Original Financial Times article (behind paywall)
The European Union will sabotage Hungary’s economy if Budapest blocks fresh aid to Ukraine at a summit this week, under a confidential plan drawn up by Brussels, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Brussels has outlined a strategy to explicitly target Hungary’s economic weaknesses, imperil its currency and drive a collapse in investor confidence in a bid to hurt “jobs and growth” if Budapest refuses to lift its veto on the aid to Kyiv, the newspaper reported, citing a document drawn up by EU officials.
Notorious for many bitter feuds with the EU during his 13 years in power, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has become a vocal critic of the bloc’s support for Ukraine and boasted about his ties with the Kremlin since Russia went to war in Ukraine in February 2022.
The document seen by FT declares that “in the case of no agreement in the February 1 [summit], other heads of state and government would publicly declare that in the light of the unconstructive behaviour of the Hungarian PM . . . they cannot imagine that” EU funds would be provided to Budapest.
This is stupid:
Whatever the EU does will help Orban. So why not try this approach? Hell Orban is already doing half the work, making sure the country’s economy goes down the shitter.
Just accept the fact that no matter what the EU does, Orban will stay popular. The brain of the average Hungarian voter is mush anyways.
Sometimes i wonder if that is a regional culture thing in that part of Europe considering the kind of people Austria and Bavaria vote for in large numbers too.
You haven’t seen the results from the last Dutch election? If it’s regional, the region is all of Europe.
I am not talking about the last one or two election but more like the last 50-100 years.
Yay acceptable racism huh?
Racism against uhhhhh…
Ah yes! The race of central europeans. Wait…
Oh so if it’s just hurtfully stereotyping a location in the world then that’s fine then? You don’t even realise the hypocrisy here
That’s something else… We’re talking racism here.
You are literally talking semantics here. It’s basically racism against the slavic people, but you don’t see that.
Since when are austrians and bavarians slavs? Central europe is a large, diverse place
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How would you deal with Orban then?
The current freezing of EU fund things are somewhat working. And he can’t use them to make himself look like a victim. He likes to speak about himself as “We Hungarians”, and this just helps him with that.
This stops working when the matters that Orban is vetoing are time-critical. Like military aid for Ukraine.
Orban is creating a situation where the EU has two bad alternatives to choose from, and he doesn’t think they’ll turn on Hungary. But they might, because at this point, most of Europe seems like they’d prefer Ukraine being in the union over Hungary. So if Orban calls the EU’s bluff, there’s a very good chance that the EU will call Orban’s bluff and kill their voting rights, with full knowledge that it would strongly push Hungary towards leaving the Union. It’s a trade off; everyone’s done the math at this point. We’ll see how it actually pans out in the coming weeks.
I’d take Ukraine instead of Hungary any day. I feel bad for the Hungarians and suspect the reason for the problem is Kremlin propaganda trying to divide the EU, but at a certain point enough is enough. They can be an example for other countries, like Brexit.
If he was already saying it then what does it matter? 😄 What’s he gonna say, “I was lying before but now they’re really doing it”? Lol.
I fear that we will look at the situation of the recent past years with a lot of nostalgia and think “we were happy but we didn’t know it”…
I get your point, but at the other hand Orban has been doing everything he can to get the EU to take an action like this ao he can use it for his narrative against them.
It’s high time that Hungarians decide if they want in the EU or not. The sooner they make that decision the better.
And yes I fully realize that the democratic process is broken in Hungary, and that any attempt to pretend this will be a democratic decision will fail, and that Hungarians will have to take to the streets eventually.
No way around it. I’m their neighbor and we’ve been through this stuff ourselves and it was hard but it’s something that needs to be done if they hope to ever regain democracy. Eternal vigilance and all that. Postponing it only makes it worse.
We will stand with them but it’s not a problem we can solve for them.