The ways of the European Parliament in Strasbourg are inscrutable to the American visitor. Political parties bearing maddeningly similar names—the Sweden Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats; the German Social Democrats, the German Free Democrats, and the German Christian Democrats—form coalitions whose names elude all meaning. The design of the immense campus, a cylindrical tower abutted by an ellipse, is meant to represent the transition of Western civilization from centralized power to democracy. An exhibition of photographs in the pillared courtyard reveals the body’s aspirations to be the arbiter of international statecraft: the parliament’s former president Nicole Fontaine poses with Yasser Arafat, the Dalai Lama, and the leader of a delegation of female Afghan refugees. Yet it is rare to hear Europeans express any measure of reverence toward the body; its name is evoked more often in the matters of regulating light bulbs and Roquefort cheese.
Then Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, comes to town. Since 2011, Orbán has regularly travelled to Strasbourg to receive a kind of public stoning. The latest such session took place in mid-September, when the parliament convened to vote on enacting Article 7 proceedings, which can strip a country of its voting rights. Orbán’s government was accused of routinely violating European regulations on the rule of law. Before the vote, Judith Sargentini, a member of the European Parliament for the Dutch GreenLeft party, had prepared a report detailing the erosion of democratic norms in Hungary: constitutional amendments were passed after little consultation with groups outside the government; the court system had been reorganized and its oversight body placed under the control of the Hungarian parliament; the European anti-fraud office had found “possible fraud and corruption” in public-investment projects; and the European Commission had repeatedly sued Hungary for its treatment of migrants. Observers fear that Fidesz, the Hungarian political party that Orbán has led since 1993, has become the state.
I sat in the gallery, where I could hear only murmurs as Orbán arrived, strolling into the chamber late, after Sargentini had begun presenting her report. At fifty-five, Orbán has acquired a heft that he carries with the relative ease of a retired athlete. His hair is gray but clipped boyishly short. Spotting Orbán, Sargentini seemed distinctly irritated and said, “I think I should stop now and start again.” There was a round of applause in the hall.
Orbán took a seat in the second row, and for the next two and a half hours members of parliament alternately castigated or defended him. When Nigel Farage, one of the United Kingdom’s most bellicose nationalists and an M.E.P. for South East England, stood and declared that the proceedings were a show trial, Orbán allowed himself a smile. “Come and join the Brexit club, you’ll love it!” Farage shouted across the chamber.
For the past seven years, Orbán has used a maneuver that he has called the “dance of the peacock.” His government would insert measures into new laws precisely for the purpose of removing them. “He’ll generally put in one outrageous thing and one super-outrageous thing,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary, told me. “But the super-outrageous thing isn’t really necessary—it’s designed to be jettisoned.” When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government on the antidemocratic measures, he has made a few symbolic gestures of conciliation, “as if,” he has said, “we would like to make friends with them.”
Now Orbán ended the dance. Speaking to the chamber, he declared Sargentini’s report an insult to his country. “Hungary’s decisions are made by voters at parliamentary elections, and you state nothing less than that Hungary is not reliable enough to decide what is in its interests,” he said. “Let’s be straightforward with each other: Hungary is going to be condemned because the Hungarian people have decided that this country is not going to be a country of migrants.”
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