The portfolio that Navracsics should not be given

Summer blog: One thing is clear – unlike other new EU member states, Hungary is not a suitable leader for the EU’s enlargement and neighbourhood policies.

Tibor Navracsics was officially nominated to be Hungary’s next European commissioner on Wednesday evening (30 July).

The nomination was no surprise, and, in sending his foreign minister, former head of his private office and one of his oldest and closest political allies, Viktor Orbán is putting forward a member of the small category of heavyweight Hungarian politicians. Orbán is also, in passing, showing more interest in the European Union than this very domestically minded prime minister is prone to.

Theoretically, Navracsics will now become a European technocrat whose life in Hungarian politics will not play into his decision-making. That is conceivable – he was, after all, an academic before he entered government in 1998 at the age of 32. But it is also highly unlikely that a man from one of the hottest hothouses in European politics – Orbán’s Fidesz party – will shed his political skin. And, certainly, it will take him a long time to convince counterparts that he is more than merely Orbán’s man in the Commission.

So what post should Navracsics get in the Commission? It is easier to identify a post that he should not get: the portfolio for enlargement and the EU’s neighbourhood policy. Unfortunately, this is a post that some think would be natural for a Hungarian and for Navracsics.

There is a respectable case for saying that a Hungarian commissioner would make a good job of the post, and not just because Hungary is a new-ish EU member state familiar with the demands and difficulties of adapting to the EU’s demands – like the Czech Republic, which is where the current commissioner for enlargement, Štefan Füle, comes from. Hungary has historically been a strong advocate of enlargement into the western Balkans (at the latest meeting of EU foreign ministers, for example, it presented a discussion paper about Bosnia). Hungary also has more historical ties with Europe’s southern neighbourhood than western Europeans assume (like other members of the Soviet bloc, Hungarians were active in engineering projects across north Africa and the Middle East before 1989), and it was notably committed in Libya during the military campaign of 2011, keeping its delegation open in Tripoli when all other EU states had closed theirs.

A good number of Hungarians feature at the top of EU diplomatic and security activities. The EU’s current special representative to central Asia is János Herman. The last head of the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Iraq was László Huszár, a top official in Hungary’s prison system. In the eastern neighbourhood, Hungarians are central to the EU’s efforts to help Ukraine. A Commission official with a lifetime of experience in trade – Peter Balas – leads the EU’s support group for Ukraine, and a former special envoy to Moldova, the not-universally-loved Kalman Mizsei, is leading the EU’s new security mission to Ukraine.

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But there is a far stronger case for suggesting that no country could be worse for the portfolio.

Hungary is – along with Bulgaria and Romania – the EU country that has clashed most frequently with the EU over the rule of law in the past five years. This is not a legacy problem, a result of a lack of reform. It is, rather, the result of a re-casting of the Hungarian state. Orbán made clear to Hungarians in Romania on Saturday (26 July) that “the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state”. He went on to say that this new state “does not deny foundational values of liberalism, [such] as freedom” and that he did not believe that “it is impossible to build an illiberal nation state within the EU”. Many will argue with his respect for the “foundational values of liberalism”, but what Orbán’s speech made absolutely clear is that Hungary is embarking on an experiment with many dangers. Meanwhile, reforms relating to the rule of law – including fundamental values – are now the alpha and omega in the EU’s enlargement talks, the first ‘chapters’ of laws to be discussed and the last to be concluded. Navracsics would not be a credible spokesman for those principles, both given the record of Orbán’s government and Orbán’s stated intent to experiment with a different approach to democracy.

Secondly, Navracsics could choose to spin elements of enlargement talks to promote Hungary’s own rancorous policy agenda with its neighbours. When he headed Fidesz’s parliamentary faction in 2009, Navracsics told a US diplomat – as disclosed in a leaked diplomatic cable – that “the principles” of a UN proposal for Kosovo drawn up by Martti Ahtisaari, “including the wide-ranging autonomies for nationalities, offer a solution for all similar situations of conflicts between majority and minority populations”. The diplomat continued: “Navracsics stated that the Fidesz policy statement does not advocate autonomy for Hungarians living beyond the border, the goal is to use the Ahtisaari principles to support their rights.” The EU’s enlargement and neighbourhood agendas would offer Navracsics plenty of opportunities to instrumentalise policies for Hungary’s purposes.

It is not just on the issue of Kosovo that Orbán and Navracsics have shown a willingness to use whatever chance arises to push a nationalist agenda. The two men have seized on the Ukraine crisis to try to increase the rights of Hungarians in Ukraine. The idea of stronger community rights is a perfectly legitimate topic at any time and particularly at a point when Ukraine is revising its constitution; but Orbán and Navracsics are using Ukraine’s multi-headed crisis to increase Hungarian influence and push an agenda that, as Orbán’s speech on Saturday suggests, is not an agenda based on liberal democracies’ advocacy of minority rights.

Hungary’s opportunism – and the accompanying dangers of its experiment – are all the more troubling because of the relationship between Orbán and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. That relationship has become closer, rather than more distant, in the course of the past crisis-dominated year. The economic ties have strengthened – Russia will design, fund and construct a new nuclear reactor; Hungary is strongly advocating the South Stream pipeline for Russian gas – but it is Orbán’s growing political proximity to Putin that would particularly alarm the EU’s eastern neighbours with which Navracsics would have to work.

The illiberal agenda that Orbán has been setting out in the months since he gained a second consecutive term as prime minister (his third in total) will take Hungary farther from the European mainstream. It is guaranteed that Orbán will generate troubling headlines for the EU for years ahead. Navracsics, if he were commissioner for enlargement and the neighbourhood policy, might not generate headlines, but his years close to the helm of Fidesz policy would guarantee him the mistrust of many interlocutors – and would engender hope among those anxious to secure as much political leeway as they can from the EU.

A country that is heading away from the European mainstream should not be charged with helping neighbouring countries come closer to Europe’s mainstream.