We've had Rui Tavares, then Judith Sargentini, and now we're getting a Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield. It seems that every cycle in the European Parliament already has a representative who must prepare a report on the state of the Hungarian rule of law.
Rui Tavares was the first, he completed his own report in 2013, in which he used panels that had already been repeated to the point of boredom. 9 years have passed since Tavares' "work", but the situation has not changed, only the characters have changed. In the previous cycle, Judith Sargentini came, whose document containing similar, unfounded claims could only be accepted by the European Parliament with a little fraud. It was then that the abstaining votes were simply not taken into account during the voting and that was the only way the representatives supporting the report could gain a majority. Of course, the case did not become a rule of law case, even though it is very strange to have a rule of law where the otherwise cast vote is disregarded.
After Tavares and Sargentini - in the shadow of the war, the energy price explosion and inflation - the European Parliament now saw that the time had come to prepare another report on the Hungarian rule of law.
This time, the French Green Party representative, Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, was appointed to the task, and since she is a party member of the previous two rapporteurs, we can already guess what will be in the report. The boringly silent, now smiling panels about the rule of law deficit, hybrid regime, media predominance and the like will come again. Really, we could even laugh at it, since the European Parliament has completely lost touch with reality in relation to matters concerning Hungary (as in many other cases). They are merely producing another reference base, which can then be referred to by NGOs, domestic and international left-liberal politicians and the future rapporteur of the next cycle.
However, the situation is now more serious than smiling about it.
In the autumn, the European Parliament may request the continuation of the procedure according to Article 7 and the further blocking of the payment of EU funds, referring to the report. The pressure exerted by the EP can therefore override the sane negotiation and the constructive, solution-oriented atmosphere that has been created between the government and the Commission in recent weeks. The ideology-driven, often funny misadventure taking place in the EP may even have serious stakes this time. It doesn't hurt to be alert in the next period.
In our opening picture: Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, French member of the European Parliament (EP), vice-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance group, head of the fact-finding delegation of the EP's Committee on Civil Rights, Internal Affairs and Justice (LIBE) holds a press conference at the EP's office in Budapest, October 1, 2021 -yen.
MTI/Zoltán Máthé
Source: vasarnap.hu
