(Mis)handling Budapest: The European Politics of the Rule of Law

This paper explores the political obstacles to the action of the European Parliament (EP) against rule of law violations by populist parties in EU Member States. While respect for liberal democratic principles constitutes a condition for EU membership, the political response of European institutions to democratic breaches in Hungary and Poland has been belated, inconsistent and relatively meek. The EP postponed formal action against the Fidesz majority under article 7 TEU until September 2018, despite international monitoring bodies evidencing Hungarian rule of law violations as early as 2011. The dominant European People’s Party (EPP) was instrumental in this delay, as it consistently opposed sanctions against Fidesz, an affiliate, while rapidly backing in January 2018 the use of Article 7 against Polish outsider PiS. We test the key hypothesis in the current literature according to which strategic partisan considerations explain this stand and put forward an alternative argument: that EPP MEPs also have distinctly normative reasons for supporting Fidesz. Loyalty to the Eurogroup is likely to proceed not only from the strategic necessity of maintaining the integrity of the EPP group, but also from a shared commitment to key values: national pride and the principle of popular sovereignty. To explore these different hypotheses, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of how EPP MEPs position themselves in EP debates on rule of law related issues in the period 2013-2018. We then rely on a series of semi-structured interviews with EPP MEPs that have adopted differentiated positions on this topic to further refine these findings. The study makes a key contribution to the literature on the drivers of MEP voting and to existing research on the EU’s role in addressing rule of law violations in Member States.