Hungarian unpolitics Strategies in EU Decision-Making: Insights from the Council’s Debates on the Rule of Law

Populist parties seek to shape national and European policies in accordance with their ideology, which conflicts with key principles of liberal democracy (Enyedi 2023; Albertazzi and Mueller 2013). If the impact of radical right parties in the EP has been examined (Brack 2018; Börzel et al. 2023), less attention has been devoted their impact on the functioning of the Council (Novak, Rozenberg and Bendjaballah 2021; Zaun and Ripoll-Servent 2023; Schmidt 2020; Coman 2022). The Council is a complex institution, designed as an arena of mediation and consensus-building to accommodate diverging domestic interests. Despite natural disagreements, political and diplomatic actors manage to reach a consensus (Puetter 2014; Novak 2013). Yet, given that populist governments seek to challenge the EU, the question is: to what extent and in what ways do they undermine the ability of the Council to reach a consensus? This article, drawing on the concept of unpolitics, aims to map Hungarian governmental strategies in EU decision-making within the Council. The analysis is conducted at three levels: at the top, looking at the Council presidency; in the day-to-day decision-making and in terms of norm behaviour (Lewis 2005). By analysing Hungary’s voting behaviour in the Council since 2009 (relying on the database of Hix, Frantescu and Hagemann 2022), the article shows that consensus remains the institutional norm (Novak, Rozenberg and Bendjaballah 2021) in low-risk decision-making, while dissensus is growing in high-risk areas. However, the quantitative analysis tells only part of the story. If the culture of consensus seems to be preserved, the article discusses and empirically illustrates nine unpolitics strategies used by the representatives of the Hungarian government in rule of law debates, including in the Article 7 TEU hearings, the Regulation 2020/2092 and the Child Protection Act. These strategies share a confrontational approach based on legal grounds.