Hungary election tests EU ability to bypass Orban vetoes

Europeans are watching Hungary's parliamentary election on 12 April as a test of whether the European Union can finally escape the veto trap that has paralysed common foreign, defence, energy and migration policy for years. No single member state has stymied the EU's ability to act as much as Hungary under Viktor Orban, whose Fidesz party has held power for sixteen years. The opposition Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, now leads polling by roughly ten points, offering the first plausible chance to dislodge a leader who has turned the unanimous voting rule into a personal lever of influence.

A record of calculated obstruction

Orban's vetoes are not abstract. Hungary has refused to participate in a common EU asylum policy or shared defence mechanism. It opposed the bloc's rapid shift toward energy autonomy based on solar and wind while continuing to import Russian oil and gas. It blocked the opening of accession talks with Ukraine and vetoed 90 billion euro in low-cost loans to Kyiv, a sum equivalent to $105 billion at current rates. In the European Council, where 27 leaders must agree, the threat of a Hungarian veto has forced compromises that water down ambition across the board. As Angelos Syrigos, a conservative New Democracy MP in Athens, put it: "We don't want vetoes. Orban constantly vetoes things." He defined Fidesz as "a party that is opposed to the way the EU works."

The pattern extends beyond Budapest. Slovakia's Robert Fico and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babis, both described by Syrigos as "fanatically Trumpian and at the same time fanatically pro-Russian," have signalled willingness to adopt similar tactics. Even if Orban falls, the structural incentive for a small state to extract concessions by threatening unanimity remains. The EU's 2005 constitutional treaty, which would have replaced unanimity with qualified majority voting in many areas, was rejected by French and Dutch referendums, a missed opportunity that left the veto weapon intact.

The opposition platform

Peter Magyar's Tisza party offers a sharply different orientation. He wants a binding referendum on Ukraine's EU membership, a clampdown on corruption that would release billions in withheld EU funds, and a reversal of Hungary's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. Polls currently give Tisza roughly 50 percent of the popular vote, about ten points ahead of Fidesz. But the electoral map has been redrawn to Fidesz's advantage. Constituencies are gerrymandered to amplify the governing party's parliamentary majority, and state resources, media dominance and a network of oligarchic interests built over sixteen years constitute what SM Amadae of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk calls "the deep state, the legions of corruption, the oligopoly, the funnelling of money to the close Orban insiders."

Ad hoc evolution and the coffee-break method

The EU has not stood still. At a December 2023 summit, leaders asked Orban to leave the room so the remaining 26 could unanimously declare Ukraine a candidate country. Reports indicate he was swayed by a promise to release 10 billion euro in blocked EU funding. Katalin Miklossy, Jean Monnet Professor at the University of Helsinki, describes the moment as emblematic: "[There are] these kinds of ad hoc structures … you just send Viktor out for a coffee when you have a very important decision to make. [EU members] started to become more practical about it." She argues the bloc's previous weakness lay in "playing by the book", a constraint that has now been discarded in favour of pragmatic workarounds.

This improvisation has precedent. In 2010, when Greece became the first eurozone member to face bankruptcy, other EU states extended a series of bilateral loans known as the Greek Loan Facility because no common rescue fund existed. The same logic now underpins a proposal to circumvent any future veto on Ukraine aid: 26 bilateral loans from the other member states. The European Council has floated this mechanism explicitly as a fallback should Orban, or any other leader, block collective action.

The Ukraine loan saga

The 90 billion euro loan package illustrates both the EU's creativity and its fragility. Orban agreed to the package last December after securing an exemption for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic from backing it. Then, in March 2026, he abruptly reversed course, an "unheard-of manoeuvre in European politics," according to observers, because Ukraine refused to repair the Druzhba pipeline carrying Russian oil to Hungary after a Russian strike damaged it. A tumultuous summit failed to budge him. The result: funds promised for January 2026 never arrived. Victoria Vdovychenko, co-leader of the Future of Ukraine programme at Cambridge's Centre for Geopolitics, said: "In December 2025, there was a first European Council decision, when the European Union was promising this money as soon as possible, starting from January 2026. [This] never happened, as we know already, and now it's not again happening. Plausibly, feasibly, [this] will be happening only in June." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently told Le Monde that without released funds, "the Ukrainian army will be underfunded," adding he hopes for an alternative.

Defence union and the Russian horizon

The urgency driving EU improvisation is not abstract. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the bloc has funnelled money into its defence industry and aims ultimately to become a defence union. The NATO alliance provides the hard security guarantee, but EU members want autonomous capacity. Miklossy notes a "very strong belief that Russia will turn on us after 2030 or so. So we are in a hurry … Ukraine is the buffer zone, and they are fighting for us." This perception has concentrated minds in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw, making the Hungarian veto not just an annoyance but a strategic liability. The European Commission has responded with joint procurement initiatives, a defence industrial strategy and the first steps toward common borrowing for defence, echoing the 2020 pandemic recovery bonds that marked the EU's first collective debt issuance.

Psychological stakes on both sides of the Atlantic

A Tisza victory would reverberate beyond the Carpathian Basin. Amadae argues it would deliver "a big shot of confidence into the EU" at a moment when "stealth creep of illiberalism, the far right populism, the economic disenfranchisement of the people that aren't part of the economic pie" threatens the bloc's founding values. She sees the danger not as a Russian invasion but as internal erosion. A Hungarian turnover would give "a sense of ownership over the future of Hungary" to the protesters who have marched for years, and could influence the US congressional elections in November, where Donald Trump's Republican Party faces unfavourable polls. The transatlantic dimension is real: Orban has cultivated Trump, and a shift in Budapest would weaken the illiberal axis that spans Budapest, Bratislava and, until recently, Prague.

Structural constraints on change

Even a Tisza win would not flip a switch. Gerrymandered constituencies mean Fidesz could retain a parliamentary majority with a minority of votes. The "deep state" Amadae describes, prosecutors, media regulators, state-owned enterprises, EU-funded NGOs controlled by Fidesz loyalists, would remain in place. Unwinding sixteen years of institutional capture takes longer than an electoral cycle. Meanwhile, the EU's own rule-of-law conditionality mechanism has moved slowly; billions in cohesion funds remain frozen, and the Article 7 procedure against Hungary has stalled at the European Parliament and Council. A new government in Budapest would inherit a confrontation with Brussels over judicial independence and media pluralism that cannot be resolved overnight.