Katalin Halmai: Did you consult each other when you were appointed rapporteurs of the Hungarian file?

Judith Sargentini: As the coordinator of LIBE [the EP’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs] since 2014, I followed the work that Rui had been doing before. And we, like Gwendoline, had the same advisors. However, Rui had written the first report in 2013, and we only got permission to work on the report that finally activated the Article 7 procedure in 2017.¹ By then, he was already back in Portugal. So there wasn’t a smooth transition like with Gwendoline in 2019, and now with Tineke Strik [the current LIBE rapporteur]. There was a space in between.

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: When we started working in the new parliament in 2019, there was a discussion about the different files, and it was immediately decided that the Hungarian rule of law dossier would stay in the Green Group. I became Hungary’s rapporteur almost immediately, and from that moment, it was a big part of my job. And yes, I consulted Judith. I went once to the Netherlands to meet her with my assistant. It was very important to know what she had been doing.

Was talking to your predecessor encouraging or demoralising for you?

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield:  It was very helpful. I don’t know if the word “encouraging” is the proper one to describe it, but she prepared me for the difficulties and shared her experiences about what we were going against and how it would work. I have never done anything in the Parliament without asking people who had already worked on the relevant topic. I always find it very useful to learn about others’ ideas.

Rui Tavares: The LIBE Secretariat and other advisors were also a huge help for all of us.

Judith Sargentini: I agree. In general, the internal support was very good.  But it is also true that the President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani [from the centre-right European People’s Party], said on the day before the vote in a press conference in Italy that he would not vote in favour of my report, and his party, Forza Italia, indeed did not do so. And that was the president of the house. At that point, I had also become a target in Hungary, with posts and advertisements in the pro-government newspapers with my face on it.

Rui Tavares: This is a difference between Judith and me, because in my days, the Parliament’s president was [the Socialist] Martin Schulz, and he was very interested in the report. I almost always had a direct line to him if I wanted to ask for a meeting, which would be smoothly and quickly arranged. And we were kind of in the same boat when we were attacked by Fidesz [Orbán’s Hungarian political party].

But at the time, there was no Soros conspiracy. That shift happened after the report was adopted. I remember visiting Hungary and many Fidesz ministers being very proud of George Soros and saying: “Oh, he’s a Hungarian. Very smart Hungarian. The world knows how smart Hungarians are.” When the report came out, the Fidesz line of attack was mostly focused on German utility companies. According to the government’s propaganda, we in the EP were in the pockets of German utility companies that wanted to make Hungarians pay more for their services. This was completely bizarre, as I didn’t even know about these companies and certainly wasn’t in their pockets. In 2015, when my mandate as MEP ended, the story shifted to Soros.

What does being a rapporteur on the Hungarian rule of law issues take? Would you do it again?

Rui Tavares:  Of course, I would do it again! It’s fascinating. You have to know more about Hungary and the Hungarians, and this is one of the best things about the job. The government always tries to portray the work of the rapporteur as being against Hungary, which is not true. In the Green Group, we have always been very careful in separating the people and the question of the rule of law for the EU as a whole. The European Union is not worried about a single country. It’s worried about a decrease in the standards of rule of law for every member state. We have seen that now other governments know that they can bend the values of the European Union to their will because the EU Council has let the government of Viktor Orbán do what it did.

The European Union is not worried about a single country. It’s worried about a decrease in the standards of rule of law for every member state.

I even learned some Hungarian at the time, even if now it’s mostly forgotten, but it was important. During the eurozone crisis in Portugal, we had the Troika [a joint decision group created by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund]. I understood that we could not do what they did: come to Portugal every three months for an evaluation, not speak a word of Portuguese, and not speak to the Portuguese public opinion. I was aware that we needed to have a dialogue with the Hungarian public. We needed to try to make it understood that we like Hungary and that we appreciate its contribution to the Union. Learning some words in Hungarian, this famously difficult language, helped us, and people appreciated that.

But then the verbal threats started coming. We received many negative messages in our inbox at the time, including death threats. At a certain point, I wrote a letter in response, saying: “I know what you are thinking as a Hungarian: what does this guy from Portugal have to do with Hungary?”. I explained what EU values are stipulated in Article 2 of the Treaties, how the European Parliament works, how I was appointed rapporteur, and what my job was. And incredibly, even to me, there were some positive replies.

Judith Sargentini: I’d do it again too. But I would ask for more support. We only got permission to do the Article 7 report in 2017, and it took until September 2018 to get the two-thirds majority needed for the report to be adopted. Some in the EPP thought that they couldn’t clearly say that they wanted this report, and therefore, they would abstain.

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: I was in a slightly different situation to Rui and Judith. By the time I arrived, Hungary’s situation had been exposed thanks to their work. After very few months, Fidesz became a pariah because it had left the EPP. The dynamics completely changed. My job was to take the Article 7 procedure forward. We had to continue what Judith had started; we had to convince the EU Council to act, and the European Commission to be vigilant. We started another legislative process to suspend money for those who misuse it – the so-called conditionality mechanism – which was indirectly linked to the Article 7 process. However, not everything happened as it should have because of the resistance in member states’ governments. It took a lot of diplomacy, which I was not prepared for.

What did you expect when you were working on your reports? Did you expect European institutions and the Hungarian government to follow your recommendations?

Rui Tavares: I was never under the impression that things would move very quickly. First of all, we did not have a two-thirds majority, and the best we could hope for was a simple majority, but the simple majority does not activate the Article 7 procedure. This only became possible after Judith’s report.

So we needed to thread carefully, and this was a source of misunderstanding. Guy Verhofstadt [the leader of the Liberal ALDE Group] decided to pull out of the consensus because the report was not strong enough and did not propose the activation of the Article 7 procedure. But eventually, he understood that this was not possible at the time because we were nowhere near a qualified majority.

Judith Sargentini: We had the same issue with the Liberals. When we got to talk about the strategy to get the majority for my report to activate the Article 7 procedure, the Liberals wanted to speed it up. They said: “We have all the information; we need a stapler to staple it all together and table it.” They wanted a vote before Christmas 2017. I delayed it because there were parliamentary elections in Hungary in April 2018, and the EPP would never have been willing to support the report on the eve of elections. But the Liberals insisted that we should hurry up. Of course, we were in a hurry, but losing the vote is not a very smart tactic.

Rui Tavares: I think that we, as Greens, had a much more balanced way of looking at the three reports. They were important, and it was necessary to act quickly. One of our goals was to document, to create a snapshot of where the rule of law situation stood at that point in Hungary.

When producing all those recommendations, I was not thinking that the Hungarian government would implement them. But if one day there is a transition in Hungary, where people want to recover democracy and do a kind of reverse engineering to the authoritarian project of Orbán, they can use our reports as a way to go back. Everything is documented: what Fidesz did to the supreme court, the constitutional court, the data protection authority, and so on. The report serves as a document that can be used 10, 20 years later, or even more.

People thought that if countries in Central and Eastern Europe joined the EU, everything would go well. They were very naive.

I come from a country that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy, and I know that you need those kinds of documents to create an environment where every opposition party can agree on the same topics. You can put these documents on the table and show that this is what we had before Orbán started to dismantle the rule of law.

Looking at the three reports together, but also at the situation in Hungary now, what went wrong?

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: I don’t think anyone ever expected that the intervention on the European level would change things in the Hungarian government. I never thought that we would be saving Hungary, and I don’t think anyone thought that. But since 2010, the Parliament has played an important role in alerting about the developments. We did the work, and we alerted more and more people in the EP. We also have more and more allies in the Commission and in the Council.

I must admit that I am not very optimistic about Hungary. The Council very clearly holds huge responsibility. If they had acted earlier, the situation could have changed. It is not just the Article 7 procedure, but a number of other things. For example, I think that the Hungarian presidency of the Council [in the second half of 2024] was a mistake. If there had been a political will to strip Hungary of the rotating presidency, it would have been an important signal.

So the answer to the question of what went wrong is a long story. It concerns the  local, national, and European level. One element is definitely the weakness of the EU Council. Even when dynamics were bad in the Parliament, and even when we were not as strong as we should have been, the EP was a positive actor in all of this.

Rui Tavares: I think there was also a failure of imagination. People thought that if countries in Central and Eastern Europe joined the EU, everything would go well. They thought that with prosperity comes the love for democracy. They were very naive. There was also no imagination on the EU Council’s side that there was indeed an authoritarian project being led by Orbán.

Then there was also a failure to act, and again the EU Council is completely to blame for this.

Sargentini: I echo what Rui says; there was an unwillingness to act. For example, as an MEP from the Netherlands, I had a very cooperative spirit with the Dutch permanent representation in Brussels. But it was only when there was a certain pressure on the LGBTQIA+ community in Hungary that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte finally started to speak out on Hungary, years after my report, simply because we had elections in the Netherlands, and he could put himself forward as a champion of LGBTQIA+ rights. But it had nothing to do with Hungary, and it was too late.

How contagious is Viktor Orbán in Europe, and how much of a role does he play in the rise of the far right?

Tavares: He is seen not only as an authoritarian, but also as an authoritative figure who is highly respected – and not just in Europe. As a Portuguese, I follow Brazilian politics closely, and it’s amazing the kind of sway that Orbán has in Brazil, which is a country that you would not think would be in Hungary’s area of influence.

In Portugal, [liberal-conservative] foreign minister Paulo Rangel used to be an important EPP figure in the European Parliament. He was one of the people who were always trying to block whatever we were doing in the report on Hungary. Now, after every General Affairs Council, he complains that Hungary is blocking the European Union’s action on Ukraine. Although what we did seemed very abstract – talking about Article 2, Article 4, or Article 7 of the Treaty – people on the ground in Ukraine are now paying the price for that inaction. Members of the Council are complaining, but when they were warned, they did nothing. And now Orbán is exporting his brand to Europe and beyond.

As someone who comes from the country of Marine Le Pen, would you call Orbán the leader of the far right in Europe?

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: Orbán is a special case because he was initially a liberal and then slowly turned authoritarian after seizing power. He also very cleverly built links with far-right groups, which are so sovereignist that they do not even talk to each other very much. He was the one who pushed for cooperation. An alliance of authoritarian leaders was formed, based in Budapest, bringing together not just Europe’s far right but the whole world’s.

But while Orbán paved the way for it, I don’t think he is the leader of this bloc. Rather, it is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni

The far right does not need to be in power to have influence. When others start to adapt to their wishes, they get what they want.

When you wrote your report, the far right in the Netherlands was not as strong as it is now. Could the trends you have observed in Hungary also appear there?

Judith Sargentini: In the Netherlands, people have taken democracy for granted since the end of World War II, and many don’t understand that it has to be defended, that it demands action. Compared to other countries, we spend little time in school teaching our children civic values.

Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom is the largest force in the national parliament and is in government for the first time. During the pandemic, we saw that during a crisis you can govern by sidelining the national parliament, and Wilders has recently toyed with that idea. And if you keep an idea on the agenda long enough, it starts to become the norm. So yes, we are witnessing the backsliding of the rule of law in the Netherlands too.

Is Portugal’s Chega party also reading Orbán’s script?

Rui Tavares: There was no far right in Portugal before. Perhaps because the dictatorship was still vivid in people’s memories. That was the case in Spain for a long time, so everyone talked about the Iberian exception. And I kept saying that it was just luck. That is now over:  Chega has 50 members in parliament. They know exactly what they want to do once they are in power. And there is a certain naivety in the centre-right politicians who think that if they copy the radicals, they will win back the votes cast for the far right.

That said, it would be very difficult for the Portuguese far right to play Orbán’s game, because even with their allies they would not win two-thirds of the parliament.

I find Giorgia Meloni’s phenomenon interesting. In opposition, far-right forces are anti-European because this is how they rally voters. As soon as they seize power, they start talking about the need to defend Europe’s borders, to create a European army, and so on.

Orbán is not like that. He is in power, but he is rebelling against Europe.

Rui Tavares: The “patriots” say they want to change Europe. Everyone knows today that leaving the EU is very complicated. It is much more interesting if you can take control of it. The progressive side is not prepared for this. It’s like Cassandra’s prophecy: we see what’s coming, we warn about it, but people just shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh no, it’s not going to happen anyway”.

Judith Sargentini: The far right does not need to be in power to have influence. We see everywhere that when others start to adapt to their wishes, they get what they want. We see this with the Christian Democrats in Germany, with the Dutch Right, or with the British Conservatives. When they feel the hot air of the far-right parties on their backs, they change their policies.

Orbán has shown that leaving the EU is not the answer. You are much better off staying in and breaking the common rules because nothing will happen anyway.

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: Orbán has shown that leaving the EU is not the answer. You are much better off staying in and breaking the common rules because nothing will happen anyway. When Giorgia Meloni came to power, she was quick to reassure everyone that Italy would stay in the EU. The French far right also rejected Frexit. I don’t know of any country where the far right is pushing for withdrawal from the Union. The issue has also been taken off the agenda because Orbán has shown that it is possible to take the obligations of membership lightly while taking home EU money.

What message would you send to Tineke Strik, the Dutch Green Party MEP who is now in charge of Hungarian rule of law issues in the EP?

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield: Not to be discouraged by the weakness of the institutions and the combative spirit of some of the actors.

Rui Tavares: Be very patient and persistent. One by one, MEPs must be brought to the cause, and sometimes it is best not to persuade them but to let them experience reality.

A shorter version of this interview originally appeared in the Hungarian independent daily Népszava.

1. Article 7 of the of the Treaty on European Union allows EU membership rights to be suspended, including voting rights in the Council of the EU and the European Council, if a country seriously and persistently breaches the principles on which the EU is founded. Those values, outlined in Article 2, include respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. ↩︎