The political process of the EP to use Art 7

Over years of democratic backsliding in Hungary, the use of Article 7 TEU was considered and demanded by parts of the European Parliament. Yet it took eight years, until the European Parliament triggered it in September 2018. This article traces the perils of going from demanding Article 7, to attempting to use it, to actually creating a qualified majority for it. In particular, it considers the slow process of building a cross-party rule-of-law coalition that included swaths of the centre-right. Using in-depth elite and expert interviews, besides close reading of parliamentary debates and official documents, I argue that a coalition was built on the back of strategic timing, depoliticisation, and lobbying. With this explanatory framework, I show in detail, how an unlikely coalition was built in a hard case. This holds important lessons for democracy-defenders elsewhere.