In this analysis the number of right-wing MEPs who won seats in the 2019 European parliamentary elections are compared to how many seats right-wing parties are predicted to win this year. The countries covered are Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
‘States are free to reject decisions or judgements that are inconsistent with the treaties they signed,’ Senior Research Fellow at the European Centre for Law and Justice Nicolas Bauer told Hungarian Conservative.
‘I am convinced that the current leadership in Brussels does not take into account the opinion or expectations of the majority of European people, and we even see that they represent non-European interests in Brussels on key issues, such as illegal migration, the war in Ukraine or the EU’s competitiveness,’ Hungarian Member of the European Parliament Balázs Hidvéghi stated in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘You have to have different levels of political engagement. You have to win at different levels, the intellectual level, the battle of ideas level, you’ve got to win at this level. And then you’ve got the next level down, that you’ve got to win on policy, and win the debate politically, and then politicians translate these ideas into their own language and then they have to be able to convey that message to the voters. These are two different roles, but they are also overlapping. Like Edmund Burke, one of the greatest conservative thinkers, was also an active politician.’
The Polish History Museum in Warsaw, Poland, the venue for the 12th European Remembrance Symposium last month, has an impressive array of items on display, ranging from 17th-century sunken treasure recovered from the Vistula River to items related to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, such as a ball with which the Polish National Team scored against Russia at Euro 2012.
Belgium, currently holding the rotating EU Presidency, is urging member states to accelerate the Article 7 procedure against Hungary, which could result in the country losing its voting rights in EU decision-making. Pressure on Budapest over Ukraine has been increasing in recent months; Belgium’s call could be seen as part of this effort.
‘“Today marks a new chapter for Poland,” Ursula von der Leyen claimed in early May when announcing the European Commission’s decision to withdraw its case against Poland in the Article 7 procedure it had launched in 2017. I would add to that: “Today marks a final warning for all conservatives in the EU.”’
‘If we treat the deepening understanding of the common value of Rule of Law as we would the space race, with definite winners and losers, then we degrade it. There can be no winners and losers here, really, as every state is a winner and a loser simultaneously in their daily battles on the frontlines of the Rule of Law. Some of these battles are acute, some try to tackle chronic symptoms, and it is very hard to credibly create systems of indexing, wherein each and every state actor may be qualified according to the same, abstract level of success or failure on these merits.’
‘The rule of law’s conceptional imperfection makes it a perfect weapon, horribile dictu, a substantive lawfare.’
‘I firmly believe the EU is in dire need of a rule of law instrument but this instrument should be turned upside down. It should guarantee that the principle of rule of law developed and applied in Member States is similarly implemented in the activities of EU institutions.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.