Brussels – We all loved each other so much, like the title of Ettore Scola’s famous film. Once upon a time, just a few months ago, before the European elections in June, there was a political love story between the three mainstays of the sovereignist landscape in Europe: the two heavyweights of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party, Giorgia Meloni and former Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki, and Viktor Orbán, whose national party, Fidesz, had been kicked out by the Populars and seemed to be on the verge of finding a home in the very arms of the two allies. But after years of winking, the most apparent rift between Europe’s populist right-wingers has been consummated over relations with Russia. A rift so wide that the ECR says on its official website that Orbán’s Hungary is now “the Russian Trojan horse at the gates of the EU.”
In an article published by The Conservative, the ECR party’s “multilingual channel for centre-right ideas and commentary,” the European party led by the Italian premier unabashedly lashes out at Budapest, which is guilty of endangering European democracies by winking at Putin’s Russian. The accusation takes its cue from Orbán’s latest decision to simplify visa procedures for Russian and Belarusian citizens: for the Conservatives, the Magyar premier is “slowly working, in small steps,” with the aim of “facilitating the introduction of spies on the territory of a member state to destabilize the European Union.”
In the aftermath of the European elections, when there was speculation about the creation of a far-right supergroup in the EU Parliament, Orbán had declined an invitation to join ECR due to the simultaneous entry into Meloni’s group of five MEPs from the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, an ultranationalist and blatantly anti-Hungarian party. In the space of a few weeks, the Hungarian prime minister has given life to a new sovereignist group in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe, effectively incorporating the old Identity and Democracy group and also drawing some national cohorts right out of ECR.
ECR’s creation of further political space to the right, with Orbán’s Patriots and then also the Europe of Sovereign Nations founded by Germany’s AfD, gave Meloni a new outfit as a moderate right-wing leader, while also allowing ECR to stay out of the “cordon sanitaire” that populars, social democrats, and liberals have applied to the far right. A guise, that of the democratic and pro-European right, which ECR also explicitly rides on in the article in question: the author emphasizes the “usual anti-EU stance” of Orbán, who, with his visit to Moscow after assuming the presidency of the EU Council, wanted to “create the impression of a lack of unity among member states.”
In the mors tua, vita mea with which the ECR has put Orbán in the crosshairs to prove to EU institutions that it wants to rejoin the pro-European arc—”Pro-Europe, pro-democracy, pro-Ukraine,” these are the requirements pounced on repeatedly by Ursula von der Leyen to enter the EU halls of power— some minor contradictions remain. Such as the choice of the Italian government, coincidentally right along with Hungary, to prevent Ukraine from using its weapons on Russian soil.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
