Hungary scraps parliamentary session as Sweden and Finland await NATO vote
Joel Gehrke
Video Embed
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has scrapped an upcoming parliamentary session, frustrating lawmakers keen to ratify Sweden and Finland’s applications to NATO.
“Government parties do not want a parliamentary session next week,” opposition lawmaker Agnes Vadai wrote Tuesday on social media. “So the ratification of Finnish and Sweden’s NATO accession will be cancelled again.”
FINLAND AND SWEDEN’S NATO AMBITIONS AT MERCY OF TURKEY AND HUNGARY
Orban’s government notified the lawmakers that a scheduled parliamentary session would be postponed in a letter that Vadai said she received on Tuesday. The note cited “ongoing negotiations with the European Commission” as the cause of the session’s delay, as Budapest is in the midst of a dispute with Brussels about access to European Union funds, which EU officials have restricted, “citing corruption and public procurement concerns,” as the European Parliament puts it.
“This government is pro-Russian, anti-EU and now anti-NATO,” alleged Vadai, the shadow defense minister for the liberal Democratic Coalition.
Orban has carved out an unusual position in international affairs, branding himself as “a Christian politician” standing athwart trans-Atlantic liberalism, an icon of conservative nationalism with close links to Russia and China. He dismissed warnings from then-President Donald Trump’s administration that Huawei’s entrenchment in Hungary could “erode freedom” in Europe and has impeded Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO on the grounds that Ukrainian laws designed to undercut Russian influence are discriminatory against ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine.
Those disputes have unfolded alongside deepening mistrust for Orban’s government in Brussels, where officials have frozen billions of euros of “EU cohesion funds” due to Orban’s poor reputation on rule-of-law issues.
“We’ll keep working with Hungarian authorities to overcome this situation,” EU Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms Elisa Ferreira said in December.
Sweden and Finland are members of the European Union, but their entry into NATO requires Hungary’s approval. Orban recently has taken the opportunity to undercut EU criticism of the rule of law in Hungary by muting Swedish and Finnish criticism.
“It’s not right for them to ask us to take them on board while they’re spreading blatant lies about Hungary, about the rule of law in Hungary, about our democracy and about life here,” Orban said. “[How] can anyone want to be our ally in a military system while they’re shamelessly spreading lies about Hungary? So let’s stop for a friendly word and ask them how this can be.”
Hungary and Turkey are the only members of the alliance that have yet to ratify the Nordic states’ accession to NATO. Turkey has used the application process as leverage to extract policy concessions from Helsinki and Stockholm, but Finland’s efforts to mollify Turkey have proven more successful than Sweden, raising the odds that Finland will be admitted before Sweden.
“We have no confirmation that will be the case, but we think that the overall assessment after many conversations recently is that the likelihood of this has increased,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Tuesday.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
NATO observers suspect that Orban will relent if he perceives Erdogan as changing course.
“Hungary doesn’t want to be the last,” Jamie Shea, a former NATO deputy assistant secretary-general, told European media recently. “If Turkey starts to move, I am sure Budapest will speed things up.”