War in Ukraine: Breaking the unpolitical alliance against the EU?

Hungary and Poland have become the leaders of democratic backsliding within Europe, with Orbán and Kaczyński being the staunchest critics of the EU. Despite consistent support for the European project among the wider public and being a net benefiters of EU membership, both leaders have continuously radicalized their populist Eurosceptic discourse. We claim Euroscepticism of the discourse is an unavoidable consequence of a continuous populist performance of crisis that demands the creation of images of friends and foes to unite and mobilize people. This translates into a destructive approach to EU policymaking with frequent calls to veto policies that would benefit their own countries. We argue the financial crisis, the refugee crisis and even the pandemic crisis have been ‘performed’ to further exacerbate the conflict between the illiberal ‘self’ and the liberal ‘others’. All crises are performed discursively by both countries to find newer and newer common enemies that are empowered or embodied by the EU, and obstructing EU policies help keep the crises alive. Orbán and Kaczyński claim to stand morally outside and above EU politics that are not only corrupt but corrupting. They are unpolitical when it comes to the EU and they ‘reluctantly’ support each-other when it comes to neoliberal policies, migration, gender ideology or rule of law violations. At the same time, the war in Ukraine is the crisis that pits Poland against Hungary and its reluctance to condemn Russia. War thus politicizes the unpolitical Polish-Hungarian union: while Orbán remains trapped by his own stance bashing the EU and its policies, claiming it is the Western world that is warmongering, Poland is pulled back into the political world due to security concerns. Poland becomes the most active promoter of pro-Ukrainian EU policies in pushing for political consensus, while Hungary becomes an even more isolated pariah in its attempts to unsettle consent. Yet, the unpolitical alliance against the EU is only unsettled not broken – while the war pulls them apart, in all other policy domains Hungary and Poland remain each-other’s most influential ally in claiming illiberal democracy is a fundamentally European project to serve the people by opposing the liberal world order embodied by the EU.