Brussels has no plan beyond Orbán losing — but Tusk’s Poland shows problems of ‘re-democratisation’
, 31 March 2026 12:52
Whatever happens on 12 April, the EU will emerge after the Hungarian elections without a suitable plan for the country and its future relations with the Union.
Its entire Hungary strategy amounts to a single wager: that Viktor Orbán loses. If he does, relief. If he doesn’t, more of the same, conditionality threats that haven’t worked in 15 years.
Yet neither response constitutes a plan. EU leaders have spent 15 years treating Orbán as an anomaly to be managed rather than an existential threat to be confronted.
The result is a Union that has presided, in real time, over the conversion of one of its member states into a transmission belt for Putinism — and more recently Trumpism — operating not from outside the EU, but from within its institutions, with its budget, under its flag.
What Europe needs, and has never built, is a ‘re-democratisation’ plan: the active, structured support of reconstruction in a member state escaping authoritarian capture.
Hungary makes it urgent. But the need is not Hungary’s alone.
When Poland’s incumbent Law & Justice [PiS] lost power in October 2023, Brussels responded with institutional euphoria. The EU Commission unfroze billions within weeks of Donald Tusk’s investiture.
Rule-of-law proceedings were shelved. Poland was back. Democracy had prevailed.
What actually happened was more instructive.
The Tusk example
Tusk inherited a Constitutional Tribunal packed with loyalists, a president who systematically vetoed his legislation, and an institutional architecture deliberately built to survive electoral defeat.
Two years on, Poland’s democratic restoration is partial and fiercely contested at every institutional node. Brussels, having declared victory, stepped back.
This exposed a structural gap at the heart of the EU’s democracy toolkit.
The Union has well-developed instruments for preventing democratic backsliding, from conditionality, infringement proceedings to Article 7 of the treaty.
It has nothing equivalent for supporting a member state trying to reverse it.
Fighting democratic erosion and rebuilding democracy are not the same task. They require different tools, different timelines, a different kind of EU engagement and democratic legitimation.
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PiS-backed Nawrocki wins narrowly, imperilling Tusk’s reforms and EU ties
Here is what the EU consistently misses: Orbán — similarly to PiS in Poland — didn’t just capture Hungarian institutions. He legally rebuilt them to entrench his authority beyond elections.
This is what scholars call constitutional hardball: the systematic use of formally legal instruments to make democratic reversal as difficult as possible.
The rules are not broken – they are weaponised
Think of the Hungarian’s electoral system redesigned so that even a substantial popular majority may not deliver a governing one. A Fidesz-loyal president empowered to obstruct and delay. A Constitutional Court stacked with twelve-year loyalist appointees.