The European Parliament’s Debate on the Hungarian constitution

Last Wednesday’s debate (8 June) on the Hungarian constitution was remarkable for two main features. The left launched a sustained attack on the Hungarian basic law in the name of (otherwise undefined) European values, which, they alleged, its provisions flouted. These European values were not only left undefined, but whatever the definition might have been was entirely in the hands of the left. The left’s position came over almost as a kind of secret knowledge special to it and it alone. Whenever speakers from the left were challenged to produce chapter and verse for their allegations, they retreated into vague, and often enough, vapid generalities.

What the left seemed quite incapable of understanding is that European values – and these certainly do exist – cannot be and will never be regarded as being a left-wing monopoly. If they are to be genuinely European, then they must include inputs from the democratic centre-right, otherwise these values will be unrepresentative and thus lack legitimacy. The left entirely failed to understand this.

Second, if these values are to be fully and incontrovertibly European, then they must be reflected in all the constitutions of the 27 member states. Yet repeated attempts to make comparisons with other constitutions were either ignored by left-wing speakers or rejected as irrelevant. The subject of the debate, they averred, was the Hungarian basic law and other states’ constitutions were off the agenda. This is methodological nonsense, of course, and more than anything else demonstrates the intellectual poverty of the left (as it emerged in this debate anyway). In brief, this is the left’s consistency problem, one that they appear to have some trouble identifying; the voters do not.

In some respects matters are worse. Precisely because left-wing speaker after speaker refused to have anything to do with the comparative approach and insisted on a purely Hungarian focus, the debate left behind a lingering sense of double standards and Hungary-bashing. It came over as a left-wing assertion that there was an open season on Hungary, presumably because the left is quite incapable of coming to terms with a democratically elected centre-right Fidesz government that has gained a constitutional majority and has launched a historically far-reaching reform programme.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that by chance a centre-left government had gained a two-thirds majority, does anyone seriously think that it would not use this mandate as radically as it could?

And there was one further noteworthy aspect to the debate. The Slovak MEPs were able to unite from left to right and back again around the proposition that the Hungarian citizenship law, which allows any Hungarian to apply for citizenship regardless of where they live, was a danger to European values. Oddly, they were not deterred in their endeavours by the fact that the Hungarian citizenship law is not a part of the constitution. By the same token none of them mentioned that the Hungarian citizenship law is very similar to the Slovak citizenship law, very similar indeed. Most strange.

Sch.Gy