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Ukraine loan blocked at EU summit: right-wing Orbán and socialist Fico unite against disbursement
EU member state leaders failed to reach an agreement on the €90 billion loan earmarked for Ukraine at their Brussels summit on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico jointly blocked the disbursement, whilst the remaining 25 member states signed a closing declaration calling for the first instalment to be paid out by early April.
What happened at the summit?
The loan dominated the closed-door discussions at the one-day Brussels meeting. EU diplomats told Politico that roughly ninety minutes of talks yielded no result, with Orbán refusing to drop his veto. Fico aligned himself fully with the Hungarian prime minister’s position.
António Costa, President of the European Council, offered a pointed public rebuke of Orbán’s conduct, calling it “unacceptable” and a violation of the cooperative principles underpinning the EU, and noting that no other member state leader had previously crossed this red line. According to diplomats, frustration with Orbán among his peers has reached an unprecedented level — though most are reluctant to be seen openly interfering in Hungarian domestic politics ahead of the 12 April general election.
With no consensus in sight, the EU is now working towards a solution that would allow disbursement to proceed without the unanimous agreement of all member states. The closing declaration, signed by 25 countries, welcomed the decision to grant the loan and called for the first tranche to be released by early April.
Fico: Zelensky is illegitimately interfering in the Hungarian election
Fico addressed the public in a video statement after the summit. He said he had informed fellow leaders in Brussels that Slovakia had been forced to declare an oil emergency after Ukraine unilaterally suspended transit through the Druzhba pipeline.
The Slovak prime minister described Ukraine’s move as unlawful, arguing that under existing EU agreements, both Slovakia and Hungary are entitled to purchase Russian oil via the Druzhba pipeline and by sea until the end of 2027. Fico contended that by indefinitely maintaining the transit blockade, Zelensky was “illegitimately interfering in the Hungarian election campaign with the aim of ousting the current Hungarian government.”
Fico declared himself ready to take further measures against Ukraine should Kyiv continue what he described as the “deliberate economic sabotage” of Slovakia. He consequently refused to sign the closing declaration of solidarity with Ukraine — leaving him and Orbán as the only two leaders to withhold their signatures.
What’s next?
The Druzhba pipeline dispute remains unresolved
The pipeline question was also on the summit agenda. The European Commission had previously offered to send an EU monitoring mission to inspect the Druzhba pipeline, but the expert group became stranded in Kyiv after Ukrainian authorities were slow to issue the necessary authorisation. Hungary and Slovakia had also written to protest their exclusion from the mission’s work.
Simultaneously, however, talks were under way in Kyiv. Serhiy Koretsky, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Naftohaz, Ukraine’s state energy company, announced that Ukraine had presented the EU’s expert working group with a comprehensive, system-wide plan for restoring the Druzhba pipeline, and that the two sides had agreed on the direction of joint next steps. EU Deputy Ambassador Gediminas Navickas attended the Kyiv meeting.
According to Koretsky, Ukrtransnafta — the pipeline’s operator — briefed EU partners in detail on the damage caused by Russian strikes, outlined the current situation, and presented the restoration plan. The EU working group offered financial and technical assistance for the repair of the pumping station at Brody in Lviv Oblast, an offer Ukraine welcomed positively.
Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in recent days that they had launched intensive talks with EU member states and Ukraine at all levels to restore pipeline oil deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia. Whether the EU expert group intends to visit the Brody site in person remains unclear — Koretsky did not confirm this.
Merz unable to shift Orbán
According to Politico, EU leaders — including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — had hoped that sufficient pressure could be brought to bear on Orbán to persuade him to withdraw his veto and honour the agreement reached at the December EU summit. That hope evaporated entirely during Thursday’s talks.
The EU is now seeking a legal mechanism that would allow the 25 participating member states to proceed with disbursement to Ukraine without the involvement of Hungary and Slovakia.
Germany is currently one of the Hungarian government’s main targets in the campaign:
Government-close media increasingly portray Germany as Hungary’s new political enemy
Germany issued unprecedented open threat against Hungary, FM Szijjártó says
As we wrote yesterday, Orbán cabinet said, a classified national security report on Tisza may soon be released.
Source: Politico, MTI (Hungarian News Agency), Facebook
One could try to explain the relationship between the two politicians using the horseshoe theory, and/or one could explain it by their greed for personal enrichment and unlimited power. Below is a brief description of the horseshoe theory.
Horseshoe Theory
The political horseshoe theory is a concept in political science that states that the extreme left and the extreme right are politically closer together than the moderate forces of the center.
Instead of a linear spectrum (right — center — left), the political spectrum is represented as a horseshoe. The two ends (extremism) curve toward each other, so that they almost touch in certain methods, attitudes, and views.
Proponents of the horseshoe theory argue that both extreme left and extreme right movements tend to favor authoritarian structures, be anti-democratic, use conspiracy theories, and despise democratic institutions.
Both extremes are often directed against the liberal, parliamentary democracy of the political center, which is located at the apex of the horseshoe.
In current political discourse, the horseshoe theory is frequently cited when positions of far-right and far-left parties appear to overlap on certain issues – such as foreign policy or the rejection of institutions – which in Germany is also partly discussed as a “cross-front” tendency.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/
The problem for kleptocracies as a whole will be that their failure is inherent in the system itself. This is no cause for celebration, however, as they will drag everyone else down with them.
Over time, the opportunities to generate fraudulent profits using the system within their own country will diminish, as economic systems become increasingly inefficient, ultimately serving only to enrich the kleptocrats. The number of countries that do not resist and can simply be absorbed, or “swallowed up,” will dwindle. This means that the opportunities for kleptocracies to enrich themselves will decrease overall.
The countries implementing a kleptocratic system will decline, partly because there is a growing awareness of the consequences for the rest of the population, and the “robbery” of others will become more costly or even impossible, while the marginal utility for kleptocracies within their own borders continues to diminish.
If they don’t fail beforehand, that will be the point at which they begin to devour each other, and that will not be a pleasant time for any of us.