© REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

When center-right EU presidential nominee Manfred Weber came to Budapest on Tuesday to meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, it wasn’t for a friendly chat.

Both men are members of the European People’s Party (EPP), a collection of mainstream conservative parties from across Europe. But in recent years and months, Orbán has been acting as an enfant terrible within the family. He has given speeches attacking the EPP for being too moderate, championing what he has called “illiberal democracy” and warning that Angela Merkel’s refugee policy will lead to the end of Christian Europe.

Orbán has forged increasingly close bonds with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and Italy’s Lega, the former strongly conservative-nationalist and the latter on the far-right; both are not part of the EPP. There has been speculation for some while that he would leave the EPP to form a new far-right group with them.

Fearful of sparking a grand political realignment of Europe’s right, which has dominated European politics for over a decade, the EPP has kept relatively quiet. Until now.

Last month Orbán launched an ad campaign in Hungary attacking European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who is also a member of the EPP. The posters, ahead of the campaign for the European election taking place in May, seemed to be running against the EPP rather than with it. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Juncker launched a furious rebuttal to Orbán in response to the ads, and now a dozen parties within the EPP have tabled a motion to expel Orbán’s Fidesz party at their congress on March 20. The Hungarian prime minister seems to be willing to row back just enough to defeat the vote—but is it too little, too late?

Weber to the Rescue

Up till now, Manfred Weber has been trying to act as the peacemaker between the warring factions of the EPP. He has been close with Orbán in the past and some have even called him the “Orbán whisperer” for his efforts to translate the nationalistic rhetoric of the Hungarian leader into softer-sounding words for his EPP colleagues.

But the anti-Juncker campaign spurred Weber to drop his defense. He called it “unacceptable,” and said “one cannot belong to the EPP and campaign against the current EPP commission president.”

He travelled to Budapest hoping to extract concessions from Orbán that will avoid a vote to expel him next week. But the result was unconvincing.

“Today in my talks with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán we had a constructive atmosphere, but problems are not yet solved,” Weber told reporters at a press conference following the meeting. “We have to still assess and discuss among the EPP party members, about the upcoming decisions.”

Weber said that Orbán had promised him his anti-Juncker poster campaign would end. Indeed, the billboards between the airport and the parliament—the route Weber took to get to the meeting—had already been covered up. But posters elsewhere in the city are still up, as are the online ads on Hungarian websites.

Weber said this isn’t just about the posters, it is about broader issues. “What we want to guarantee is that Fidesz is committed to the EPP values, and Hungary is a clear pro-European country which sticks to the European values,” he said.

To underline just how much Orbán seems to be threatening those values, Weber held his press conference in a historic synagogue in Budapest. The Hungarian prime minister and his Fidesz party have been accused of demonizing Hungary’s Jewish community, most notably the Hungarian-born US financier George Soros who has been depicted alongside Juncker in the ads.

Splintering the EP’s Juggernaut

The EPP holds the most seats in the European Council and European Parliament, making it the most powerful political family in the EU by far. The long decline of the center-left Socialists and Democrats group has left the EPP as the undisputed leader in the era of Angela Merkel.

Given that it’s so large, one might ask what would be the big deal in losing Fidesz’s 12 MEPs? The fear is that more EPP parties would follow Orbán out the door into his new group, which could then pose a real threat. In other words, better to have Orbán in the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.

Orbán has well understood the EPP’s fears, and it has given him a feeling of invincibility. But this week, the resolution to expel Fidesz seems to have spooked him. Orbán’s chief of staff told Reuters last week that the party would ditch the billboards and is ready to apologize if any offence was caused. And though members of his party have been calling for Fidesz to leave the EPP and unite with the Poles and Italians, Orbán has been publicly urging restraint.

However these minor peace offerings might not be enough to save him. The math for next week’s EPP vote is not looking good. At least twelve of the EPP’s 56 parties plan to vote to expel, a list that reportedly includes Greece’s New Democracy, Finland’s Kokoomus, Belgium’s CdH and CD&V, and Sweden’s Christian Democrats.

Whether or not Orbán’s party is expelled will depend on what the big center-right parties decide to do, namely Germany’s CDU/CSU, France’s Les Républicains, Spain’s People’s Party, and Italy’s Forza Italia.

It may be that Orbán’s fate lies in the hands of his long-time enemy Angela Merkel. But the German Chancellor is known as being a cautious and shrewd politician, and she will not tell her delegates to vote to expel Orbán simply because of her personal dislike for him. With the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) putting pressure on her own party, she will be wary of doing anything that will bolster the far-right ahead of the European Parliament election, or during the crucial group formation period between May and July.

Out by the End of the Year?

For this reason, the most likely outcome of next week’s vote will be to allow Fidesz to remain in the EPP. There is a widespread belief that Orbán is actually trying to get the EPP to expel him, to feed a persecution narrative common among Europe’s far-right. If he can claim that Europe’s elites are trying to silence him, it could only make him grow stronger.

And so for the moment, the EPP is likely to prefer to have Orbán inside the tent rather than outside it. But given recent events, it seems unlikely his party will remain in the group by the end of the year. The EPP may just wait until after the new European Parliament has been formed and the political groupings within it have been decided.

In the meantime, however, this procrastination will benefit Europe’s center-left, Liberals, and Greens during the European election campaign. All three—especially the liberals—will point to Orbán’s continued presence in the EPP as evidence of their lack of courage, conviction, and values. We’ll find out at the end of May whether European voters took notice.

The post The Orbán Showdown appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Stephane Lecocq/Pool

It was a classic elephant-in-the-room situation: In early November, Europe’s largest political alliance, the European People’s Party, held its all-important pre-election congress in Helsinki with speeches from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Several EPP heavyweights talked about upholding democratic freedoms and values, but notably, no-one explicitly named the target of their warnings—the person sitting right next to them: Hungary’s illiberal premier Viktor Orbán.

The EPP was keen to display unity at the congress as it heads into the European Parliamentary elections next May. The gathering followed months of speculation over whether the EPP could split after the election, with some liberal-minded deputies joining a yet-to-be formed alliance with France’s president Emmanuel Macron, and whether Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party would leave to lead their own alliance with other like-minded European nationalists.

The EPP has had an Orbán problem for years. The Hungarian premier has been systematically undermining rule of law and democratic values in Hungary, and challenges those same fundamentals in the European Union. Ongoing demonstrations in Budapest for independent media and courts, and against a labor law increasing overtime hours, will cause further headache for Europe’s largest political alliance. This week, opposition MPs were violently thrown out of the public media’s headquarters in Budapest, the central propaganda-machine for Orbán, after they vowed to read protestors’ demands on air. Orbán, who has never faced political consequences on the European level for his actions, is unlikely to back down, putting the EPP in an uncomfortable spot.

The EPP is the powerhouse party in Brussels and much of Europe. Its politicians head the three most important institutions in the European Union and command seven governments in the (still) 28-member EU, plus they hold the Romanian president’s post. The EPP has sheltered Orbán for years, with the party’s president Joseph Daul, an influential French politician, amicably referring to Orbán as the party’s “enfant terrible.”

The EPP’s Red Lines

Initially, EPP members were arguing that keeping Orbán close would tame the Hungarian prime minister, who likes to see himself as a “street-fighter,” and curb his autocratic tendencies. It set out what it called “red lines” over Orbán’s targeting the Central European University in Budapest, but failed to act when the CEU did decide to move to Vienna as the Hungarian government refused to secure its future in the Hungarian capital. Despite mild EPP criticism, Orbán kept running his anti-EU, anti-liberal, anti-migration campaigns, and continued to centralize power back home. Liberal-minded EPP members in the European Parliament grew increasingly annoyed with the lack of disciplinary action, and saw Orbán as a dangerous pull for EPP to the right.

The frustration with Orbán boiled over last September, when the majority of EPP members in the European Parliament, including its leader, Bavarian Manfred Weber, who is running for the presidency of the EU commission, voted to launch a sanctions procedure against Hungary under Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty for breaching EU rules and values. But the procedure is unlikely to lead anywhere, as deciding on biting sanctions depend on fellow member states reluctant to challenge each other’s internal measures.

Despite calls to kick Fidesz out, the EPP party leadership refused to tackle the issue, arguing that according to the party rules, seven member parties from five different member states need to come forward with a request. No such request has been made. Petteri Orpo, the leader of the Finnish National Coalition Party, tentatively said that if there were other six parties, his group would join in calls for Fidesz’s expulsion.

Clear Intentions

Orbán isn’t hiding his intention to pull the EPP to the right either. He made it clear in a speech in June 2018 that he does not want to leave the EPP and create what he called a “successful anti-immigration” party, but rather he wants the center-right alliance to turn his direction and return to its “Christian democratic roots.”

He argued that the EPP could either become a flavorless, colorless party stuck in an anti-populist coalition with the social democrats and liberals, or move to the right and continue shaping EU politics. “The other model which has been successfully tested in Austria and Hungary is taking up the challenge, is not creating such a people’s front, is taking the issues raised by new parties seriously, and is giving responsible answers to them,” Orbán said at the time.

The EPP attempted to portray itself in Helsinki as a united political force that can stop the threat of extremist and populism in Europe. Yet speakers at the congress were more interested in rallying EPP members against their socialist and liberal contenders than populists. The party leadership also knows that Orbán will deliver at the ballot boxes. His party alliance is expected to win well over a dozen MEPs to the party in May’s election, much needed by the EPP, which could lose 30-40 seats, according to projections.

Orbán argued at the party should respect winners. “What is even more important to understand: we have to win, not just survive, and victory must be wanted. Let us not listen to our opponents, and let us not measure ourselves by the standards of the leftist parties and the liberal media. […] The European elections must be won at home, in each of our countries. In order for the EPP to become the party of the winners again, we need winning prime ministers,” he told delegates.

EU council president Donald Tusk retorted in his speech following Orbán: “We all want to win the upcoming elections. But let us remember that at stake in these elections are not benefits and jobs, but the protection of our fundamental values. Because without them, our victory will make no sense.”

The most recent EPP argument for not stepping up criticism of Orbán cites Brexit. Party officials argue that the Brexit process really started when British Conservatives, led by David Cameron, left the EPP and formed their own group in 2009. This started the UK’s drift away from the EU core, they say. The same could happen with Hungary if Orbán is put under more pressure. Meanwhile, EPP president Daul insists on keeping the party as large and wide-reaching as possible. The continued support for Orbán’s autocratic measures will nevertheless further encourage the Hungarian leader. It might also signal an EPP shift to the right during and after the European elections.

The post Can Europe’s Center-Right Handle Orbán? appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.