PM Orbán: Not in EU’s interest for Ukraine to join quickly

Ukraine joining the EU quickly would have unforeseeable consequences and would serve neither Hungary nor the bloc’s interests, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told MPs on Wednesday.

He said it was important to hold a substantive debate on Ukraine’s accession in parliament in respect of the ruling Fidesz party’s parliamentary draft resolution on Ukraine’s accession talks.

Orbán said the debate in the Hungarian parliament could have an impact on Hungary and the EU’s future, yet a real debate in the EU had not taken place.

Ukraine, he noted, was given candidate status last year, four months after submitting its application for membership. Normally, he added, three years passed after an application was made and candidate status granted. In the case of central and eastern European states, this process took four years, he said.

Orbán noted that accession negotiations with North Macedonia were not currently taking place even though it had submitted its application for membership in 2004, while Montenegro submitted its application in 2008 and waited a year and a half to start accession talks and two years for membership. He also made similar observations about Serbia and Albania.

The prime minister said “naked partisanship” undermined the authority of EU institutions, while the role of national parliaments was enhanced. National parliaments, he added, were needed for a debate on whether it was a good idea to start accession talks with Ukraine.

The prime minister said the government’s currently standpoint — although the debate may convince it otherwise — was that Ukraine joining the EU quickly would have unforeseeable consequences and would serve neither Hungary nor the bloc’s interests.

The European Union should take its rules seriously, Orbán said. If European institutions did not take these rules seriously, the entirety of the EU would “simply cease to exist”, he said. But Ukraine’s swift accession, he said, would mean that EU institutions would be asking member states, including Hungary, “not to follow our own rules”.

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The prime minister noted that the European Commission had set seven specific conditions for Ukraine to meet to be granted candidate country status. And unlike the existing member states, Ukraine was granted candidate status before having met these conditions, he added.

He listed the conditions as: reforming how constitutional judges are selected, vetting the supreme judicial council, stepping up action against money laundering, guaranteeing media freedom, taking action against corruption and oligarchs, and enforcing national minority rights.

Orbán insisted that even the “biased” Commission had admitted that Ukraine had only met four of the seven conditions. “So the EU shouldn’t even have granted Ukraine candidate country status, to say nothing of starting accession talks,” he said, adding that independent assessments showed that even those four conditions had not been properly met.

The prime minister told lawmakers that when it came to a country at war, objections over current media rules and practices could not be objected to. “But this doesn’t mean we Europeans should make the laughable claim that media freedom prevails in Ukraine,” he said, adding that the Commission had made just such a claim.

Referring to minorities in Ukraine, Orbán said it was as yet unclear what was contained in the law recently passed by the Ukrainian parliament. In 2015, he added, Hungarians and other national minorities in Ukraine were deprived of the their rights.

Source: MTI