Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its rotating presidency, under which the 27 member states take it in turns to do a six-month stint running its technically supreme political body, the European Council. This week, Hungary, the bad boy of Europe, took over the hot seat. It keeps it until the end of this year.
The difficulty is that the government of Viktor Orbán in Budapest, albeit still popular at home, is at loggerheads with the EU. Politically, its scepticism over Ukraine’s war effort and its open dislike for liberal social policies exasperate Brussels; legally, it is under attack over the so-called rule of law, LGBT rights and its intransigence on immigration and asylum. No wonder Brussels looks askance at having to take orders from it, or that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has already taken the symbolic step of calling off a proposed goodwill visit to the Hungarian capital.
Brussels is looking increasingly out of touch with the peoples whose interests it claims to serve
Not that the presidency actually allows Hungary to do very much.
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