Viktor Orbán’s pseudo-EU global diplomacy has ignited talk of taking away his presidency and cancelling a Budapest summit, but also distracted attention from a fresh wave of repression inside Hungary, Report informs referring to EUObserver.
EU ambassadors will discuss the Hungarian prime minister's Moscow and Beijing trips at a meeting of the 'Coreper II' group in the EU Council in Brussels on Wednesday (July 10).
As they meet, Orbán will be in Washington for a Nato summit, where he's expected to continue grandstanding about his Ukraine peace mission, as though he represented Europe, due to Hungary's EU presidency, even though the presidency has no foreign-policy mandate.
He's also expected to meet the anti-EU and Russia-friendly former US president Donald Trump, possibly at the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation think-tank in Washington, which is co-funded by Orbán, and which would amount to another diplomatic faux pas, by snubbing the sitting US president, Joe Biden, ahead of US elections in November.
It was "too early to tell" on Monday whether Coreper II would openly discuss anti-Orbán sanctions, one EU diplomat said.
“Ambassadors will seek more clarity” on what Orbán was doing, while “tensions are high after only seven days of [Hungary’s EU] presidency,” a second EU diplomat said.
But behind the scenes, several EU states were already discussing whether to take away Hungary's six-month EU presidency and fill the gap until 2025, when Poland takes over, by having the last two EU presidencies, Spain and Belgium, do the job instead, according to three other diplomats.
Some EU capitals are also talking about changing the venue of a summit of the European Political Community (EPC), due to take place in Budapest in November, after the European Commission already said it was "seriously in doubt" if its top officials would go to the Hungarian capital after the summer break for a courtesy EU-presidency visit, as planned.
The EPC is not an EU entity, but includes the 27 EU countries, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Monaco, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the UK, as well as South Caucasus and Western Balkan nations.
Legally speaking, EU states would have to first unanimously agree that Hungary had violated EU values under Article 2 of their treaty, before holding a majority vote to cancel the Hungarian presidency and its EU Council voting rights under Article 7 (2) + (3) of their accord.
The EPC leaders could informally decide to move the Budapest summit at their next meeting, due in London on July 18, an EU official said.
But politically speaking, the EU-presidency sanctions would be harder to achieve because Orbán’s ally, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, could block the Article 2 preliminaries.