 'compromise': some say a delay of 1-2 years in implementing the RoL law does not matter much – I disagree. Strongly, actually.

It's by far not just the humiliation of not being able to introduce a fully agreed law after watering it down multiple times already,

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all in order to find a compromise; caving in to aggression once more, or entering muddy waters / creating a troublesome precedent by the Council instructing the Commission to refrain from applying a law until the judiciary has spoken.

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But it has very practical, material implications for Hungary and the RoL there.

An obvious one, Orban can steal further billions of Euros and continue destroying institutions in the next 1-2 years.

But he won time to study the law and redesign his grand theft machine too.

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This point should not be underestimated: he has an entire state apparatus at his disposal, and the delay may well lead to a situation where by 2022 the system is re-designed so that the RoL mechanism cannot capture anymore the theft of billions of Euros each and every year.

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Finally the quite important point that incidentally, there are general elections in Hungary in 2022.

The ‚compromise‘ presumably means the law will not show any real-world effect before that, which might have exactly been Orban's true negotiating goal.

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Now he can further tweak the electoral system and prepare for the elections under status quo, all cash flowing to his network 'as it should', win 2022, and then has further 4 years to figure out how to handle the RoL mechanism, with no general elections again before 2026

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Now, it is obviously not the EU’s role to engage in national politics and tailor laws to the events and givens of national politics in a member state.

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However, does the Council not do exactly that when it agrees to postpone the de-facto entry into force of an agreed law about fundamental values, which are not honored in a MS, to after its national elections?

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This is why I belive this RoL agreement is a fail: it awards the perpetrator time to prepare for & circumvent the law, and evade paying the political price for his crimes; thereby inevitably & greatly reducing the law's ultimate effect on the real world.
END