Viktor Orbán has conceded defeat. Leaders from Brussels to Kyiv are celebrating. Sixteen years of institutional disruption: of blocked sanctions, strangled Ukraine aid, democratic backsliding conducted from inside the EU’s own walls, and a Budapest government that functioned, in practice, as Moscow’s most reliable asset inside the Western alliance. It has ended not in Brussels, but by Hungarian voters.
Ursula von der Leyen declared that Hungary had chosen Europe, and European officials exhaled.
They shouldn’t.
Orbán’s defeat is not a vindication. It is a window. One that is already closing.
What Orbán demonstrated is that a single government inside the EU can hold the entire Western alliance hostage. Not through military force. Through procedure. For years, and with increasing frequency, he used the EU’s own unanimity rules as a weapon, denying Europe the one thing that great power competition now demands above all else: the ability to act.
In the balmy days of the early 2010s, that was manageable. Now it’s not. Europe is no longer operating in a permissive international environment where strategic drift is affordable. An economic giant that cannot convert its weight into coherent strategic decisions is not a power that can counter Moscow’s aggression or even Washington’s contempt.
Europe must act as though Orbán won.
Across the continent, the structural conditions that enabled Orbán remain in place. And are deepening. Populist parties now lead opinion polls across Europe’s three largest economies. In Germany, the AfD has moved from a protest movement to the country’s dominant political force. In France, the National Rally has rebranded itself as the common-sense party of sovereignty. Across the Channel, Nigel Farage’s Reform leads the polls and is close to real political power.
And populists already in power, in countries like Slovakia and in Bulgaria, where a populist, Kremlin-friendly government has just won a majority, may pose a similar threat to joint decision-making.
Populism across the continent is deeply rooted in the erosion of prosperity that defined the post-war order and has radically accelerated since the financial crisis of 2007-8. Since 2000, 14 EU member states, including Germany, France, and Italy, have fallen in global GDP per capita rankings. Real income levels have declined, and the middle class has been squeezed across the majority of European countries.
Growth has occurred, but it is uneven. Four in five people across the OECD feel income disparities in their country are too large. Stagnant wages, intergenerational inequalities, and institutions that sometimes answer legitimate grievances with technocratic indifference have created the space that populists moved into. Traditional patriotism, anti-immigration sentiment, cultural conservatism, and anger at the decline of the “left behind” have boosted backing for populist parties, often hostile to the continent’s strategic unity.
When prosperity erodes, and institutions don’t respond, the space for alternatives opens up. Vladimir Putin did not make Viktor Orbán, Robert Fico, or Nigel Farage. Nor is Orbán’s defeat a full repudiation of populism’s fundamentals. Péter Magyar, for example, shares some of Orbán’s nationalist analysis, while promising an end to corruption and overt obsequiousness toward Russia.
In the 12 months before Orbán’s defeat, Brussels had finally woken up to the strategic danger posed by its own governance, the legacy of a bygone geopolitical era. European capitals were forced to improvise to bypass Budapest, restructuring aid packages outside normal budget rules, recharacterizing defense spending to bypass unanimity requirements, and deploying obscure emergency legal mechanisms to unlock the funds Orbán was blocking. It worked. Just.
The EU must not pause the processes that Budapest forced upon it. Institutional improvisation will not work for a National Rally-led France or with a pro-Moscow AfD in power in Berlin.
The Commission and leading member states should finally and decisively act on unanimity.
Firstly, Europe must end the veto trap in foreign and security policy. The requirement for unanimity on sanctions and critical security decisions was designed for a bloc of trusted trading partners; it has become a strategic vulnerability. As French President Emmanuel Macron’s decade-long push for a Sovereign Europe has emphasized, strategic paralysis is becoming the inevitable price of the national veto.
Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on European Competitiveness correctly framed this issue as an existential necessity: the EU cannot maintain its relevance in a world where adversaries act in hours while Brussels waits years for consensus. Moving to Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) for security decisions is now a strategic requirement. (This system requires 15 of the 27 members to agree on decisions, and together they must represent 65% of the bloc’s population.)
The mechanisms for change already exist. The EU can use the Passerelle Clause to extend Qualified Majority Voting into key areas of foreign and security policy, even if doing so requires initial unanimity, and shift the operational burden of sanctions to instruments such as those under Article 215 TFEU, which makes it harder for a single state to stall implementation. The point is simple: Europe already has the tools to reduce veto power, but under current political conditions, it has been unable to use them.
Secondly, complete what SAFE has started. Security Action for Europe has begun pooling defense procurement across member states, starting by mobilizing €150bn ($176bn) in joint loans. It is the most significant step towards European strategic autonomy in a generation. But any participating government can still block the deployment of jointly procured assets under the same rules that gave Orbán his veto. This also should be removed. Europe’s military capacity must be developed as a unified instrument and not a 27-way debate.
Third, Hungary and Article 7. The European Union’s ultimate disciplinary tool is designed to strip a member state of its voting rights if it violates the Union’s core values of democracy and the rule of law. A file was opened in 2018 on Orbán’s government, which stalled it by exploiting a pact with other populist governments, most notably in Poland. Brussels must not only force a conclusion of the current process with Magyar, but use this momentum to move the determination of a breach to Qualified Majority Voting as proposed by the European Parliament three years ago.
Finally, the EU should vigorously enforce breaches of Article 4(3) of the EU Treaties, which obligates member states to demonstrate “sincere cooperation”. Steps are being taken in this direction, with the Commission’s proposal for the next long-term budget strengthening the link between access to EU funds and compliance with common obligations.
Paris, not Budapest, is Europe’s real test.
This moment is now less than 12 months away. France goes to the polls for its presidential election, and the National Rally, with its long-term ties to Moscow, under either Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, will make its most serious bid for the Elysée yet. The structural conditions, economic stagnation, migrant anxiety, and institutional distrust are more favorable to the French populist right than at any point in the Fifth Republic’s history.
If Brussels has not completed QMV reform, tightened its rule-of-law, and anchored a unified European defense procurement structure before that election, it may face the same vulnerabilities it faced with Orbán, but at the scale of France, a founding member, a nuclear weapons power, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
The Kremlin has not been sitting idly waiting for a European fracture. It is openly pursued through the continent’s populist parties.
Under current structures. Any captured capital will suffice.
In that world, the inability to act is not an administrative inconvenience. It is an invitation.
Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst and writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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