Tag Archive for: European Council

Is Europe broken?

Last week, in a major political victory for embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the European Council decided to open accession talks with his country. According to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, it was ‘a day that will remain engraved in the history of our Union’. In fact, the real winner was Hungary’s anti-EU prime minister, Viktor Orban.

After threatening for weeks to block the decision, Orban apparently relented by simply leaving the room so that the other leaders could come to an officially unanimous agreement. Not only will he still have plenty of opportunities to sabotage Ukrainian accession in the future, but he also managed to extort EU funds that the European Commission had been withholding over concerns about corruption.

Ironically, that outcome further reinforces arguments against European enlargement. After all, as the Hungarian government has demonstrated for all the world to see, once you are inside the European club, it seems nobody can force you to abide by the club’s rules. The closer Ukraine gets to joining, the louder will be the chorus reminding us that—contrary to all the treaties and moralistic rhetoric from European elites—there are no real limits on corruption and autocratisation within the bloc.

Everyone in the European Union understands that Orban was playing hardball to unlock EU funds. He continuously spun out new reasons for not opening accession talks, citing everything from concerns about Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority to worries about corruption (which was especially rich coming from the leader of a kleptocratic autocracy).

Ultimately faced with the need to make what she called a ‘strategic decision’, von der Leyen accepted cosmetic changes to the Hungarian judicial system. And yet the day before the Hungarian government was cleared, it introduced a draconian law enabling it to hound non-government organisation in the name of ‘defending national sovereignty’.

Not only did Orban’s extortion work, but what was praised as a crafty workaround will end up being extraordinarily costly for Europe as a whole. For that, Europeans can thank German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who came up with the idea of sending his Hungarian counterpart out for a coffee while the remaining 26 member-state governments voted.

Moreover, although starting accession talks is of major symbolic importance, it won’t help Ukrainians get through the winter. Ukraine is still fighting for its survival against a Russian war criminal who has reaffirmed his aim of wiping it off the map. Orban well knows that the €50 billion promised to Ukraine by the EU is especially critical now that congressional Republicans are throwing America’s own commitments to supplying weapons and aid into doubt. Yet he made sure to have his coffee in the room when the chance presented itself to deny this life-saving support.

European leaders still haven’t found a strategy for dealing with the presence of a veto-wielding Putin ally in their midst. The complacent expectation that a relatively small country can always be incentivised to offer what political scientists call ‘loser’s consent’ may have been reasonable when the EU worked properly as a consensus-building machine on material issues. But those days are gone.

One approach might be for Europe to make Orban’s coffee breaks permanent. There’s already a precedent for working around vetoes to reach agreements on issues such as the pooling of resources. In the early 2010s, British Prime Minister David Cameron learned the hard way that British opposition to EU responses to the euro crisis could indeed be circumvented.

The European Commission clearly is failing to live up to its role as ‘guardian of the treaties’. As critics have been pointing out for years, all the talk of new ‘instruments’ and ‘mechanisms’ (note the technocratic vocabulary) obscures the real problem. What the EU lacks is not legal tools but a willingness to confront member-state governments that are bent on undermining the foundation of European integration: the rule of law.

To be sure, pretending that a problem is technical, rather than political, is sometimes a smart way to help conflicting parties save face. But Orban doesn’t want to save face. On the contrary, he is positioning himself as primus inter pares among a new cohort of European far-right populists. Unlike previous hardline Euroskeptics, the goal is not to leave the EU but to exploit it to the hilt. As Orban put it in a speech last month, the idea is to treat the European Commission president as ‘our employee’ and to extract maximum national advantage. That sums up the right-wing populist platform for next year’s European Parliament elections.

There might have been a time when the EU was strong enough to deal with a government that is gaining the benefits of membership without observing the rules. In the current context, some have found hope in the recent triumph of Poland’s liberal opposition parties over the previous populist government. Might the people themselves solve the problem, by getting rid of anti-European far-right populists at the ballot box?

Unfortunately, such optimism overlooks the fact that Orban’s autocracy is now deeply entrenched, and that a continuous rot within institutions can’t be easily contained. Europe might still grow larger, but it will become ever more fragmented and incapable of resolute joint action. There will be a sprawling periphery where everyone knows that things aren’t really working as they should—and that nobody has the political will to fix them.

Can Donald Tusk go home again?

Donald Tusk’s term as president of the European Council will end on 30 November, which is perfect timing for the Polish opposition. After the parliamentary election in late October, Poland will hold its presidential election in April 2020, and opposition voters already see Tusk as the only viable candidate.

For the past year, Tusk has been dropping hints that he intends to return to Polish politics. ‘No one expects that after the conclusion of my term I will just be watching politics on television’, he recently said. Tusk is openly critical of the policies of Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), and has heaped praise on the recently created European Coalition, an opposition grouping comprising his own party, Civic Platform (PO); the Polish People’s Party; the Democratic Left Alliance; and others.

With the European Parliament election this month, Tusk has an early opportunity to start building a campaign profile. In his current role, he has become one of the faces of the European Union, which enjoys 88% support in Poland. His return to Polish domestic politics thus would bolster the opposition and set him up to leave his mark on Polish history.

If Tusk decides not to run, many Poles will be sorely disappointed, and his standing in Poland will be diminished. But if he runs and loses to the incumbent, Andrzej Duda—who is essentially a puppet of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński—a long, successful political career will be severely damaged.

At an event last year commemorating the centennial of Poland’s renewed independence, Tusk depicted PiS as 21st-century Bolsheviks, and pointed out that Polish interwar leader Józef Piłsudski and Solidarity co-founder Lech Wałęsa each faced far more difficult circumstances when they defeated their own eras’ Bolsheviks. Raised in the tradition of Polish romanticism, Tusk may come to see saving the nation as the logical culmination of his political career.

Yet, despite Tusk’s advantages, he faces significant hurdles. Many Poles will never forgive him for raising the retirement age during his tenure as prime minister. In fact, that reform alone may be the reason why PO lost in 2015 to PiS, which lowered the retirement age immediately upon taking office. And current polls suggest that only 34% of Poles support Tusk’s return to domestic politics, whereas 44% oppose it, and that he would lose to Duda.

In the past, Tusk has always managed to boost his poll numbers by speaking to ordinary voters over the course of a campaign. But one cannot win a Polish presidential election on one’s own. For Tusk, mounting a successful campaign will require the backing of Grzegorz Schetyna of the European Coalition.

Like former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with respect to Labour, Tusk and Schetyna were the PO’s key players when it was in power. Tusk was the party’s charismatic public face, and Schetyna was the mastermind who kept the machine running. The two men complemented each other perfectly, but Schetyna always aspired to Tusk’s position, and was ultimately marginalised. Still, while there is no love lost between them, they are both pragmatists.

The main criticism against Schetyna has always been his lack of charisma, which is thrown into sharper relief whenever Tusk’s star is rising. But Schetyna effectively silenced his critics when he forged the European Coalition, the only political project with any shot of defeating PiS.

In Poland, true power rests with the prime minister, but the presidency carries prestige and a legislative veto that can be overturned only by a three-fifths majority in the Sejm. So, given Schetyna’s and Tusk’s complementary interests—namely, saving Polish democracy—it stands to reason that Schetyna should hold the premiership and Tusk the presidency.

Though Tusk is more popular than Schetyna, it is Schetyna who holds all the cards. After Tusk decamped to Brussels, he neglected to maintain his domestic political relationships, which means that his former PO colleagues won’t necessarily come running when he calls. They owe their loyalty to Schetyna, who controls the party’s organisation and money—and thus their own electoral prospects.

Obviously, this isn’t the arrangement Tusk would prefer. Complicating matters further, Schetyna is counting on Tusk to do his part in the European and Polish parliamentary elections this year, but Tusk may see little reason to stick his neck out before the presidential campaign really begins.

Recently, Tusk spoke at a University of Warsaw event commemorating Poland’s 1791 constitution, where he made a show of erudition by citing Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, George Washington and José Ortega y Gasset. He warned of a civilisational threat facing the world, and thereby pleased the elites in attendance. But in political terms, the speech was a mistake, as was a speech he gave the following week calling for national reconciliation. For the opposition, all that matters right now is defeating the populist threat to democracy; reconciliation is for later.

Tusk used to win elections in Poland because he was seen as a man of the people—a regular guy with whom you could imagine yourself playing soccer. Had he resumed his old style of politics and appeared with a Polish family from a small-town housing project, Tusk would have made a splash. Instead, he chose to wax eloquent from a bastion of European elitism, uttering words that ordinary Poles will greet with indifference, if not hostility. The opposition may not be able to defeat PiS without him, but if Tusk wants to go home again, he will first have to remember where he came from.