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Opinion
February 16, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
Europe’s axis is shifting West not East
Robert Anderson in Prague
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman, has hailed 2018 as the year Central Europe will start to finally punch above its weight inside the Euro- pean Union.
He has claimed that the region’s growing eco- nomic and political self-confidence is attracting admirers across Europe, shifting the EU’s axis eastwards so that cooperation between Germany and the Visegrad Group is now becoming at least as important as cooperation between Germany and France. In particular he has welcomed Aus- tria’s new government as an ally and as a possible harbinger that the tide against Western European federalists is turning.
This fantasy firstly ignores the widening division between Czechia and Slovakia on the one hand, and Hungary and Poland on the other. 2018 is likely instead to be the year the Visegrad Group becomes more and more moribund, preventing Orban’s cru- sade against Western Europe’s out of touch liberal elite from even getting off the ground.
At a panel debate in Prague in early December on the future of Central Europe organised by the As- pen Institute, the gaping fractures in the V4 were impossible to ignore.
Moderator Michal Zantovsky, head of the Vaclav Havel Library and a former Czech centre-right politician, challenged Fidesz deputy Zsolt Nem- eth to justify Orban’s hollowing out of Hungar-
ian democracy, asking “Are we still on the same side?” Nemeth at first refused to answer and then brushed off the question with cold disdain. Repre-
New premiers Andrej Babis (left) and Sebastian Kurz (right) will prioritise links with the EU's core.
sentatives of Fidesz or Poland’s ruling Truth and Justice party are already a rare sight at Prague conferences – it is not hard to see why.
The united front of the V4 was always exagger- ated anyway, both by Hungary and Poland (to bulk up their own significance), and by Western media, which as always prefer to hype a sexy story rather than tease out the little known region’s complexities.
Just because Orban regards himself as the V4’s spokesman does not mean he is. The Hungar-
ian leader speaks good English and is witty, and therefore tends to overshadow his fellow V4 premiers. Czech and Slovak leaders could help themselves by beginning to voice their differences with their neighbourhood populists at V4 press conferences, rather than shuffling their feet or nodding along, as they did at their Budapest sum- mit last month.
The V4 is not only divided politically between rightwing authoritarians in Poland and Hungary, and Social Democrats in Slovakia and centrist populists in Czechia, it also remains deeply split on key international issues such as relations with Russia and Nordstream 2. In reality the V4 these days agrees on little of substance apart from refusing to accept refugees, and defending the rights of their own migrants in Western Europe.
When the V4 put together their own EU pro- gramme in October 2016 in the Bratislava Decla- ration it was only notable for its vacuity. Moreover there was no follow-up; it stayed just a declara- tion. Central Europe’s voice in the upcoming big