The Parliament approves to cut funds to countries that they skip the values europeosLa EU is part of two blocks with plans to cut funds to countries “rebellious”women who lead Europe remain conservative

One of the potatoes hot in the new mandate of Ursula von der Leyen at the front of the European Commission (EC) will be linking or non-respect of the countries members to the rule of law to the granting of european funds. Poland and Hungary, major beneficiaries, batallarán in the next few months to avoid that this clause be included in the new Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-2027.

last Thursday, the Commission decided to bring to Hungary the Court of Justice of the EU to criminalize activities in support of asylum applications and further limit the right to seek asylum. Popularly known as ” the law “Stop Soros”, this legislative package approved in June 2018 threat with jail time to organizations that help the undocumented migrants that the Government of Viktor Orban considered to be under the control of the billionaire philanthropist of Hungarian origin.

The community Executive has also opened a record penalty by the situation of migrants in transit areas near the border with Serbia. The people that “violate the interests of national security, Hungarian or are a threat to public order” can receive a “restraining order”, that will keep them out of an area of eight kilometres of the Schengen border of Hungary, according to the translation of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a non-governmental organization that enforces the rule of law.

Democracy “iliberal” to the Hungarian

The Hungarian prime minister said yesterday in Baile Tusnad (Romania), where she leads an annual cultural festival of ethnic Hungarian, the struggle against liberal democracy will be his main political project during the next 15 years, in a challenge to the values of the EU. “It is feasible, possible and rational to place the thesis of the democracy iliberal against the liberal democracy, not only intellectually but as a political program,” he said.

For the statements and actions aimed at this purpose, Orban has become the target of criticism from Brussels and the majority of the Council’s efforts to convert Hungary into what he calls a “democracy iliberal”. One of the books of the time, ” How to die democracies “, of the Harvard faculty members Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and translated into Spanish by Ariel, described in a few lines how Orban has subverted the independence of the judiciary in favour of his party, Fidesz: “The governments cannot remove independent judges can ignore them through a judicial process. The Orbán expanded the size of the Constitutional Court of eight to fifteen, and changed the rules of nomination for the ruling party Fidesz could appoint the new judges and to place party loyalists in these new positions”. After winning in 2010 by a two-thirds majority in the Parliament, Fidesz used this supermajority to rewrite the constitution and electoral laws for their benefit, reformulating in addition to the electoral districts to maximize the gain of seats.

30 years Ago, a young Orban, then spokesman of the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Imre Nagy and delivered a speech in favor of free elections and the withdrawal of soviet troops from Hungary. Three decades later, the independence of the judiciary in Hungary has deteriorated notably in recent years, according to the complaint by the american organization Freedom House, which cites cases such as the powerful National Judicial Office (OBH), directed by Tünde Handó, a person very close to Orban, who is married to the president of the delegation of Fidesz in the European Parliament József Szájer. Handó holds a position in which you can make appointments high court and to exercise a great authority over the disciplinary procedures and the finances of the courts.

“it Is clear that the 13 votes of Fidesz were vital to the election” of Von der Leyen

Chosen with a very discrete minority, Von der Leyen said in its statement of intent, which fully supported a “mechanism of EU law” to silence the accusations of owing his presidency to the nationalist governments of Warsaw and Budapest who supported publicly his appointment. “It is clear that the 13 votes of Fidesz were vital to the election” of Von der Leyen, boasted the party of hungary, which craves now your reward, and that “to remedy the many errors in the legacy of the outgoing president of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker”, according to has picked up the daily pro-government “Daily News Hungary”.

the countries of The Visegrad claimed its first head with the pressure exerted to thwart the plans of Pedro Sanchez (chief negotiator of the social democrats) in their operation to make the present of the EC Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the Commission Juncker and the black beast of Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski (leader of the government party in poland, Law and Justice) in their alleged attempts to bend the rule of law to favor their political interests.

“Respect to the proposal to make the rule of Law an integral part of the next multiannual financial framework. It is about strengthening the confidence between us, which is so good for our domestic market as well as for our internal drive. The Commission will always be an independent guardian of the Treaties. Mrs. Justice is blind: it will defend the rule of law in any place and by whomsoever attacked,” said the German in its roadmap for the next five years. However, Von der Leyen, from the christian democrats of the CDU, of the same european family that Orban (European Popular Party), has revealed little about how it intends to deal with the upcoming negotiations on the seven-year budget of the EU.

High dependency on the european funds

“The proposal of the Commission envisages that, if they do not respect the rule of law in some member States, funds of the budget of the EU committed with that member State may be frozen,” he said in a telephone interview with ABC Annemie Turtelboom, the audit of Court of Accounts of the EU that led the opinion published July 2018 on the proposal.

Hungary receives an average of more than 4,000 million euros of the EU budget, which makes it the third net recipient of funds among the member states behind only Poland and Greece, first and second, respectively. According to calculations of the German think-tank Centre for European Policy (CEP) would be € 400 for every Hungarian. To calibrate the decisive importance of the european funds in the Hungarian economy, according to a study by KPMG and GKI picked up by the think tank Hungarian KKI, although the GDP magyar grew 4.6% in the period 2006-2015, without EU funds, the GDP growth would have been only 1.8% between 2007 and 2013.

The academic of the University of Sussex Anna Szamely argues that between 2010 and 2010, Hungary experienced a marked decrease in measures of competitiveness and in the quality of education, falling further behind in the rankings of corruption and on the Scoreboard the European Innovation which are published annually by the European Commission. In the judgment of Szamely, the chain of european funding in research projects in Hungary presents seven locks linked to a process of excessively centralized enfangado in corruption and in recruitment to the finger where a premium is loyalty to the central power on the productivity, reducing substantially the competitiveness of channeling the aid. The researcher adds that in these últims years, 60% of the EU funds has been earmarked for economic development in Hungary at the expense of boosting the research, innovation, education or healthcare. “This strategy has been successful in the registry of macroeconomic indicators satisfactory in the short term, but runs the risk of wearing away the trust in investments and long-term growth,” he stresses.

The fight between Brussels and Budapest is expected to be more fierce than in the previous legislature. Although their predecessors romanians and bulgarians in the rotating presidency this innovation that is expected to include in the Multiannual Financial Framework, the premier Finnish, Antti Rinne, said the European Parliament on 17 July that the mandate of the Council of the EU will focus on the fight against climate change and in the negotiations on how to link more closely the disbursement of funds from the EU with the respect for the rule of law in the member States. As a response, the new minister of the Hungarian Justice Judit Varga said to Reuters that their aim is to try to knock this proposal on the grounds that the EU already has sufficient tools to safeguard the rule of law and the distribution of the EU funding.