The European Union is a strange club. Among the twenty-seven members there are all kinds. Socialists, far-right, liberals, conservatives and even some hybrid of complex lace. What is not so common is accepting partners whose aim is to burden the institution.
Since the expansion to Eastern countries, this self-destructive profile has taken root in the community’s hard core, favored by the naive decision-making system that requires the unanimity of the components to approve resolutions. Until the recent electoral fallout, Poland, ruled by the ultra-conservatives of Law and Justice, sold its essential vote in exchange for Brussels’ silence on its internal legal abuses.
Another advantaged student is the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, who for a decade has been using the community’s Achilles heel to improve his popularity by denigrating European leaders such as Jean-Claude Juncker or Ursula von der Leyen, presenting- them as puppets of their enemy, the Hungarian millionaire George Soros.
He also doesn’t waste any opportunity to cash in. Thus, his veto of the package of 50,000 million euros of community aid to Ukraine is the umpteenth show of shamelessness of the populist because he favors Russia’s military plans at a key moment of the war. But also because it is blackmailing the European Union, which refuses to give him 20,000 million in aid while he manipulates justice and dismantles fundamental rights in his country. The alternative is to press the nuclear button, apply article 7, which provides for the suspension of a member country’s right to vote and therefore render the extortion void. But Orbán knows that when he has to make radical decisions, his legs tremble in Europe, and in a crisis of unpredictable consequences, he always opts for limping pactism.
For all this, the renewal of the decision-making system from the current unanimity to one of majorities is increasingly urgent to speed up the agreements, but also so that constituencies like Orbán cannot extort the rest of the club’s members.
