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MEMBER STATES AND EU VALUES: THE CHALLENGE OF NATIONALISM
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(TEU) to respond to situations in which actions
taken by Member States breach values such as
respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy,
equality, the rule of law and respect for human
rights deemed fundamental to the Union in
Article 2 of the Treaty. For the moment, the
Commission has only considered measures con-
templated in point 7.1 TEU, which requires a
four-fifths majority to invoke and supposes no
more than the issuance of recommendations to
the state in question. The implementation of
7.2, which involves serious sanctions such as the
loss of a country’s vote in the Council and re-
quires unanimity, is unlikely in the light of warn-
ings from the Hungarian government that such
a move would constitute an intromission in
Poland’s internal affairs it could not accept.
Since he assumed power in Budapest for the
second time in 2010, Victor Orbán has man-
aged to turn Hungary into a majority autocracy
that has served as an inspiration for the ruling
PiS government in Poland and various others in
the region. Orbán, leader of Fidesz, an ultrana-
tionalist and anti-European party that won over
49 % of the vote and more than two thirds of
the seats in the April general elections, has used
the confessional, homophobic and illiberal con-
stitution of 2011 to create a corrupt and well-
entrenched authoritarian oligarchic regime that
restricts free expression and controls the media,
the country’s judicial and educational systems
and civil society organisations with a heavy
hand, thereby hindering in practice any possibil-
ity of alternation of power. His invitation to eth-
nic Hungarians in regions of other countries
such as Romania and Slovakia beyond the
Hungarian borders established in the Trianon
Treaty of 1920 to apply for double nationality
and the right to vote in Hungarian elections also
threatens to destabilise these other Member
States.
The situation is not much better in the two
other countries that make up the rest of the V4.
Milos Zeman, a left-wing nationalist who has
described Islam as “the enemy of civilisation”,
was re-elected as president of the Czech
Republic in January. Billionaire businessman
Andrej Babis currently occupies the post of
prime minister as leader of Action of Dissatisfied
Citizens (ANO), a populist party he founded in
what might have been an attempt to emulate
Orbán or politically outmanoeuvre the rising,
even more right-wing, Freedom and Direct
Democracy party founded by Tomio Okamura, a
Czech of partial Japanese descent, which cap-
tured 10.6 % of the vote in the Hungary’s
October 2017 parliamentary elections. Slovakia’s
leftist-cum-populist prime minister Robert Fico,
under whose mandate individual police files
were created for the country’s 400,000 Roma
citizens, was recently forced to resign following
the gang-style assassination of Jan Kuciak, a
journalist who had been investigating ties be-
tween the Calabrian mafia and his government
and close associates.
The EU cannot afford to harbour in its midst
regimes that undermine the values and princi-
ples on which the European project has been
built and constitute permanent nuclei of insta-
bility and conflict that periodically involves vio-
lence against ethnic minorities. Lamentably, as
we have seen, the instruments at the Union’s
disposal to curb such drifts, which fundamen-
tally boil down to the provisions contemplated
in Article 7 of the Treaty, are limited and largely
ineffective, in large part by the need for una-
nimity. Conflicting interests are also a factor.
According to the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
, Germany’s total trade with V4 Group
countries reached 256 billion euros in 2016. If
we compare this figure to the 170 billion and
167 billion euros of trade it maintained with