Support for Hungary sanctions builds among MEPs

Hungary’s critics in Parliament say it has breached EU values and should lose its voting rights.

STRASBOURG, France — The European Parliament could become the first EU institution to openly call for sanctions against Hungary for breaching EU law, with majority support building among MEPs to back a resolution in the plenary on Wednesday.

Officials from various blocs in the Parliament said they believed a majority would back a resolution urging the EU to trigger Article 7 in response to Hungary’s approval of a controversial law to close the Central European University in Budapest. Article 7, which has never been invoked, would lead to the suspension of Hungary’s voting rights in the European Council.

The joint motion for a resolution was tabled by the Socialists & Democrats, the liberal ALDE, the Greens and the far-left GUE. Some members of the conservative European People’s Party, to which Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party is affiliated, are also likely to vote in favor of the text.

“The Parliament can’t act as if nothing happened,” said Frank Engel, a member of the EPP from Luxembourg. “We can no longer be the witness to Hungary’s slide towards authoritarianism.”

Engel said he would back the center-left resolution in order to put “institutional pressure” on Hungary and launch a “new structural dialogue.”

The S&D text says the current situation in Hungary “represents a clear risk of a serious breach of the values” included in the EU treaties and “warrants the launch of the Article 7(1) TEU procedure.”

The European Commission has given Hungary one month to present arguments that its education bill does comply with EU law. While there is growing support among MEPs for sanctions, the largest group in the European Parliament — the EPP — is still split over how to respond to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s repeated breaches of EU law.

Orbán’s Fidesz is a long-standing member of the EPP, which has refused to kick the Hungarian party out. Instead, the EPP asked Fidesz and Hungarian authorities to comply with the Commission’s request regarding the new education law.

At a group meeting last Wednesday, EPP members drafted a much milder draft resolution than their left-leaning rivals, calling on the Commission to “thoroughly assess the situation in Hungary.”

The S&D text, on the other hand, asked the Hungarian government to suspend its changes to the Higher Education Act and called on the Commission to “strictly monitor” the use of EU funds by the Hungarian government.

It also expanded the list of offenses committed by the Hungarian government “over the past few years,” including “attacks against civil society organizations and human rights defenders, the rights of asylum seekers, mass surveillance of citizens, freedom of association, freedom of expression, media pluralism and the closure of the Hungarian mainstream newspaper Népszabadság.” It also referred to Hungary’s “segregation of Roma children in education, LGBTI rights, women’s rights.”

In 2015, MEPs adopted a resolution calling on the Commission to activate the EU’s rule of law procedure against Orbán’s government.

In addition, according to the Article 7 procedure, the European Council would need to obtain the consent of the European Parliament to determine the existence of a serious and persistent breach by a member state.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of the MEP Frank Engel.

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