Decoupling EU Enlargement From Liberal Democracy: The Engagement of Hungary’s Government in Georgia and Serbia

Summary

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted the EU to revitalize its enlargement policy by granting candidate status to Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. After decades of “enlargement fatigue”, the EU sought to reassert itself as a normative actor in its neighborhood. Because accession depends on candidate countries’ compliance with liberal-democratic criteria, enlargement has significant potential to advance democratization. Not all member-state governments, however, see enlargement as a way to promote liberal democracy. Since coming to power in Hungary in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party have positioned themselves as challengers of liberalism at home and abroad, with the openly stated goal of transforming the EU from within. Together with potentially helping in the future to protect themselves from sanctions, which became a realistic scenario after the EU froze some of Hungary’s funding in 2022, decoupling enlargement from liberal democracy also served their goal of strengthening illiberalism internationally.

The revival of enlargement coincided with Hungary’s government temporarily holding important institutional levers to challenge the EU’s normative agenda—a Hungarian diplomat as enlargement commissioner and the presidency of the Council of the EU—in addition to its permanent veto power in the council. As well as to obstruct Ukraine’s accession, Orbán and Fidesz have used these and other tools to undermine the EU’s approach to two candidate countries with autocratizing governments: Georgia and Serbia.

In Georgia’s case, Hungary’s government diluted EU pressure on the Georgian Dream government, which has accelerated the country’s democratic backsliding. It did so through high-level visits and supportive statements, blocking sanctions, and helping entrench illiberal values that violated the EU’s Copenhagen Criteria. Orbán and Fidesz built close ties with Georgian Dream. They helped it maintain a pro-EU veneer for the sake of its electorate as well as deflect the blame for Georgia’s lack of accession progress onto the EU and the West.

In Serbia’s case, where the EU applied less pressure on President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party government for strategic reasons, most of Budapest’s efforts have aimed to accelerate the country’s accession. Before 2022, Orbán and Fidesz promoted this goal through, for example, deploying a high-level “EU integration adviser” to Belgrade and through the softening of critical reports in the European Commission. This intensified after 2022, with Hungary’s government using its council presidency to advance Serbia’s membership and accusing the EU of penalizing the country. This reinforced Vučić’s narrative portraying the EU as responsible for reforms and the accession process stalling.

With enlargement back on the EU agenda, Hungary’s actions shed light on the challenges facing the EU’s strongest democracy-promotion tool. This aligns with the growing calls for limiting the veto power of member-state governments when they undermine the union’s liberal-democratic foundations, as well as for shifting key foreign policy and enlargement decisions from unanimity to qualified majority voting.

Anastasia Mgaloblishvili is a ReThink.CEE Fellow 2024 of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.