Priority dossiers under the Hungarian EU Council Presidency

Written by Eszter Balázs (Legislative Planning and Coordination Unit, Directorate-General for the Presidency).

Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on 1 July, and will stay in office until 31 December 2024. This is the second time Hungary has played this role, following its first-ever presidency in 2011. Hungary is the last member of the presidency trio made up together with Spain (in the second half of 2023) and Belgium (in the first half of 2024). It will hand the baton over to Poland.

State and government

Hungary (Magyarország) is a parliamentary republic, with a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government.

The prime minister is elected by the National Assembly (Országgyűlés) and exercises executive power. The current prime minister is Viktor Orbán, leader of the Fidesz party – formerly EPP-affiliated, and now a member of Patriots for Europe. In 2022, he was elected to the position for the fourth consecutive time, after an earlier stint in office between 1998 and 2002. His predecessor was Gordon Bajnai, head of a minority government up to May 2010.

The Hungarian president is Tamás Sulyok, a former head of the Constitutional Court.

The National Assembly voted him into office on 26 February 2024, after the early departure of President Katalin Novák, former minister of family affairs in the fifth Orbán government. The president’s tasks remain primarily representative, including receiving foreign dignitaries, serving as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and formally nominating the prime minister. The president can also veto legislation or request its review by the Constitutional Court.

Parliament

The Hungarian Parliament is unicameral. It consists of 199 members elected for four-year terms in a mixed system, made up of first-past-the-post voting in single-mandate constituencies and a nationwide proportional contest on closed candidate lists.

The elections on 3 April 2022 resulted in the fourth consecutive two-thirds constitutional majority for the Fidesz-KDNP coalition. Slightly over 2.7 million voters, the highest ever, voted for Fidesz (53 %) while 1.8 million (35 %) voted for the united opposition. Our Homeland Movement, a radical right party, also made it into parliament with 317 000 votes (6.1 %).

Currently there are nine parties in the National Assembly, with German-speaking minorities represented by one member.

Government (135)

• Fidesz-KDNP (Christian Democratic People’s Party) coalition
  • Fidesz (Patriots for Europe in EP)- 116
  • KDNP (Patriots for Europe in EP) -19

United opposition (57)

• Demokratikus Koalíció (Democratic Coalition, DK) (S&D in EP) – 15 members
• Momentum (Renew Europe, not currently in EP) – 10 members
• Magyar Szocialista Párt (Hungarian Socialist Party, MSZP) (S&D, not currently in EP) – 10 members
• Párbeszéd Magyarországért (Dialogue for Hungary) (The Greens, not currently in EP) – 6 members
• Lehet Más a Politika (Politics Can Be Different, LMP) (The Greens, not currently in EP) – 5 members
• Jobbik (non-attached, not currently in EP)- 8 members

Others

• Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement) (Europe of Sovereign Nations in EP) – 6 members
• Municipality of Germans in Hungary – 1 member

The united opposition collapsed after the unexpectedly large defeat. In its post-election report, the international election observation mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) found that the latest Hungarian elections had been well administered and professionally managed but also ‘marred by the absence of a level playing field’.

The next parliamentary elections are due to take place in 2026.

European elections

The 2024 European elections in Hungary were held in parallel with local elections on 9 June. Fidesz-KDNP secured 11 seats in the EP with 44.8 % of the vote (losing two seats), newcomer Tisztelet és Szabadság (Respect and Freedom, TISZA) obtained 7 seats with 29.6 %, and the coalition MSZP-DK-Párbeszéd-Zöldek carried two seats with 8 %, losing two MEPs. EP newcomer Our Homeland Movement gained one MEP with 6.7 % of the vote. While DK continues as a member of the S&D group and TISZA has joined the EPP group, Fidesz-KDNP co-founded a new political group called Patriots for Europe, and the Our Homeland Movement joined Europe of Sovereign Nations, another new formation.

State-of-play

As Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the Council, roughly €21 billion of EU funding earmarked for the country had remained locked over breaches of principles of the rule of law (under the conditionality mechanism), for non-compliance with horizontal conditions for cohesion funds and non-compliance with specific super milestones for the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

On 13 June, the European Court of Justice ordered Hungary to pay a lump sum of €200 million, plus a daily fine of one million euros for not changing its policy of handling migrants and asylum-seekers at its border. Hungary has until 17 September to pay the lump sum.

EP conflict with Hungary

The relationship between the Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the EU overall, and the EP in particular, has been rocky. In 2018, the European Parliament initiated an Article 7(1) TEU procedure against Hungary over problems it observed in among other things, the functioning of the constitutional and electoral system, the areas of judicial independence, corruption and conflicts of interest, freedom of expression, academic freedom and minority rights, and fundamental rights of migrants and refugees.

In the following years, the EP adopted a series of resolutions urging the Council to conclude the procedure and, in parallel, criticising decisions taken by the Hungarian government. In a resolution adopted on 5 May 2022, the EP urged incoming presidencies to organise hearings under Article 7(1) TEU ‘regularly and at least once per Presidency’. The seventh and last such hearing was held under the Belgian Presidency on 25 June 2024.

In another resolution from 2022, the EP stated that Hungary no longer fulfilled the criteria to be a democracy. A year before the country was to take over the rotating presidency, the EP questioned Hungary’s ability to credibly fulfil its task at the helm of the Council. In March 2024, the Parliament decided to sue the Commission over a €10.2-billion payment to Hungary in December 2023, saying it was a breach of the EU executive’s obligation to protect taxpayers’ money from being misused. At its last plenary session, in April 2024, the ninth legislature adopted a resolution on the state of the rule of law, and pointed to several concerns. (You can find links to recent EP press releases on Hungary in the Annex at the end of this document.)

The Hungarian National Assembly, for its part, adopted a resolution in 2022 stating that it was through representation by national MPs that the ‘real political legitimacy’ of the EP would be guaranteed. The Prime Minister has repeatedly dismissed the whole of the EU or described ‘Brussels’ that ‘fulfils commands of a globalist elite‘, as a threat to Hungary’s sovereignty. A recent inquiry report adopted by the National Assembly found that the work of Hungarian ‘left wing MEPs’ ‘injures the interests of Hungarian people’. The report provides an itemised list of all contributions, in speech or writing, of these named MEPs as well as of all EP resolutions related to Hungary.

Read the complete briefing on ‘Priority dossiers under the Hungarian EU Council Presidency‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.