The European Union: post-Orbán but not (yet) post-Trump

Péter Magyar’s stunning victory in Hungary’s elections on Sunday, with scenes in Budapest so reminiscent of 1989, has created a wave of hope and relief across Europe. Moving on from Orbán’s far-right EU obstructionism, corruption and collaboration with Putin and Trump is a huge moment. But that it went on over 16 years, with relatively little and rather ineffective pushbacks from the EU, also needs serious reflection.

There is a mixture of lessons to be learnt from the Tisza Party success, both for fighting the far-right, and for tackling deliberate, authoritarian blockers within the EU. But while some serious analysis of the former is already under way, the EU and Brussels look less likely to undertake serious inward-looking criticism of what more could and should have been done. Yet this is vital; the far-right has not disappeared even if it’s received quite a blow.

Magyar has already spoken of repairing relations with the EU, not least to allow the EU’s planned €90 billion loan to Ukraine to go ahead. Hungary’s new leader, as well as dealing with all the politics of his transition into power and tackling the embedded corruption and cronyism left behind by Orbán, will want to move as quickly as possible to get Brussels to unfreeze almost €18 billion, suspended from payment due to EU rule of law concerns. Without a deal, these funds could no longer be available after this August.

There is a balance to be struck here. The EU will want to support Hungary’s, so-welcome new government. But it will want to see evidence that Péter Magyar can move fast on unpicking key elements of Orban’s nepotistic system. Yet, there is an associated risk here that if the EU goes for an overly nit-picking approach, it could dent the extraordinary good-will and optimistic dynamic in Hungary’s politics in the wake of Sunday’s elections. The EU’s leaders will need to keep a political eye on the detailed investigation that the Commission’s officials will do – necessary investigations but ones that can easily (as they have in the past) veer into patronising demands with knock-on political impacts in domestic politics.

New Momentum on Enlargement?

Hungary’s new government-to-be is good news across many headings. Anything not welcome by the Trump and Putin twins is a big plus, given the disastrous US/Israeli war in the Middle East, and especially for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s ongoing war.

Orbán had, of course, been determinedly blocking Ukraine’s progress in EU accession talks. Magyar is not expected to be pro-Ukraine’s rapid accession – but nor are many other EU states. But if accession talks can now go forward across different areas, that will be a real plus.

The wider problem with the EU’s enlargement process is the sense that it has stalled through lack of political will and a range of obstacles that loom ahead. Montenegro and Albania are leading the current set of EU accession candidates. But given that France has to either have a referendum or get a two-thirds majority in parliament for a new accession, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. Other member states’ politics and elections will play into this too.

Once seen as the most powerful foreign policy tool in the EU’s remit, enlargement has slowed to a bureaucratic and political crawl. And as we’ve seen with Ukraine, the EU’s leaders are not up for the proposal of Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to speed up Ukraine’s accession for political and strategic reasons.

EU Foreign Policy in the Era of Trump

Looking at broader geopolitics, the EU has, in many ways, been reduced to the role of bystander as Trump upends the international order and initiates conflicts and wars around the globe. And even before Trump’s second term, the EU was on the back foot as Israel continued its genocide in Gaza and now carries on with its forever wars, this time against Iran and Lebanon, mostly in lockstep with Trump.

But the Iran/Lebanon wars have resulted in more assertive responses from different EU member states (and even European but not EU country, the UK). Spain was the first to refuse the US permission to use airbases in Spain and two weeks’ ago made clear its airspace was also closed to US planes involved in attacks on Iran. France also, at the end of March, refused permission for Israeli flights carrying American weapons to use French airspace. Today, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, said she was suspending the automatic renewal of its defence agreement with Israel. And the UK has continued its balancing act of allowing some use of American airbases in Britain, for ‘defensive purposes’ (though when defensive becomes offensive is, at least, debatable).

As Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran spirals out of control and creates the beginning of major economic upset around the world, European leaders have chosen to speak out more frankly and more assertively. While President Macron always manages to sound more assertive and strategic than Keir Starmer, UK government ministers clearly now have some lee-way to be more critical in their comments. And, as Trump derides individual leaders and countries and attacks NATO, there is little benefit to European leaders in not speaking frankly.

Orbán’s defeat surely also gives EU leaders more confidence in their own European political institutions and goals and in standing up to the far-right interventions of Trump and Vance in different EU countries (Vance’s backing of Orbán a weak, inept failure).

What now for the EU? Many have argued, down the years, that the EU needs a much stronger, unified foreign policy – introducing full majority voting into this most sensitive of areas. And this argument is now being made again more forcefully. This is understandable both as the West splinters and given the experience of Viktor Orbán’s obstructionism (in truck with both Trump and Putin).

And yet, the EU – and wider Europe – are in many ways starting to do fairly well or at least better than in the more obsequious first year of Europe’s dealings with Trump and his chaotic, deliberate global disorder. There have been various different ad hoc groupings and connections made, whether on Ukraine or on how to attempt to intervene diplomatically in the disastrous fiasco of the Iran war or on dealing with Trump’s Greenland threats.

Only a few EU countries spoke out early and clearly against Israel’s Gaza genocide – notably Spain, Ireland, Belgium and Slovenia. But it is much preferable to have those voices, than a bland common EU position (just as it was better for France and Germany in 2003 to oppose the Iraq war supported by the UK (then a member state) than to have a common position).

And Spain’s lead on standing up to Trump in the face of the Iran war has contributed, it seems, to an emerging stronger, and indeed more unified, response from other EU states (and from the UK), as the level and depth of Trump’s folly continues to evolve and emerge.

Diversity of political and foreign policy stances may not always lead to maximum European strength. But it can prove a positive political dynamic and show ways the EU and/or its individual member states can act when speed and clarity are needed. A flexible power more than a superpower may be a positive in many ways.

Trump’s multi-level destabilising of geopolitics and geoeconomics is not going away any time soon. But Orbán’s departure together with European countries starting to have more confidence in working together effectively in opposing Trump and promoting their own geopolitical and democratic goals and interests, however difficult that is, looks like progress. It is, we must hope, the start of a much more effective, if inevitably patchy, European strategy in these most unstable of times.