Despite the Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) rejecting her nomination last week, on 24 May, the plenary session of the European Parliament decided to vote in favour of Ildikó Gáll-Pelcz’s renomination to the European Court of Auditors.
The final tally ended up being 303 in favour, 278 against, and 52 abstentions, giving Gáll-Pelcz a plurality of votes in the Parliament, despite the Committee’s official misgivings.
The Hungarian engineer and economist expert is actually well-established in Brussels, having already served on the ECA from 2017.- In addition, she also held the position of even holding the office of one of Vice-President of the European Parliament between 2014 and 2017. She is currently seeking another six-year term in the Court of Auditors. However, that is yet to be decided.
The final call will be made by the Council on ECA nominations,
as both the Committee and the Parliament can only give non-binding recommendations to the responsible body after a vote.
One representative of each Member State serves on the Court of Auditors. Nominations are made by the respective governments, who are then voted on by the Committee on Budgetary Control, then the European Parliament for recommendations, with the final confirmation coming from the Council of the European Union.
So, while many on the left celebrated in Brussels and Budapest, the obstruction of Gáll-Pelcz’s renomination did not even get to the phase where the EP official asks the Council to reject the nomination, which would have required a majority of the votes cast opposing Gáll-Pelcz in the European Parliament.
Gáll-Pelcz is facing elevated levels of scrutiny because she is connected to PM Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, having served as one of their representatives in the Hungarian National Assembly between 2006 and 2010, and then as one of their Members of the European Parliament between 2010 and 2017.
The Ongoing Tensions Between the EP and the Orbán Administration
While the confirmation process for the new auditor is ongoing, five liberal MEPs held a press conference on Wednesday, 31 May, long-windedly complaining about Hungary’s upcoming Council presidency, due to happen in the second half of next year.
The next day, 1 June (when Gáll-Pelcz’s nomination was sustained by the EP), the liberal-majority European Parliament
accepted a resolution that ‘condemns the deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hungarian Government to undermine the founding values of the EU’.
However, in the meantime, negotiations between the European Commission and the Hungarian government are making headway about the frozen EU funds, about €13 billion of which are set to be released to Hungary by 2027. In fact, the liberal MEPs at the Wednesday press conference repeatedly claimed that the EU Commission and Council are not being harsh enough on the Orbán administration.
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