How the EU’s budget feud with Hungary is sparking demands for radical reform
Faced with the intransigence of Viktor Orbán, MEPs are debating whether to abolish the principle of unanimity.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban in Brussels
Hungary and Poland’s recent veto of the EU’s proposed €1trn budget illustrates a recurring truth about EU institutions: that the consensus-based functioning of the world’s second-largest economy can be undermined by just one or two hostile governments. The old joke about Brussels politics from the satirical 1990s British TV show
The Day Today – a correspondent bluffing that a minister “didn’t like the deal, but had to go along with it” – no longer applies.