Five Questions on How Viktor Orbán Is Testing the EU’s Democratic Core

What are the central issues between the Orbán government and the EU?

Lisa Anders: Since Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he has turned Hungary into a textbook example of democratic backsliding. In his 15-year reign, the Hungarian prime  minister and his Fidesz party have dismantled institutional checks and balances, weakened the independence of the judiciary, packed courts and state institutions with loyalists, changed the electoral system in their favor, fundamentally restricted media freedom and minority rights, and constricted civil society and academic freedom. For several consecutive years now, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) has classified Hungary as an electoral autocracy. This is the same regime category it uses for Russia and Belarus.

This process of democratic backsliding, that  you also describe in your book, blatantly violates many of the EU’s foundational values including the “union of law” as one of the EU’s core principles. Orbán also does not shy away from blocking important decisions, when it serves his own interests. As a result, he can prevent the EU from speaking with one voice, for example, when addressing the actions of other strongmen such as Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump.

Orbán himself and other members of the Hungarian government frame the conflict with the EU as a counter-hegemonic cultural war in the Gramscian sense. In a typically populist manner, they pit the supposedly left-liberal Brussels against traditional values, such as family and the nation, arguing that the Brussels elite aims at forcing “gender,” “wokeness,” and “migrants” onto Hungary.

When did the EU first consider taking action against Hungary? What instruments did they have at their disposal?

Sonja Priebus: When the EU treaties were crafted, backsliding in member states was not something anyone had envisioned. Initially, the only instruments available were the cumbersome Article 7 procedures, meant to establish that a country violates the EU’s values, and ordinary infringement procedures, which can be initiated whenever EU member states violate EU law. Both proved to be useless when facing a government deliberately and systematically dismantling democracy and the rule of law. Since 2014, EU actors have established new instruments for protecting rule of law in member states, starting with so-called dialogical tools, such as the Rule of Law Framework.

When it became clear that dialog would not be sufficient, the EU has become more assertive and rediscovered the power of the purse, linking disbursement of EU money to respect for the rule of law. It does so explicitly through the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation. And it does so implicitly by using economic and budgetary tools such as the Common Provisions Regulation, which details the rules for the EU’s seven-year budget, and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, created in 2021 to cushion the negative effects of the COVID pandemic. As we have argued in a 2023 paper, the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, which makes the disbursement of EU funds conditional on the rule of law, has been a crucial step toward supranationalizing rule of law protection in the EU. More recently, we argued that the European Commission seeks to replicate its pre-accession strategy by making polity conditionality toward member states a more permanent feature of the EU’s political and legal fabric.

Yet, the efficiency of these potentially powerful new conditionality tools hinges on their strict and consistent application. As we show for the first Ursula von der Leyen Commission, such a strict and consistent application is lacking. Also, given the increasing shift toward the right in the EU, we have become less optimistic about the protection of the rule of law and democracy at the EU level.

Why was it so difficult for the EU to act given that the derogations seem so obvious?

Lisa Anders: There are several reasons. First, the extent of democratic backsliding in EU member states was unprecedented, and the EU’s initial reactions were shaped by long-standing norms of consensus-seeking and accommodation that dominate EU decision-making. When the Commission began to grasp what was happening, it initially tried to respond in a consensual way, relying on the largely toothless dialogical tools that Sonja mentioned. In the Council, the same consensus-oriented mindset prevailed, allowing Hungary and Poland to protect their backsliding projects.

Second, some scholars have argued that there has been a long-standing deliberate under-enforcement of Article 2 values. The Commission, for instance, has refrained from taking more decisive steps out of fear of losing support among EU member states. The European Parliament, too, undermined more decisive action because of dynamics rooted in party politics. Until 2021, the Orbán government was protected by the European People’s Party, and prominent conservative politicians such as Angela Merkel repeatedly pushed for dialogical solutions rather than robust supranational rule of law enforcement.

Lastly, Hungary and Poland have increasingly abandoned the consensus norms themselves, openly threatening to exercise vetoes unless their demands are met. Given the unanimity requirement in many policy areas, such hostage-taking strategies can undermine the newly established conditionality tools. A recent example is Hungary’s threat to block an EU aid package for Ukraine, which ultimately pressured the Council to reduce the blocking of funds that had been withheld over rule of law concerns.

It seems this problem is spreading. Orbán talks about “changing the EU from within” and now other countries—both inside the EU and on a path to accession—are creating similar problems. What are the new risks?

Sonja Priebus: Yes, you are right. Between 2010 and 2014, Fidesz still had a more or less cooperative stance and it was viewed as embracing a soft Euroscepticism. Following their re-election in 2014, it has become extremely confrontational, openly waging a war against “the Brussels bureaucrats.” Despite this hard-Eurosceptic turn, Orbán has so far rejected an exit from the EU. His aim is “to occupy Brussels,” to change the EU from within and to build an illiberal and Eurosceptic majority in the European institutions. One crucial step in “occupying Brussels” was the founding of the political party group “Patriots for Europe” in July 2024, which has become the third-largest group in the European Parliament.

Initially Hungary was alone in presenting these sorts of challenges. In recent years, however, we have seen the rise of right-wing populist forces across Europe and in Poland, Italy, Slovakia, and most recently, Czechia. Slovakia’s Robert Fico has been emulating Orbán’s illiberal playbook. At the European level, these forces have been strengthened by the right-wing drift made visible by the 2024 European Parliament elections. Moreover, this drift is supported by the biggest center-right group, the European People’s Party, which includes the German governing parties CDU/CSU. The power balance within the EU has shifted significantly to the right since, with the European People’s Party (EPP) now willing to push through its political agenda with the help of the so-called “Venezuela majority” in the European Parliament, that is, the votes of the three right-wing groups: European Reformers and Conservatives, Patriots for Europe, and the Europe of Sovereign Nations. The damage is not limited to democracy and legal issues: we have seen a major rollback of green legislation under the second von der Leyen Commission as well. Another prominent example is the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum. With this pact, the EU adopts a much stricter stance toward migration, which would not have found a majority among EU leaders just a few years ago. Since changing the institutional setup of the EU requires unanimity, at least the formal reallocation of powers is probably not something we will see soon. But the risk cannot be ruled out altogether.

These issues now have a trans-Atlantic dimension, as the Trump administration has a certain affinity with the Orbán government. Do U.S. preferences on this issue matter for Europe?

Lisa Anders: Orbán has become the center of a transnational right-wing network that seeks to promote illiberalism, an “illiberal transnational field,” as observers coined it. Through government-created institutions such as the extremely well-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), they foster ties with other right-wing forces. Conferences organized by the MCC and their partners bring together various right-wing figures and organizations to discuss strategies of “overcoming the deep state” and ways to “win the culture war.”  These activities have engaged individual members of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, The Heritage Foundation, and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Sonja Priebus: Trump considers Orbán to be “a great leader in Europe” and he explicitly supports Europe’s far-right parties. The latest U.S. National Security Strategy paints a picture of Europe on the verge of cultural collapse and “civilizational erasure” due to immigration, which clearly echoes the claims of Orbán and other nationalists. Trump has also clearly emulated elements from Orbán’s illiberal playbook, spearheading an “Orbánisation of America.” For his part, Orbán has always craved good relations with the U.S. president and counts on his backing, especially in the run-up to the April 2026 Hungarian general elections.

It is unclear whether the creation of such a transnational network and Trump’s support for Orbán would translate into actual political leverage. At this point, we can only speculate. What we are seeing, irrespective of Trump’s support, is that Orbán generally feels emboldened by the global shift to the right. Additionally, he can use his illiberal network and close relations with the U.S. administration domestically to demonstrate how powerful he and his government are. Orbán has, for example, accepted Trump’s invitation to his Board of Peace. By leveraging these connections, he hopes to galvanize electoral support.

But there is another crucial unknown in the equation: the outcome of the April 2026 parliamentary elections. Polls suggest that his challenger, Péter Magyar, could win and hence replace Orbán and his government. While Magyar’s electoral victory would theoretically put an end to the Orbán regime, I am less convinced that this would also be the end of the Orbán problem. As we have seen, Orbán is not alone.

Lisa Anders is a lecturer in German & European Politics at King’s College London. Sonja Priebus is a lecturer and Chair of European Studies at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder.

Thumbnail credit: Estonian Presidency (Flickr)