Dutch to stay out of widening EU boycott of Hungary

The Netherlands isn't joining a boycott of Hungary's EU presidency, as its new government sits on the fence on rule-of-law.

Dutch prime minister Dirk Schoof said on Thursday (18 July) that his justice minister, David van Weel, will attend an informal meeting in Budapest on Monday.

"If it is in the Netherlands’ interest to go, then we will go unless the minister is on holiday,” Schoof told Dutch broadcaster NOS in the margins of a European summit in the UK.

The boycott so far includes the European Commission and at least eight member states: Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden.

"The government wants to clearly distance itself from the Hungarian presidency's handling of Ukraine in the first weeks of the presidency," Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said on Thursday in a written reply to national MPs.

It comes after Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán met Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow on 5 July, as if Orbán was representing the EU on a Ukraine peace mission, even though he had no mandate to do so.

The last Budapest meeting, of energy ministers on Tuesday, saw just six EU countries send senior people, suggesting the boycott was already wider in practice than the eight EU capitals who subscribed to it publicly.

Informal energy meetings can see a low turnout also for non-political reasons — Greece and Luxembourg sent junior people, for instance, even though they had earlier told EUobserver they were against boycotting Orbán for now.

But the justice and home affairs ministers' meeting next week will be a better test of who's in and who's out, as it is a more high-profile event.

The next Budapest fixture, also next week, brings together health ministers, but is again quite low-key - the Dutch minister, Fleur Agema, for instance, has said she won't make it as she's on holiday, even though the Dutch are staying out of the anti-Hungarian protest.

The biggest test will come in August when EU foreign and defence ministers are due to go to Orbán's capital.

Meanwhile, the fact Hungary is chairing justice talks on Monday is ironic, given that Orbán is under an EU sanctions procedure from 2018 for abusing the rule of law at home, on top of the criticism of his EU presidency violations.

The Dutch minister, van Weel, said he'd meet with civil society leaders while he was in Budapest, in a fig-leaf statement about his trip.

The Netherlands was in the past broadly aligned with northern and Nordic EU countries in taking a strong line on the rule of law.

But Schoof is leading a government coalition which, for the first time, contains the far-right PVV party of Geert Wilders, who is friends with Orbán and who may have tilted the balance in a new direction.

Over 60 MEPs and some EU capitals have called for Hungary's presidency to be taken away and given to Belgium and Spain or to Poland, which is to take over the EU presidency in January anyway.

According to EU Council lawyers there is no legal way to do this without first having an EU-26 consensus that Hungary had breached EU values under Article 2 of the treaty, which could trigger further consequences for Budapest.

But Orbán's ally, Slovakia's populist prime minister Robert Fico, would likely veto this, while the Netherlands might also go against the move, in part due to the new Wilders factor.

This left boycotts as the only practical form of redress for Hungary's critics, an EU diplomat said.

If the situation were to deteriorate, EU capitals could also boycott formal Hungarian EU presidency meetings being held in the EU Council in Brussels.

They'd be legally obliged to send at least their ambassadors, but these wouldn't be eligible to cast a vote or make a statement.

And that meant the most extreme scenario could see top-level EU politics being conducted in a chamber with 24 silent people, while Dutch, Slovak, and Hungarian ministers talked to each other.