this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Hungary’s parliament will convene an emergency session on Monday to do something its western partners have waited for, often impatiently, for more than a year: to hold a vote, finally, on approving Sweden’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.

But Hungary’s governing party, led by nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has signaled that it will boycott the session, blocking the chance for a vote and further delaying a decision on Stockholm’s bid. It’s the kind of obstruction of key policy objectives for which Orbán has become notorious within the European Union.

“We are the sand in the machinery, the stick between the spokes, the splinter under the fingernail,” Orbán said in a speech to tens of thousands of supporters in 2021.

That “stick between the spokes” tactic, and Orbán’s role as Europe’s perennial spoiler, has brought the EU to breaking point time and again as he has blocked crucial decisions to leverage concessions from the bloc, forcing its leaders to scramble to find workarounds.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 4 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


That “stick between the spokes” tactic, and Orbán’s role as Europe’s perennial spoiler, has brought the EU to breaking point time and again as he has blocked crucial decisions to leverage concessions from the bloc, forcing its leaders to scramble to find workarounds.

“We have Orbán fatigue now in Brussels,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters ahead of an EU summit on Thursday, where the Hungarian leader threatened to derail plans to provide Ukraine with a major funding package.

It has long been conventional wisdom within the EU that Orbán’s intransigence is purely transactional: that he is holding up key decisions as a way to force the bloc into releasing billions in funding that it has withheld from Hungary over alleged breaches of rule-of-law and democracy standards.

But Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based think tank Political Capital, said that while securing the funds is important to Orbán to shore up Hungary’s ailing economy, Europe’s longest-serving leader is motivated by more than just cash.

Daniel Freund, a German member of the Green party and lawmaker in the European Parliament, said Orbán’s serial blocking of crucial EU decisions shows that his veto power has given him influence within the bloc that endangers its very ability to function.

An anti-Islam populist and Orbán ally won elections in the Netherlands in November, while the far-right Alternative for Germany party has risen to second place in national polls behind Berlin’s mainstream conservative opposition.


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