The costs of Merkel’s surrender to Hungarian and Polish extortion

The EU budget and covid-19 fund compromises German Chancellor Angela Merkel reached with Hungary and Poland are the worst of all possible worlds
By George Soros
View from the Council 11 December 2020

The European Union is facing an existential threat, and yet the EU’s leadership is responding with a compromise that appears to reflect a belief that the threat can simply be wished away. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic regime in Hungary and, to a lesser extent, the illiberal Law and Justice government in Poland, are brazenly challenging the values on which the European Union has been built. Treating their challenge as a legitimate political stance deserving of recognition and a compromise solution will only add – massively – to the risks that the EU now faces.

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All I can do is to express the moral outrage that people who believed in the EU as the protector of European and universal values must feel. I also want to warn that this compromise may severely dent the hard-won confidence that the union’s institutions have gained through the creation of the recovery fund.