The nominally ‘center-right’ CDU and the socialist SPD—likely forming Germany’s next government—have agreed to demand much harsher punishments from Brussels against member states accused of rule-of-law violations. This would include withholding EU funds from member states and suspending their voting rights in the European Council, stripping them of their right to veto EU legislation.
The EU has frozen certain funds after triggering infringement procedures against Hungary and Poland before, and there are plans to make every type of EU funding dependent on the same rule-of-law conditionality in the future.
However, suspending the voting rights of a member state has never been done before, as EU countries are understandably afraid of creating a precedent that could be used against them in the future. For a long time, Germany was among the most strongly opposed to this ‘nuclear option’—not anymore, it seems.
According to the current draft coalition agreement between the CDU and SPD:
Existing protective instruments, from infringement proceedings and the withholding of EU funds to the suspension of membership rights such as voting rights in the Council of the EU, must be applied much more consistently than before.
The agreement does not explicitly mention Hungary, but it’s clearly a reference to the country’s conservative government, which still has some €20 billion in EU funds frozen due to being in “serious breach” of the bloc’s core values and fundamental rights.
These include alleged discrimination against the LGBT community within the Child Protection Act of 2022 as well as the treatment of illegal migrants who are required by Hungarian law to submit their asylum applications before entering the country.
There’s no question about the political hypocrisy of using these tools, which are meant as a form of ideological blackmail to either force the conservative government to enact progressive legislation or pressure its citizens into voting it out.
Poland’s frozen funds, for instance, were almost immediately released after the conservative PiS government was replaced by Donald Tusk’s liberal regime, despite the fact that not a single reform had been implemented at the time, and that Tusk has been engaged in blatant rule-of-law violations against the opposition and conservative civil society ever since.
The coalition agreement also makes it clear that the ultimate goal is not the protection of ‘EU values’ but circumventing Hungary’s (and any other member states’) veto power. This is especially alarming since the unanimity principle, especially in foreign policy, has always been a foundational tenet of EU legislation, put forward by the treaties as the most important guarantee of member state sovereignty.
Yet, the draft agreement foresees that Berlin will advocate
an expansion of qualified majority voting in the Council of the EU, particularly on certain issues of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), such as the imposition of sanctions.
Shifting to qualified majority voting instead of unanimity has long been the dream of the EU elite, as it would prevent any individual country from vetoing a common position. Under the qualified majority system, a vote needs to be supported only by half of the member states representing at least 65% of the EU population to pass—meaning that the democratic opinion of one-third of EU citizens can be discarded as long as you have the support of larger countries, such as Germany.
Once considered a taboo in Brussels, this could finally become a reality if it lends its weight to these efforts. But once Pandora’s box has been opened, the future consequences for all member states cannot be understated, as the EU will be one (giant) step closer to becoming a centralized superstate.