Ep.115: A Real Nuclear Option for Orbán's Hungary

Summary

Podcast Summary: EU Scream – Ep.115: A Real Nuclear Option for Orbán's Hungary

Date: April 30, 2025
Host: James Kanter
Guest: Tom Tones (Leiden University)
Main Theme:
A sharp discussion of the EU’s failure to deal with democratic backsliding, specifically Hungary under Viktor Orbán, and a provocative proposal: creating a realistic path to expel a member state.

---

Episode Overview

The episode tackles the European Union’s deepening crisis with illiberal member states—most notably Hungary under Viktor Orbán. James Kanter and Tom Tones dissect why the EU’s existing punitive mechanisms, especially Article 7 (the so-called nuclear option), have been ineffective at reining in autocratic governments. Tones lays out proposals from his book Protecting Democracy in Europe, including a thought experiment for mass coordinated withdrawal and “EU 2.0,” and robust measures to directly support democratic forces inside backsliding countries.

The conversation moves through the ethical, practical, and political problems with existing EU mechanisms, explores the historic roots of EU inaction, and ends with a call to rethink the limits of democracy within the Union.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Orban’s Hungary and the Precedent of Illiberalism

• Background: Hungary, led by Viktor Orbán and Fidesz for 15 years, systematically undermines democracy, brutalizes minorities, and threatens press and academic freedom ([00:02]).
• Hungary’s illiberalism has inspired far-right actors globally, normalizing kleptocratic governance in the EU.

2. Why Article 7 (the ‘Nuclear Option’) Fails

• Provisions: In theory, Article 7 can suspend a member’s voting rights. In practice, it’s been ineffective—a "damp squib" ([00:02]).

• Unanimity Requirement: Any single state’s opposition renders sanctions impossible, as Tones notes:

  “All Orban needs is one ally in the European Council... the sanctions procedures against him... become impossible.” ([09:04], Tom Tones)

• Paradox of Continued Membership: Article 7 strips voting rights but obliges the sanctioned state to EU law, creating an anti-democratic “suzerainty” ([10:02]).

3. A Three-Pronged Strategy for Defending EU Democracy ([04:07])

• Complicity by Omission: The EU is complicit if it fails to address democratic decline.

• Containment: Limit autocrat influence in EU decisions without betraying core EU values.

• Cultivate Pluralist Democracy:

  “Those that are harmed most by democratic backsliding in Hungary are Hungarian citizens themselves. So we should think about how to support pro democratic actors in Hungary…” ([04:07], Tom Tones)

• Direct Support for Democracy: More controversial—suggests direct EU funding for pro-democracy opposition parties, not by ideology, but by commitment to democracy ([06:10]).

4. Direct Funding for Political Parties: Risks and Ethics

• Rationale: When the playing field is fundamentally distorted by autocratic incumbents, direct partisan intervention is not only defensible but necessary.

  “In that context, partisan political interference, as long as it serves to redress that distortion, is justifiable and even desirable…” ([06:10], Tom Tones)

• Obstacles: Far-right and conservative actors in the EU seek to roll back such funding ([07:23]).

5. Expulsion: A Real (Not Just Theoretical) Nuclear Option

• No Treaty Provision: There’s currently no legal way to expel a member state.

• Article 50 as Creative Mechanism:
  Tones proposes a collective, coordinated withdrawal and immediate “re-founding” of the EU without autocratic members (“EU 2.0”), using Article 50—the same withdrawal clause as Brexit ([19:04]).

• Mass Exit as Leverage:

  “What that means is, at some point, if a member state of the European Union becomes frankly, autocratic, EU member states can also choose to disengage.” ([12:44], Tom Tones)

• Political Risks: Complex, fraught procedure requiring massive pre-coordination, and vulnerable to disruption by spoilers ([00:02]).

6. Timing and Criteria for Expulsion

• Political Judgment, Not Technocratic: Deciding to expel must be debated democratically, not left to experts ([15:31]).

• Empowerment vs. Fatalism: Keeping expulsion off the table only emboldens autocrats ([15:31]).

• Potential for Deterrence:

  “If we have a clear headed conversation about... expulsion... we actually disempower autocrats.” ([15:31], Tom Tones)

7. Sanctions and the Hungarian Public

• Sanctions disproportionately hurt regime opponents and ordinary citizens; the regime protects its own. This dilemma mirrors international sanctions debates ([11:43]).

8. Current Political Dynamics & Weak Workarounds

• Workarounds (Europe of 26): Increasingly, Hungary is bypassed on EU decisions, but often bought off with concessions.

  “We have this... situation where the Commission announces 10 billion euros of funds, which coincides perfectly with Orban leaving to allow a vote on support to Ukraine.” ([23:46], Tom Tones)

• Unsustainability: Relying on a veto player’s goodwill is insecure and corrosive for EU legitimacy ([24:39]).

9. Historical Lessons and Institutional Weakening

• The EU’s early (2000s) attempts to boycott Austria over far-right party government collapsed.

  “Concretely you can’t come to parties. We’re not going to invite you to bilateral diplomatic talks...” ([28:25], Tom Tones).

• Subsequent EU procedures were weakened to avoid future political crises, leading to a “process over enforcement” approach, as satirized by Dan Kellerman ([31:28]).

• Assessment Reports: Lack of meaningful differentiation between rule-of-law violators and compliant states; “completely insane” ([32:08], Tom Tones).

10. Urgency and the Logic of Backsliding

• The longer an autocracy consolidates, the harder it is to reverse:

  “What they are undermining, literally, is the possibility of their removal by flattening media freedom, by flattening opposition. And the result of that is if you do nothing, the situation just gets worse.” ([33:12], Tom Tones)

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On EU Complicity:

  “If you have a duty to respond to democratic backsliding in a member state, and you don’t do that, you’re also complicit by omission...”
  — Tom Tones ([04:07])

• On the Limits of Article 7:

  “Stripping someone of their right to vote and continuing to hold them subject to a political ... decision that’s made in a body that they have no influence in, it’s just a straightforwardly anti-democratic scenario.”
  — Tom Tones ([10:02])

• On Direct Interference:

  “In that context, partisan political interference, as long as it serves to redress that distortion, is justifiable and even desirable where the actors supported are pro-democratic.”
  — Tom Tones ([06:10])

• On Mass Exit as Expulsion:

  “Pro-rule of law member states [could] collectively withdraw from the Union ... as long as you have this robust majority in the Council, you can do what you want.”
  — Tom Tones ([19:04])

• On Institutional Weakening:

  “After the Austrian experience ... the lesson that was learned is that going outside of the EU institutions, going this bilateral route, is a mistake. Boycotts are a mistake. We have to go procedurally, we have to go legally, we have to go via EU procedures and EU law.”
  — Tom Tones ([29:46])

• On EU Reports:

  “They’re largely indistinguishable ... which is insane. Completely ignoring that there’s part of the building that’s burning down.”
  — Tom Tones ([32:08])

• On Urgency:

  “The logic of democratic backsliding is the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is to dislodge these authoritarian actors.”
  — Tom Tones ([33:12])

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Background on Hungary and the EU’s failing tools: [00:02–03:09]
• Three-pronged strategy for containing autocrats: [04:07–07:23]
• Support for pro-democracy actors & parties: [05:29–07:53]
• Why Article 7 fails and legal paradox: [08:11–10:02]
• On necessity and ethics of expulsion: [12:24–14:30]
• Testing and timing for expulsion decisions: [15:13–17:29]
• Use of Article 50 for expulsion/refounding EU: [19:04–20:26]
• Buying off Hungary, ‘Europe of 26’: [23:46–24:39]
• Lessons from Austria (2000) and institutional weakening: [25:22–29:37]
• On toothless democracy instruments: [31:28–32:39]
• Closing analysis and the urgency for action: [33:12–33:54]

---

Tone and Takeaways

The conversation is sober, methodical, and urgent. Tones and Kanter make clear the costs of dithering, and the depth of the EU’s political and institutional crisis. Tones insists that the mere conversation about expulsion would have real-world effects, reducing fatalism and providing leverage over autocrats. The episode is a warning—and a call for Europeans to confront how far their Union will go to defend democracy from its internal enemies.

---

Transcript

[James Kanter]

Hungary has been a member state of the European Union since 2004 and it's been run by Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesh party uninterrupted for the past 15 years. He's now the EU's longest serving prime minister and his strategic allies are in China and in Russia and in Trump world. The MAGA faithful in the US and far right admirers in Europe take inspiration from the way Orban has used the state to purge judges and civil servants, brutalize migrants, attack LGBTQ rights and threaten press freedom as well as academic freedom. Hungary isn't the only EU state where a leader has sought to steer democratic principles into the ditch. But it's Hungary and Orban that have set the stage for making kleptocratic illiberalism a new kind of EU normal. The EU does in theory have tools to punish Hungary, its so called Article 7 process. Under Article 7, the EU can even take away a member states voting rights, a kind of temporary exclusion. A former president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, called Article 7 the nuclear option, but it's been more of a damp squib. Hungary's Article 7 process has been dragging on for seven years now. Orban has outmaneuvered the EU time and again, slyly avoiding enforcement. In this episode, Tom Tons of Leiden University says it's time to jettison the Article 7 process and instead put expulsion squarely on the table. Call it the real nuclear option. Tom's proposals are outlined in his new book Protecting Democracy in Europe. Those proposals include more measures to contain EU autocrats, direct funding for democratic political parties, and the threat of definitive removal. Tom envisages a scenario where democratic member states would leave the EU in a mass exodus and immediately refound the Union. An EU 2.0 minus any autocratic states, de facto expulsion, but legally theoretical and something of a thought experiment, not to mention politically risky, especially if you need to remove a state ASAP because of war crimes, say, or gross human rights violations. More than two dozen countries would need to coordinate national consents in advance. If all doesn't go to plan, obdurate legislators, sudden calls for referendums, even a French demand for more subsidies. Such an exercise could usher in the kind of political warfare that sinks the EU for good. But Tom's goal is above all to end what he calls fatalistic defeatist thinking that no member state, no matter how far down the road to autocracy it's gone, can be cut loose from the eu. As Tom says when it comes to Hungary and whether the EU can once again be a club of democracies. Something has to give.

[Tom Tones]

No migrants more.

[Far-right supporter]

In no Europe without Christianity. An alliance also with Russia.

[James Kanter]

Welcome to EU Scream, the podcast that guides you through stories coming from the eu. We talk about the news a bit differently and with people who really know what they're talking about. I'm James Kantor. This is episode 115, a real nuclear Option for Orban's Hungary, with Tom Tones of Leiden University.

[Interviewer/Host]

So, Tom, before we get to your ideas for expulsion of an EU member state, you know, your vision of a kind of limited European disintegration. What are your ideas for keeping the Union together, keeping a state like Hungary in the eu, while increasing the costs for authoritarian actors? What is the strategy?

[Tom Tones]

The strategy I describe in my book has three different prongs. The first is that I say, look, if you have a duty to respond to democratic backsliding in a member state, and you don't do that, you're also complicit by omission, which is standardly accepted in the theoretical literature on complicity, but hadn't been applied much to the EU in this context. The second prong is to recognize that we already have these areas of European political decision making that are tainted by autocratic actors and autocratic politics, and maximally to try to contain these autocratic influences to the extent that that's coherent with EU fundamental values like democracy and the rule of law. The third strategy is about cultivating pluralist democracy. So this comes a little bit back also to this complicity idea, because complicity generates not only duties of redress, which is to say, to stop whatever you're doing that makes you complicit, but also reparation. That is a duty to make good to those that you've harmed. In Hungary's case, for example, those that are harmed most by democratic backsliding in Hungary are Hungarian citizens themselves. So we should think about how to support pro democratic actors in Hungary also as a way of compensating them for checking out of our responsibilities.

[Interviewer/Host]

This idea, the third prong, supporting pro democracy actors, trying to reverse the backsliding, massively scaling up EU funding and support for civil society, media and even independent judges. Okay, but then you also call for direct EU support to opposition politicians. The political party being supported would be selected not by ideological criteria, right wing versus left wing, for example, or progressive versus conservative, but. But by a more fundamental pro democratic orientation. Okay, but who decides who is sufficiently democratic to get that money to get that support?

[Tom Tones]

I think the argument for support for Example, for pluralistic media, for independent civil society organizations, human rights organizations, free academic exchange in Hungary and other states that, that are suffering democratic decline. The case is quite easy to make. We should be doing much more. But I think most people agree that we should be doing much more. This is the controversial one, right? Direct support for partisan actors. Because ordinarily we think that especially EU institutional actors should refrain from partisan interference with domestic politics. So I say, look, if the democratic playing field is distorted, what that means is the incumbent has an unfair advantage. So in that context, partisan political interference, as long as it serves to redress that distortion, is justifiable and even desirable. Where the actors supported a pro democratic. Because of course it doesn't make any sense to try to restore some kind of distortions that are, I don't know, that are keeping up the fascists.

[Interviewer/Host]

This is very interesting, but another impediment here is that the conservatives in the far right in Europe and the European Parliament are already signaling a retreat from any possibility of this approach, in a way by threatening funding for programs like the EU Citizens Equality, Rights and Values program. And that's the kind of program that would point in this direction of actually directly helping not only civil society groups and media and judges and so on on, but also politicians and opposition parties.

[Tom Tones]

So in this case, this is a situation where what we see that's happening, the developments are moving away from what I think should be happening. Unfortunately, there's many situations where that's the case.

[Interviewer/Host]

So expulsion, the big one. What if, after trying to stronger tools to cultivate pluralist democracy, we still see one or several member states continuing to slip? Now, what's interesting and what's super important here is that there's no way currently under the EU treaties that the EU can expel a member state. There is no expulsion mechanism. There is this big bazooka that the EU already has, which is Article 7. Article 7 can strip a recalcitrant member state of its right to vote on EU matters. A kind of temporary expulsion. This has never actually happened though. And of course there are political reasons why that's never happened. You say that actually it's time to just kind of jettison this whole thing entirely.

[Tom Tones]

That's right. So the political side of things is focused on this step in Article 7, which requires unanimity. The moment that you have one body in the European Council or the Council, whichever institution is voting, that's enough for unanimity to be impossible. So all Orban needs is one ally in the European Council or the Council, and The procedures against him, the sanctions procedures against him, which require unanimity become impossible and it's unlikely to have a dissuasive effect, and so on. I always worried more about one of the later clauses in Article 7, which makes very explicit that a sanctioned member state remains subject to EU law.

[James Kanter]

In other words, you can be stripped.

[Interviewer/Host]

Of your voting rights, but if you're Viktor Orban, let's say, but you still have to abide by EU law, your state still has to abide by the law. And you find that very problematic.

[Tom Tones]

Well, it creates a paradox because on the one hand, stripping someone of their right to vote and continuing to hold them subject to a political or a legal decision that's made in a body that they have no influence in, it's just a straightforwardly anti democratic scenario. What's complicated by this, in the case of, let's say, Viktor Orban, is that we don't necessarily consider Viktor Orban to be the legitimate representative of the Hungarian people. If we think that Hungarian elections are not democratic elections because of this skewed a democratic playing field, then there's also this question of, okay, well, maybe he shouldn't have a vote in the Council because he's not, I mean, his ministers are not legitimate representatives of the Hungarian democratic will. That paradox is, I think, unresolvable because up to some point we say, okay, a member state is sufficiently democratic to have the right to vote, and then we should bind them to the results of that vote. But if we think they're no longer democratically accountable to their people, there's no justification to bind those people to the result of votes that they have no influence in. They'll be holding them in a state of suzerainty right of subjection.

[Interviewer/Host]

You know, you talk about the Hungarian people here. We mustn't forget this, because kicking them out would mean you're kicking out people, citizens who have no share in the blame for the autocracy that we have in Hungary, and they may be actively resisting their government too. They're part of civil society organizations, they may be voting for the opposition.

[Tom Tones]

Absolutely. And this dilemma is frequently discussed in sanctions literature and international contexts as well. Right. So often sanctions against a particular authoritarian regime don't negatively impact the material comfort and wellbeing of the leaders of that regime. They actually have massively disproportionate effects on those who oppose the regime because the regime still controls plenty of resources, enough to ensure a level of comfort for regime cadres and those closely supporting the regime. And basically they distribute These costs of the sanctions on to poor elements of society and opposition. I think in the European context it's similar. Right.

[Interviewer/Host]

Given this kind of problematic. Get us now to why you propose an expulsion mechanism. Why do we sort of end up there? An expulsion mechanism for a state, let's say a Hungary, that is judged to be no longer capable of reform?

[Tom Tones]

What's important to me is to insist that an expulsion mechanism is a last resort. So one of the reasons I think it's important to talk about it is because it focuses the mind on other things that need to be done and the urgency of doing those things. So when I talk about cultivating pluralist democracy, I'm not thinking just of being nice. I'm thinking about duties we have to those we've harmed in Hungary. And the hope being that as part of a coherent strategy of protecting democracy that can turn things around, expulsion is a last resort. And I think it's important to recognize that ultimately, supranational union with an autocratic state is a choice. What that means is, at some point, if a member state of the European Union becomes frankly, autocratic, EU member states can also choose to disengage. They can also choose to dissolve those commitments. Right? And thereby also protect their own democratic character, because continuing supranational involvement with an autocratic actor. What that means is you give some authority, some legislative authority over some affairs that govern citizens in your policy to an unelected autocrat, and that autocrat will.

[Interviewer/Host]

Be doing business with the rest of the Union's institutions. The MEPs in that autocrat's party will be in the European Parliament. That autocrat, his or herself, will be in the European Council. That autocrat will be appointing a commissioner to the European Commission. The autocracy is starting to poison the European Union itself.

[Tom Tones]

Exactly. And I think that's already the case. So when I say unelected autocrat, of course I mean someone who's elected in undemocratic means, right? So there are elections, but they're not fair, they're not democratic for that reason, and so forth. This is shorthand, but basically every EU institution that has authority, that's delegated from member states, where member states are supposed. Member state governments are supposed to be accountable to their parliaments or their people. This is Article 10 of the Treaty of the European Union. If that's not the case, then the derivative legitimacy of all these other institutions is undermined. And the legitimacy of the European Parliament is also directly undermined, because the elections for members of the European Parliament take Place in the same context. That are the reasons we're calling these national elections undemocratic.

[Interviewer/Host]

So when do we judge? When it's really better to leave Hungarian society to fend entirely for itself outside of an eu? If there is an expulsion mechanism, what are your tests for invoking it?

[Tom Tones]

Ultimately, I think this is a deeply political decision. What's really important for me is not that experts and academics should decide, okay, this is the precise threshold of Hungarian democracy, below which it's intolerable. What's important to me is twofold. One, that we actually have a conversation on what the red lines are, a democratic conversation. So you and I might have slightly different views on that, but we get those out there. What lines do we think cannot be crossed? Maybe they've already been crossed and maybe not. That's important to get that out in the open. And the second is that expulsion is a real option, that it's not because there's no expulsion article in the Treaty of the European Union, that a member state can never be expelled, and that we should be fatalistic about this possibility ever being on the table. Because for me, that really empowers an autocrat. What I think is that if we have a clear headed conversation about both the possibility of expulsion and the contours or the criteria which we think expulsion would be legitimate, we actually disempower autocrats. Because remember that the population of Hungary and Poland under Pearson, many of these cases, Slovakia under fico, the population support EU membership. So it's actually quite an important question whether Hungarian membership of the EU is a matter which is fully determined by the Hungarian government or not. Right.

[Interviewer/Host]

So having this mechanism might even set in, train an effect within these polities that catalyzes a state to kind of return to perhaps a democratic equilibrium.

[Tom Tones]

Absolutely. And we can see how sanctions, when they are reasonable, legitimate, when they are credible, they can have quite an important effect on domestic politics.

[Interviewer/Host]

Now, there is an opponent of Orban's who's actually ahead in the polls by a few percentage points. He's a former aide of Orban's called Peter Magyar. Unlike Orban, Magyar says that he supports Ukraine. Okay, but how do we judge when a Peter Magyar may turn out to be a democratic savior if we just wait because, you know, maybe he won't get elected in the end, or he'll just turn out to be another Orban, you know, anti LGBT rights? We already know that's where Peter Magyar sort of stands. And he may try and hollow out EU institutions a little bit. Like Orban. So do you have any thoughts on when?

[Tom Tones]

So my own view is that right now, also, given this first really credible challenge to Orban in the polls and domestic politically, he's taken so far not so much, in fact, very little from Orban and Fidesh. But perhaps this is the moment both to raise the stakes of this conflict, of this rule of law conflict, and then also to try to shape the outcome. Anyway, moving to expulsion procedure, it would be a convoluted procedure if the legal option that I think is possible would be taken. This is not going to happen.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right now, your idea for the removal of a member state is that you're finding a way to expel a member state without having to redraw the treaties.

[Tom Tones]

Exactly. The starting point for me is that expulsion in the ordinary sense, like it's included in other international institutions like the Council of Europe, isn't possible in the European Union because of the absence of an expulsion mechanism explicitly in the treaties. But we do have a way to leave the European Union. We have article 50 that was used in Brexit by the United Kingdom. And what I suggest is that you could use the Article 50 procedure in a coordinated fashion for pro democratic, pro rule of law member states to collectively withdraw from the European Union. Now, the way that the voting procedure for Article 50 works, much unlike Article 7, the sanctions procedure, is that it doesn't require unanimity, it requires a qualified majority in the Council. So kind of supermajority. So as long as you have this robust majority in the Council, you can kind of do what you want.

[Interviewer/Host]

But it would imply a refounding of the eu.

[Tom Tones]

That's a possibility, a legal possibility, which hadn't really been explored before I mentioned it. There was a speech in the Dutch Parliament by Mark Rutte where he kind of alludes to this possibility without being very specific. And then I wrote an op ed on this and I worked with a lawyer, Merrin Chamond, on the first kind of sketching out the idea that I developed. Then in the book later, that's very.

[Interviewer/Host]

Interesting that it was Mark Rutte, because he's a big figure in European politics. He's the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He's now the Secretary General of NATO. And he spoke in the Dutch Parliament about the idea that we could have a European Union without Poland and Hungary. This was in 2020.

[Tom Tones]

Absolutely. And he spoke about it just about as much as you just did. So he literally just raises it as a rhetorical question. Could we found a new European Union without Poland and Hungary, and then he moves on. But this led me to think, okay, wait. Actually, that recognizes something very specific and legally very interesting, which is that Article 50 is the way that an expulsion mechanism could work.

[Interviewer/Host]

We have a new German chancellor. He's promised tougher action against Hungary. He's talking about withholding funds and suspending voting rights from Hungary. He wants this expansion of qualified majority voting and the Council of the eu. Is Mertz's formula more promising or is it more of the same?

[Tom Tones]

Mertz is making different noises. Some of them are credible and welcome. Some of them are symbolic, which might still be welcome, and some of them are a little bit bullshit. So the talk of expanding qualified majority voting in the Council, this requires treaty change. Hungary would need to sign up for that. Clearly, Orban, the veto is all he has. There's no way he's going to sign up to that. Similarly, suspending voting rights from Hungary requires unanimity, as we've discussed right now, I'm very confident that that would be impossible. We have several member states with far right involvement in government, from the very direct involvement in Italy and the more indirect involvement in the Netherlands, for example. I don't see that happening in the near future. Signaling that that's what he wants to do is already politically very important. And it shows a break from this kind of Angela Merkel complacency about Orban's autocratization. And it's good that Metz is sounding more committed to fundamental values than his predecessors on that. Signaling support for withholding funds is important. It's something that's proven to be, in very recent years, a key tool in terms of actually getting concessions.

[Interviewer/Host]

Let me ask you this as well. Isn't a Europe of 26 already happening, in a way, without Hungary? There are 27 members of the European Union. But it seems like the Council is reaching conclusions on the basis of 26 where it needs to, especially when it comes to issues around Ukraine, where Hungary is very aligned with the Kremlin, is very aligned with Putin's way of thinking, rather than that of the eu, which formally says we are going to support Ukraine for as long as necessary and bring Ukraine into the European Union. Now, there's this weird cohabitation going on now where Orban just seems to kind of disappear where necessary. So a decision can be made on the basis of 26. But is that really viable, or does that just save up problems for the future?

[Tom Tones]

It's hugely problematic, partly because sometimes he needs to be bought off even to walk out of the room. Right. So we have this. This extremely problematic situation where The Commission announces 10 billion euros of funds, which coincides perfectly with Orban leaving to allow a vote on support to Ukraine. The European Commission says it will unlock 10 billion euros in cohesion funds for Hungary.

[Far-right supporter]

It looks nasty that you release 10 billion euros to Orban just before the Council. We don't even know if it's kind of a negotiation for some position tomorrow. One of the leaders was deliberately not inside the room when the decision was taken. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. For weeks he threatened to block the decision. In the end, he abstained.

[Tom Tones]

It seems that there's a tits for tat going on. It's very difficult to prove, of course, but in general, relying on a veto player not to use their veto is just a really weak situation because Orban chooses to leave the room and allow decisions to be taken without him. Sometimes, sometimes he exacts quite heavy price for that, and he can always decide not to. Consensus is required in these common foreign and security policy issues. So I think it's absolutely unsustainable to rely on his cooperation, on his goodwill somehow to continue to work together.

[James Kanter]

Just.

[Interviewer/Host]

To square the circle there, you know, to ask the question, why the need for such a bold rethinking? And here we need some history. Where it starts, the backsliding is what happened in Austria a quarter century ago, in 1999, 2000. This is when the Austrian Party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazi party members, this party, the far right FPO, or Freedom Party, in 1999, wins second place in an election. Eventually, the Austrian Centre Right People's Party, or ovp, decides to include this party with the strong taint of Nazism and led by the very colorful Jorg Heider. There are protests. The European Parliament overwhelmingly approves a resolution condemning the FPO's inclusion, that this legitimizes the extreme right in Europe. And this is where the story really starts for you.

[Tom Tones]

Yeah. So one really important aspect of the responses to the FBO's inclusion in the government in Austria in 2000 is how that was remembered 10 years later. So, like many people, my story of evaluating kind of democratic backsliding in European Union member states really starts in 2010 with Hungary and Viktor Orban. But the way in which different European actors respond to Orban in 2010, I think was shaped heavily by the memory of this response to FB2000.

[Interviewer/Host]

So, initially, in this election in Austria, of all people, Antonio Guterres, the current Secretary General of the un, he was then the Portuguese Prime Minister and Portugal held the presidency of the Council of the eu. Guterres leads an effort to scare the Austrians against forming such a government with the far right. But this election was free and fair and the FPO weren't even in government yet. So in that sense they. They hadn't violated any EU fundamental values yet. It was all a bit anticipatory. And very quickly more dilemmas develop.

[Tom Tones]

You're right that Guterres was the kind of organiser of the EU 14 the other member states.

[Interviewer/Host]

14 at the time.

[Tom Tones]

Yeah, exactly. What happened was that Guterres realising that they couldn't impose sanctions via the European Union because there wasn't something like a concrete violation yet. The threat was not made via EU institutions directly. It was organised by Guterres as President of the Council. But it was a series of bilateral diplomatic boycotts threatening the Austrian centre right. They're trying to push them towards the centre left, who actually won the election and say, stay away from the fpu, the far right, and form a government instead with the centre left. So the threat is do this or we will freeze out Vienna from bilateral diplomatic relations.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. Concretely you can't come to parties.

[Tom Tones]

Concretely you can't come to parties. We're not going to invite you to bilateral diplomatic talks in the different capitals. And it very quickly failed in that goal because in February 2000 the Ofipe and the FBO form a government.

[Interviewer/Host]

The Austrian conservatives ignore Guterres. They form the government with the far right anyway.

[Tom Tones]

So then you of course need to put your money where your mouth is. And what happened was a series of bilateral diplomatic freezeouts. The Austrians weren't invited to a bunch of parties. But embarrassingly, one of the awkward aspects that was baked into the threat, and I think that was perhaps seen through already by the Austrian negotiators, was that cooperation in the EU institutions would have to continue in Brussels and in Luxembourg and in Strasbourg. And what you see quite quickly, and I think entirely predictably, is that this cohesion, this common position that Guterre has organized starts to break down. They see that indefinite diplomatic boycotts against Vienna are just not going to be sustainable.

[Interviewer/Host]

So Joergh Haider doesn't become Chancellor, but the about face by the EU is that they drop this rather ineffective regime.

[Tom Tones]

Exactly. And the lesson that was learned is that going outside of the EU institutions, going this bilateral route is a mistake. Boycotts are a mistake. We have to go procedurally, we have to go legally, we have to go via EU procedures and EU law. The problem with Austria is that they can't go through these procedures because there's no violation. And that also then feeds into this kind of knee jerk or this reflex that if there's a problem, the problem is that the tool is too strong. Right.

[Interviewer/Host]

So this is the remarkable thing that almost in the immediate aftermath of the Austria debacle, there are these moves to weaken rather than strengthen responses to such scenarios in the future.

[Tom Tones]

That's absolutely correct. So it becomes weakened very soon after the Austrian experience. This is exactly the period in which they are revising EU constitutional treaties. And then what comes the Lisbon Treaty and then reticence to use up procedures. The consideration is that a sanctions mechanism needs to then include monitoring this dialogue. But one of the things that is incredible is that Article 7 already has all of these monitoring and dialogue steps built into the article.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right. So Article 7, the Voting Rights of a member state still can be taken.

[Tom Tones]

Away, but the process of adding to this procedure is almost endless. The pattern is very much that when there's a kind of deadlock, instead of trying to work through or around the deadlock, you try to retreat and find some kind of prior point which is less sticky or which is more manageable.

[Interviewer/Host]

And we've seen a succession of tools and instruments for democracy. One is this annual rule of Law report, a sort of assessment process, emphasis on process rather than enforcement. And you quote Dan Kellerman, the Georgetown professor, likening this process to being, quote, in the midst of a three alarm fire, publishing an obscurantis treatise on the importance of fire safety and the warning signs of fire risk. I mean, what you're saying here is that almost all the instruments that are introduced to deal with the democracy question are just too little, too late and a little bit off the mark.

[Tom Tones]

That's right. So I actually read some of these reports for the book and what I did was take the EU member state, which performs the most highly on rule of law standards, Denmark and Hungary, which performs the lowest, and compare what the report says now in terms of tone and even kind of content. They're largely indistinguishable, which is remarkable, which is insane. It's completely insane. Completely ignoring that there's part of the building that's burning down.

[Interviewer/Host]

I mean, we sort of come back to the need for some form of expulsion threat in order to bring a person like Victor Orban and his party back on board, back to a democratic equilibrium. There is no way at the moment to guarantee that they will reach that point under the current rule books, of which there are many now, for theoretically enforcing a kind of democratic consensus in Europe. It seems to me that we need what you're proposing.

[Tom Tones]

Increasingly, I think it's become also more current in academic but also political circles to think seriously about what the limits are of the EU's commitment to democracy and what the limits are of a democratic Europe. We need something to give, because the logic of democratic backsliding is the longer it goes on, the more difficult it is to dislodge these authoritarian actors. What they are undermining, literally, is the possibility of their removal by flattening media freedom, by, by flattening opposition. And the result of that is if you do nothing, the situation just gets worse.

[James Kanter]

That's it for this episode. But one more thing before you go. There's an easy way to become a material supporter of EU Scream. It's simple. You look for eu [e-mail] and you pledge what you can. Now, EU Scream is non profit. We might occasionally do partnerships and take advertising, and we're grateful to Full Beam Media for an annual grant. But here's the thing. We need your support to bring you more content more regularly. It's your support that helps us delve into this new, darker era in our politics, into how the EU should be responding, and into the thoughts and experiences of people who really know what they're talking about. Small donations to large ones, it's all incredibly appreciated. It also helps when we get a five star rating at Spotify or a review at Apple. Podcasts and passing on episodes to family, colleagues and friends. That's yet another great way to show support. For more details and for more EU Scream, do Please visit EU scream.com thanks for listening.