Strasbourg vs. Brussels. The European Parliament has today given the green light to the recommendation of the Legal Affairs Committee and has agreed to sue the European Commission before the Court for its decision, taken in December, to authorize the disbursement of 10 billion euros in community aid allocated to Hungary. that had been frozen as a result of the Viktor Orbán Government’s repeated failures to comply with the principles of the rule of law.
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, informed the leaders of the political groups about this this morning and, after discussing the recommendation, announced that “she will present the case to the Court of Justice of the EU” before next 25 March, sources from the institution have reported. The recommendation of the Chamber’s Legal Affairs Committee specifies that the unusual judicial action aims to “clarify the role of the Commission and its margin of discretion on the unlocking of Cohesion funds to Hungary,” they add.
The recommendation was adopted at the beginning of the week by the Legal Affairs Commission by a large majority, with the far-right group Identity and Democracy voting against, and in the absence of the representatives of Conservatives and Reformists, the political family to which Vox belongs. In his opinion, the judicial reforms adopted by the Orbán Government are not sufficient to justify the disbursement agreed in December by the community executive. Apart from the 10,000 million unlocked and that Budapest will be able to claim in exchange for presenting projects, Brussels maintains 20,000 million euros suspended for similar reasons.
“Hungary has complied. Those are the rules that we have all agreed upon and we will follow them. It is what differentiates the rule of law from the arbitrary exercise of power,” defended the president of the Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, during the debate held. about this in January with Parliament. The MEPs disagree and, in the resolution approved then, accuse Brussels of giving in to Budapest’s “blackmail” in the hope – failed – that Orbán would not veto the approval of a macro-financial aid package of 50 billion euros to Ukraine. “Now Orbán knows what his price is and he is not going to get cheaper,” criticized German MEP Daniel Freund (Greens).
