Pavel Havliček: the New Enlargement will Require a Lot of Political Will

Pavel Havliček

Lately, we have been witnessing sabotage among member countries, because in some of them the influence of Russia, which manipulates nationalist parties, is growing. Is the EU capable of solving this problem: the Newssky correspondent asked Pavel Havliček, who is a Research Fellow at the Research Center in Prague.

The EU has very little to no instruments to control the behavior of the member states, including those more inclined to support the Kremlin’s positions. There are, indeed, some opportunities to influence the behavior of the political leadership and hold it to account, for example, when stopping financial inflows or restricting the voting rights of a given member of the EU. However, this requires a lot of political will and determination, especially when launching the procedure to limit voting rights.

To give a concrete example, the position of the Hungarian government is tough to influence apart from leading the dialogue and following the transactions approach practiced by Orbán’s leadership. In exchange for releasing parts of financial resources for Hungary, the leadership would need to follow certain policy decisions, for example, on the opening of the accession talks with Ukraine, which will be highly watched in mid-December.

Maryna Kovalchuk, Newssky’s correspondent (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland), head of the V5 Media project, contributed.

Українською