Hungary: EU Is Trying to Punish Countries That Control Their Own Borders

LUBLIN, POLAND - SEPTEMBER 11: The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban takes part on
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Oliver JJ Lane

Hungary’s leadership is standing by its decision to block the whole seven-year budget for the European Union over the inclusion of new powers which would, they claim, allow the political persecution of member states that don’t follow the Brussels globalist playbook on matters like mass migration.

The Hungarian and Polish governments used their veto powers to block the seven-year Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) — in other words, the EU’s budget — on Monday, having failed to prevent new clauses and rules being inserted at earlier stages of the negotiation process. While the comparatively small central European nations lacked the political clout to prevent the new rules, because they are tacked on to the overall budget which must be adopted by all member states unilaterally, the bloc essentially forced Hungary and Poland into a showdown where their choices were to accept the new controls or stop Europe’s spending altogether.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban was bullish on Wednesday when he said Europe was attempting to use a “political whip” to punish member states that refuse dto fall in line. The Associated Press reported further remarks where Prime Minister Orban explicitly invoked the mass migration issue — a longstanding area of disagreement between the EU, which has attempted to institute a mandatory migrant redistribution programme, and its conservatively minded members — as being at the heart of the dispute, and Europe’s desire to turn the screws on some members.

Orban said: “In Brussels today, they only view countries which let migrants in as those governed by the rule of law… Once this proposal gets adopted, there will be no more obstacles to tying member states’ share of common funds to supporting migration and us(ing) financial means to blackmail countries which oppose migration.”

Hungary’s justice minister — on whose brief much of these debates fall — accused Brussels of “double standards” in its discussions of the kinds of “rule of law” claims made as a justification of these rule changes. Pointing out that many European countries have legal peculiarities or far-from-perfect standards for judicial independence, Justice Minister Judit Varga said on Wednesday that the phrase rule of law was only invoked in reference to Hungary.

Earlier in the week, Varga had said that Europe’s wealthy nations, which don’t receive EU funding anyway, would be able to politically blackmail the poorer members, an infringement of sovereignty. Ultimately, she said, Hungary was under attack because the “liberal mainstream” couldn’t accept the fact an extremely popular conservative government controlled a nation in the heart of Europe.

While Hungary and Poland pioneered the blockade of the budget to head of the “blackmail” rules on Monday, they have since received support from Slovenia — another conservatively-minded central European state which may have something to fear from Europe tying the often considerable development fund payments to political control.

Slovenia’s Prime Minister Janez Jansa criticised the language of the new rules, which are generally couched in relatively emotive terms painting opponents as being anti-democratic, or anti-rule of law. Euractiv reports his Wednesday remarks, when he said: “Some political groups… are openly threatening to use the instrument wrongly called ‘rule of law’ in order to discipline individual EU Member States through a majority vote… We need EU institutions that will not be involved in Member States’ internal political conflicts.”

While Slovenia has not gone as far as joining the veto itself, it nevertheless has supported the complaints so far.

As Breitbart London reported Monday, the attempt to block the budget so far has elicited anger from some Eurofederalists. Anti-Brexit campaigner and all-round EU cheerleader Guy Verhofstadt, for instance, claimed a “corrupt power grab” by Orban.

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