Die neusten Meldungen.

Eine Woche nach seinem Treffen mit dem amerikanischen Präsidenten Trump hat Chinas Staats- und Regierungschef Xi seinen russischen Amtskollegen empfangen. Der steht unter Druck und hofft auf Hilfe von seinem engsten Verbündeten.

Faszien können Schmerzen verursachen. Dagegen hilft gezielte Bewegung.

Die dänische Umweltschutzbehörde bestätigte, dass es sich beim toten Buckelwal vor der dänischen Küste um den Buckelwal Timmy handelt. Ende März war er auf einer Sandbank in Schleswig-Holstein gestrandet. In einer aufwendigen Rettungsaktion hat eine private Gruppe das Tier Anfang Mai in die Nordsee gebracht.

Während einer Kreuzfahrt haben sich mehrere Personen mit einer schweren Atemwegserkrankung infiziert. Drei von ihnen starben. Inzwischen werden mehrere Passagiere in Spitälern betreut.

Commission v Hungary proved, unsurprisingly, yet another bold leap forward in the Court’s value jurisprudence. Central to the reasoning of the Court has been the notion that Article 2 forms part of “the very identity of the Union as a common legal order”, which popped up five times in the 44 short paragraphs of the Court’s reasoning on Article 2. While much attention has already been paid to the judgment, the role of the Court’s “identity rationale” in the judgment merits a separate examination.

The identity rationale is the most recent of three overarching rationales advanced by the Court for the enforcement of requirements flowing from Article 2. First, there was the functional rationale: Adherence to a common set of values needs to be safeguarded because the “fundamental premiss” of such a common set of values is essential for the functioning of European integration (para 522 in Commission v Hungary). It was later joined by the commitment rationale, which entered the ring with cases such as Wightman and Repubblika: The Union’s shared values can be enforced because, in the Court’s understanding of Article 49 TEU, the Member States have legally committed themselves to upholding these values when they acceded to the Union (para 521).

The identity rationale tells us that Article 2 TEU needs to be judicially enforceable because that article forms part of “the very identity of the EU as a common legal order”. Following its first appearance in the Conditionality judgments, the identity rationale has become a staple in the Court’s reasoning, prominently featuring in landmark cases. In Commission v Hungary, too, the appeal to identity is frequent: The “very identity of the Union as a common legal order” shows up five times in the relatively short segment the Court dedicated to Article 2 TEU. Despite the frequency of its mention, however, Commission v Hungary might not have brought us any closer to understanding what precisely the Court means by referring to identity, nor even what purpose the appeal to identity serves in the EU context.

What Does the Court Mean?

Following the identity rationale’s first appearance in the Conditionality judgments, scholarship quickly surmised that the Court was at the very least alluding to, if not fully embracing, a “constitutional identity” doctrine analogous to similar doctrines advanced by the Member States.

The constitutional identity arguments developed by member states are rooted in a foundationalist constitutional paradigm that imagines constitutions as grounded in the people’s constituent power and aims to safeguard the essence of that act of constituent power against being superseded or eroded both from within and from the outside.  Implicitly or explicitly, they follow a (questionable) Schmittian logic that understands the “constitution” in a material sense—the fundamental decision of the constituent power in favour of a certain type of political existence— as separate from and superior to the mere multitude of “constitutional laws”. In other words, in the state context, constitutional identity is defended not simply because certain provisions are contingently deemed more important than others, but because a violation of the “constitutional identity” of a polity would, in effect, signify a usurpation of constituent power.

Advocate-General Ćapeta’s opinion in Commission v Hungary represented the most serious attempt thus far to transplant this logic from the Member State level to the EU level. Indeed, at times, the AG’s opinion sounds surprisingly Schmittian. Ćapeta understands Article 2 as encapsulating “the choice of the founders of the European Union as to the type of society that the Member States have pledged to create together within the framework of the European Union” (AG opinion, para 155, emphasis added). This choice represents the “very identity” of the Union, because “without those values, the European Union would cease to be the Union as envisaged by the Treaties” (AG opinion, para 158). Ćapeta even goes as far as enmeshing the moral with the political, by suggesting that the question of defining a “good society” is a matter of political choice (para 157). The AG’s opinion, in its seeming attempt to embrace a form of “supranational decisionism”, was daring and profoundly political (in the best sense of that term).

Yet, the foundationalist logic of constitutional identity is not easily transplanted into the EU context: The EU is not based on an act of original constituent power. It did not emerge from “the Political” but from a more mundane sphere of international treaty-making, notwithstanding the magnitude of the Treaties themselves. The Treaties may have encapsulated a decision in favour of certain values, but it is simply not clear on what basis that decision could appear any qualitatively different from a choice in favour of a single market, in favour of price stability in the Eurozone, or in favour of qualified majority voting as a decision-making principle. If the EU’s constitutional identity claim is indeed modelled after the identity claims of the Member States, it appears strained and implausible.

In the Court’s final judgment, Ćapeta’s supranational decisionism has all but evaporated. Here, the identity rationale simply materialises out of thin air, without any explanation about what concretely it means that Article 2 amounts to the “very identity” of the EU legal order. The Court does not derive the “identity status” of Article 2 from a political foundationalist logic but seems to simply understand the latter as a result of the fact that adherence to values is functionally important for the EU and the Member States have legally committed themselves to upholding the values in Article 2 (para 525). In other words, the identity rationale appears as a mere restatement of the functional and commitment rationales, rather than as hinting at a more distinctly political logic. This is not just underwhelming; it raises the question what an appeal to identity adds to the Court’s justification for enforcing Article 2 TEU at all.

What Purposes Does the Identity Rationale Serve?

EU legal scholarship, keen to develop the analogy between EU and Member State constitutional identity, has jumped on several purposes to which the identity rationale could be utilised. It could provide a definitive like-for-like response to the (often abusive) assertions of national constitutional identity from which the EU legal order has found itself under attack in past decades. It could even serve the stipulation of amendment limits within EU law.

Yet, whether these purposes are truly pertinent to the EU context can be questioned: The stipulation of amendment limits hardly could have been on the Court’s mind in any of the cases in which identity was summoned. The debate around such limits is truly ‘academic’ (in the worst sense of that term). Nor does the Court need to advance a constitutional identity analogue to displace and override the identity claims of the Member States: The most basic of European constitutional orthodoxies – the primacy of EU law itself – already does that job. Already in Commission v Poland, identity played a subdued and mostly rhetorical role in dealing with the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s diatribes. To claim that EU law needs its own constitutional identity to provide an additional layer of superiority entrenching Article 2 values suggests a very strange, and infinitely replicable, shell game of constitutional one-upmanship. The Court’s reasoning in Commission v Hungary, making quick work of Hungary’s plea for respect for national identity under Article 4(2), demonstrates its dispensability: It dismisses Hungary’s identitarian objections without so much as mentioning identity in the relevant paragraphs (557-563).

A closer look at the Court’s use of the identity rationale in Commission v Hungary raises the question of why the Court needed to appeal to identity at all. Despite the frequency of its mention, its function remains opaque. Appeal to identity is often tacked onto (eg para 546: “In the first place […] the values set out in [Article 2] lay down horizontally binding obligations and define the very identity of the Union as a common legal order”) or simply crammed into sentences (para 549) without itself doing much justificatory work. The Court established the legally binding nature of Article 2 TEU by appealing to commitment rather than to identity: That Article 2 imposes legally binding and judicially enforceable obligations on the Member States follows from the Court’s interpretation of Article 49 and the non-regression principle it had already established prior (para 520-525). The status of Article 2 as “identity of the EU legal order” equally follows as a corollary of the Member States’ commitment, and so hardly does any justificatory work in and of itself.

Later, the appeal to identity seems to come close to serving a heuristic purpose: Because “particularly serious and manifest” violations of the Union’s founding values amounted to an infringement of the “very identity” of the Union legal order, the Court ruled that such breaches directly violated Article 2 TEU (paragraph 551). Yet even here, it remains difficult to see what concretely the Court gains from the reference to identity. It hardly adds clarity to the ‘particularly serious and manifest’ threshold stipulated in that paragraph but simply provides an additional layer of conceptual opacity. Nor does it explain why reference to the “identity of the EU legal order” justifies the direct judicial enforcement of Article 2: What is it about the “identity of the EU legal order” that conduces the Court to finding a violation of Article 2 TEU? How come it is only violated in “particularly serious and manifest” cases? For the finding of an Article 2 violation in this case, the appeal to identity was entirely dispensable.

Identity Unbound?

The only clue left for the potential role of the identity rationale is speculative and prospective. Much has already been said about the Court hinting at potential violations of Article 2 TEU even where EU law is not otherwise engaged. In paragraph 550, the Court argues that the scope of Article 2 violations must be limited because the Court needs to safeguard the effectiveness of Article 51(1) of the Charter, which confines the Charter’s application to situations in which the Member States are “implementing Union Law”. The Court passes this off as judicial restraint, but the underlying logic hints, however carefully, at a potentially highly expansive scope for Article 2, enforceable even where EU law is otherwise not engaged at all. In the case of “particularly serious and manifest” violations of common values, where the identity of the EU as a common legal order is engaged, the Court might free itself from the constraints of the Charter.

Appeal to the “identity of the EU legal order” may not be needed to justify finding a violation of Article 2 TEU where EU law is otherwise engaged, as it was in this case. But it might come in handy as a justification for displacing boundaries to the Court’s jurisdiction by which it is otherwise constrained. If the EU’s “identity” was elevated to a normative plane above the Treaties themselves, the Court could prioritise the identity of the EU legal order over fidelity to the text of the Treaties.

The Court’s current formulaic and vacuous approach to identity, however, seems hardly capable of carrying such a propulsive use of Article 2 TEU. It would need to follow AG Ćapeta in understanding Article 2 TEU as encapsulating a fundamental political decision. Appeal to identity would, then, signify a totalising and capital-P “Political” dimension of Article 2 TEU, transcending the more strictly purpose-bound and functional aspects of EU constitutionalism and instead embracing a comprehensive vision of the European common good, which the Court of Justice is empowered to protect in all facets of the political life of the Member States and the Union.

However, as argued above, such a full-blown embrace of the analogy between Member State and EU constitutional identity would be conceptually strained and implausible. It would require a significant leap of faith, if not a suspension of disbelief, to fully buy into the analogy. Consequently, the Court’s embrace of such a view of Article 2 would, potentially quite perilously, rely on political buy-in rather than compelling legal reasoning even more than it is doing already. Whether such political buy-in would be sustainably forthcoming is anybody’s guess, but no matter how many times the Court alludes to a European “society in which pluralism prevails”, it can hardly be generated from or grounded in the law alone.

Likewise, such a normative instrumentalisation of constitutional identity would not be without danger. If the Court of Justice can rely on a contingently constructed sense of constitutional identity to disregard or erode constraints that were hard-wired into the Treaties, it might be acting not too dissimilarly from populist leaders who have mobilised their own sense of constitutional identity for much more nefarious purposes. Displacing the constraints of the Treaties on grounds of constitutional identity would risk playing fast and loose with the rule of law on the basis of a contestable account of constitutional legitimacy.

I would like to thank Martijn van den Brink for comments on an earlier draft.

The post To Identity and Beyond? appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In a recent post, Suryapratim Roy discusses the Irish fuel price blockades that took place in April. The protests were physically and symbolically dominated by agriculture. Most of its leaders identified themselves as farmers or as farming contractors, and the blockades were agglomerated agricultural machinery: rows of tractors, combine harvesters, dumper trucks, juxtaposed into urban and industrial environments. At the same time, the protests had a far-right element. Some of those associated prominently with it expressed far-right or racist views, or appeared to have connections with international far-right causes. The protests caused immense disruption: motorways were blocked, hospital appointments missed. Fuel ran out across the country. For a moment, the state appeared to lose authority.

In his post, Roy identifies the protestors as a “fossil elite” of wealthy farmers, engaged in a form of lobbying or rent extraction to preserve their own economic interest. The protests themselves he characterises as “a marriage of fossil capital and racial capital”. Protestors sought not just to maximise economic advantage but to leverage a form of racial power: to offer up Irish identity as a form of “whiteness” that can be appropriated and exploited by the transnational far-right. In this post I reflect and respond to a part of Roy’s argument. I explore in symbolic terms why the fuel protests took the form that they did, and why the response to the protests of Irish society in general – and the broad political Left in particular – was ambiguous. The answer, I believe, is at once more complex and more domestic than Roy allows. It lies in the appropriation by the far-right of a hitherto innocuous indigenous Irish archetype: the Men with Tractors.

Men with Tractors

When I was three, perhaps four, years old, I was told to grab a stick and walk down the narrow lane from my grandparents’ house in Meath. It was important not to wear red: red aggravates the cattle. I was given wellies for the look of the thing. My grandfather, who must have been in his mid-eighties at that point, had finally accepted that he was too old to be a farmer, and, in the absence of a son to take up the mantle, a truck was coming to collect the last remaining cattle. The truck sat at the bottom of the lane, ramp down, gaping like a basking shark. We shook sticks at the herd until they ambled in.

This moment is one of my earliest memories. My ancestral memory of farming is not unique. Nor, of course, is it universal. Ireland rapidly urbanised from around the 1970s onwards. Though there will be many, like me, who are just a generation away from farming, there are likely far more now who would find this kind of anecdote completely alien. Nonetheless, the politics and imagery of farming exerts, in the year 2026, an outsize influence on Irish national politics. Men with Tractors occupy a space in the national psyche that hasn’t quite been filled by anything else.

My hinterland called out to me when I read Roy’s account of the fuel protests. Not because I think that the protests were anything other than deeply problematic. The protests were, to a distressing extent, far-right organised and far-right coded. Their apparent triumph was also highly dubious: an expensive howl at short-term market fluctuations, done at significant environmental cost. My concern, however, is that Roy’s account flattens the politics of the protests. Roy writes as a lawyer, with skill and a focus on the broader intellectual sweep. He writes, nonetheless, with a lawyer’s sensibility, and a lawyer’s tendency to discount the political and the emotional. In attributing the protests to a near conspiratorial nexus of wealthy elites and the international far-right he misses, I wish to gently suggest, the point.

The Symbolism of the Protests and the Birth of a Domesticated Far-Right

The point of the fuel protests – their symbolic power – is that they set two pastiched archetypes of Ireland against one another. In the psychogeography of the protests, the Men with Tractors (and, yes, the overwhelming maleness of the protestors is part of this) are set against plate glass corporate buildings and a franchised Starbucks on O’Connell Bridge. Rural is set against urban. The real people of the country are set against the jackeens up in Dublin. These are all crude clichés, of course, which do a disservice to everyone they caricature and everyone they ignore. But that is precisely the point: this is politics at its most deliberately simplistic; nuance and consequences be damned.

In the fuel protests, in other words, we witnessed the birth of a domesticated Irish populism: far-right populism with Irish characteristics. The archetypes differ slightly from than those in other countries. In place of White Van Man, Joe the Plumber, the Canadian truckers, or les Gilets Jaunes we have the Men with Tractors. In structural terms, though, the narrative is the same. There are (to draw on the analysis of Jan Werner-Müller in his excellent What is Populism?) all the markers of populism: insurgent “saviour” leaders who defy the normal rules of politics, appeals to the needs and values of the “real, decent, people”, and so on.

Here is where the complexity kicks in. Because the far-right populists didn’t invent Men with Tractors. Men with Tractors already existed. Every few years they kick up about something – they agitate about tax or subsidies or an environmental rule – but mostly they coach hurling down at the GAA and keep the village going when there’s a storm. You don’t live in the village, of course, but your parents used to, and a cousin still does, and the emotional pull is real. Plus farmers produce food, and Ireland is very proud of its food.

The National Archetype as Far-Right Trojan Horse

We thus have two overlapping Men with Tractors archetypes: the “real people” of the far-right populists, and the “ordinary farmer” lying deep within the Irish political psyche. It’s not an accident that the broad Left (a tricky category in Irish politics at the best of times) were flat-footed by the protests, or that the public reaction to a blockade was more ambivalent than one might expect given its effects on ordinary life. Men with Tractors were ordinary guys protesting to show a right-wing government that their livelihoods were being demolished. This was not an imagined complaint, an elitist one, nor the machination of a global conspiracy of race and capital. It was (and remains) very real. Moreover, it speaks to pain felt up and down society, urban and rural, by the kinds of people the Left worry about. Yet the far more unpalatable far-right archetype was present in the protests too, along with all the tropes of the global far-right; including, as Roy emphasises, a repellent focus on whiteness as a facet of Irish identity. All of these, together, at the same time. We have just witnessed, and with unusual clarity, the far-right appropriation of a national archetype.

This is what the far-right do. They find a crack in the door and prise and pull at it until it breaks open. Previous protagonists in Ireland’s hitherto small and shambolic far-right have been thuggish or ridiculous in their affect and obsessions. Not so the Men with Tractors. The danger of the Men with Tractors is not that they were confected by a wealthy global capitalist elite for appalling ends. The danger arises precisely because they were not: because this national archetype is real, and relatable, and has now been repurposed as a Trojan horse for internet-brained far-right politics.

This bivalent creature is now at the door of Irish politics. This is the danger we face. It’s easy to be against an abstracted alliance of racial and fossil capital and all the rebarbative aspects of the global far-right. They sound awful! How much harder is it to be against the guy you sometimes see having a laugh down the pub, who tells you he’s lost his job to fuel prices? How confusing to find yourself ranged against that old friend of your dad’s? Against Miley from Glenroe? Against a friendly and avuncular Trojan horse?

How hard is it to be against an image of your grandfather that you’ve held in your head since you were four years old?

The post On Men and their Tractors appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Hungary is entering a period of profound political, constitutional, and economic changes to restore the rule of law domestically and re-engage with the European Union. After sixteen years, the country emerges from an era characterised by illiberal governance, democratic backsliding, and the systematic weakening of rule of law institutions. It also inherits an economy marked by high budget deficit, stable stagnation, extensive oligarchic market concentration, and deep structural dependencies between political power and economic ownership.

Changes in Hungary require, first and foremost, a democratic legal and political transition, including the restoration of independent institutions and the rebuilding checks and balances of constitutional democracy. However, such a transition must go beyond the narrow restoration of constitutional democracy, and extend to restructuring the economic landscape and market governance.

Over the past decade, Hungary became a model of authoritarian political control over both democratic institutions and competitive open markets. The consecutive Fidesz governments built a highly personalised political-economic system characterised by unorthodox economic policies and economic nationalism. Under this illiberal economic model, markets became distorted by selective state intervention, politically mediated allocation of resources, and artificially concentrated ownership structures. Extreme majoritarianism enabled populist economic policies to weaken market competition not only as an economic mechanism, but also as a legal and democratic institution that constrains public power and is closely associated with liberal democracy.

In this process, law functioned as an instrument not only to monopolize public power, but also to restructure markets in line with political interests displacing the logic of open and competitive markets. Direct political control was prioritized over economic allocation, and markets came to be governed by artificial, politically driven forces instead of the foundational principles of open market economies based on effective competition, neutrality of state intervention, and equal market access. Similarly, decision-making has been increasingly centralised, with a lack of tolerance for institutional deliberation and technocratic expertise of independent regulatory authorities.

This demonstrates that re-establishing constitutional governance requires not only rebuilding democratic institutions, but also restoring market integrity, stable economic governance, and competitive market structures. Hungary’s transformation should therefore be understood as a dual transition: from illiberal governance to rule-of-law democracy, and from politically structured markets to competitive, rights-based market governance. Such a transition requires a broader understanding of the rule of law that extends beyond public institutions to the governance of markets and economic relations.

The “NER”

Before discussing restoration, it is necessary to understand the distinct political-economic order constructed in Hungary after 2010, as well as its underlying legal and economic mechanisms. This political-economic system became known as the NER (Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, System of National Cooperation), a system in which profit-based market competition was increasingly replaced by power-based extraction.

The NER is the institutionalized implementation of an authoritarian market playbook, that constructed a dramatic U-turn, from liberal democracy and market capitalism toward institutionalized cronyism. It is characterised by reliance on politically aligned cronies rather than competitive market mechanisms, and a state that does not act as a neutral regulator of market competition. Instead, legal and regulatory instruments are used strategically to manipulate market mechanisms, redistribute economic opportunities, and consolidate economic power in the hands of actors closely connected to the newly forged “national capitalist class”. The NER was not merely an economic model, but also a political and legal governance system with important implications for democratic institutions. In media markets, for example, market concentration and political control became intertwined, undermining both competition and democratic public discourse.

This created a politically managed market environment in which discretionary state intervention undermined competitive neutrality, predictability, and equal market access. A central feature of this illiberal economic model was the frequent use of concentrated executive power, prolonged emergency governance, and populist economic policies. Through legislation and regulatory measures, the Hungarian government systematically overrode competitive mechanisms and created artificial advantages for politically connected firms. It used selective regulation and taxation benefiting loyal firms, tailored licensing requirements, restrictions on market entry, manipulated public procurement rules and practices favouring insiders, exemptions from competition law investigation to concentrate ownership in pro-government hands, and the selective allocation of state resources and concessions to politically connected actors.

State-interventionist measures aimed at curbing inflation, supporting households, and maintaining political stability ahead of parliamentary elections included retail margin caps, sectoral “extra-profit” taxes, sector-specific levies in banking, energy, and retail, and regulated household utility prices, often in tension with European Commission recommendations.

The independence of regulatory, judicial, and oversight institutions was reduced in order to align them with a state-led political and economic agenda. Although institutions such as the State Audit Office, or the Hungarian Competition Authority formally remained independent, their functioning has become increasingly influenced by the ruling party. Other institutions, such as the Media Council, has been captured, losing its functional independence. Others, such as consumer and data protection authorities, have not been completely eliminated, but their independence, and effectiveness have been subject to intense scrutiny and significant structural changes leading to widespread concerns regarding political and regulatory capture.

Restoration and rebuilding

The central question now is: what does democratic restoration require today in the economic sphere? As economic regulation and enforcement have been co-opted and repurposed for political goals, restoring stability to the Hungarian economy and markets requires a multi-pronged approach focused on rethinking Hungary’s economic model, unblocking EU funds, rebuilding the autonomy and credibility of independent oversight institutions, and trust through predictable and stable economic policymaking.

A new economic model

A new economic model will need to reconnect Hungary to European integration and align economic governance with EU law, global economic challenges and the structural characteristics of the Hungarian economy. This also requires rebuilding trust with the European Union in order to unlock suspended EU funds.

As the new Hungarian government will have to present to the European Commission a credible new plan for the use of EU funds within an exceptionally short period of time, the emerging economic model should align with the objectives of the EU recovery framework and cohesion policy objectives, including making the economy greener, more digital, and more resilient to future economic and geopolitical shocks.

At the same time, the transition is unlikely to involve a complete break with Hungary’s existing economic model. Support for certain Eastern investments, and industrial policy, may remain, but within a more transparent, competitive, and EU-aligned framework. A central challenge is whether Hungary can move from a peripheral economic role based on low-wage assembly production toward higher value-added manufacturing and innovation. This requires moving away from a dependence on low-cost labour and foreign assembly plants toward stronger domestic research and development capacities, technological upgrading, and greater integration into high-value segments of European supply chains. This also raises issues of ownership concentration in strategic sectors, which may affect access to EU instruments such as SAFE funds.

Stable and credible legal and regulatory framework

A new economic strategy also requires substantial legal and institutional reforms aimed at restoring the rule of law and rebuilding trust in market governance. Law and policy making must translate and operationalize rule of law principles into market regulation, and reclaim the goal of competitive market functioning as a fundamental principle of liberal democracy. The separation of powers in the economy, ensuring that no single actor can dominate markets, resources, or regulatory authority, is as essential as the constitutional principles underpinning democracy. From this perspective, the rule of law in the economy requires changes that support and re-establish fundamental economic rights of businesses, as well as consumers, through choice and affordability, as well as citizens, through accountability and democratic control.

More specifically, the use of executive emergency powers should be limited, while transparency in market mechanisms should be strengthened through reforms of public procurement and competition rules aimed at dismantling monopolistic and politically connected market structures and enabling fair competition. Restoring judicial and regulatory independence, along with effective judicial review of administrative decisions, is essential for ensuring accountability.

Legislative changes are needed to enhance asset recovery mechanisms in cases involving political and economic abuses, including the recovery of politically allocated subsidies, selectively granted economic advantages from firms, for example through EU state aid rules, while also strengthening anti-corruption enforcement and public procurement rules. These reforms are crucial to create a more transparent, predictable, and competitive business environment. This includes reducing discretionary state interventions, strengthening protections for SMEs, and simplifying the tax and regulatory system. Rebuilding investor confidence and restoring access to EU funds will depend heavily on the credibility and durability of these reforms.

Independent oversight

Restoring democratic institutions, constitutional checks and balances must go hand in hand with limiting discretionary decision-making, restoring competitive neutrality and ensuring that market power is subject to legal constraints. Stronger institutional governance improves confidence and supports higher levels of national and foreign investments.

Independent regulatory authorities (IRAs), such as media, data, consumer protection or competition authorities, play a critical role in ensuring market stability, policy credibility, and the integrity of economic governance. By insulating key areas of regulation from short-term political discretion, they contribute to predictable and rules-based market environments that support investment, competition, and legal certainty. IRAs are also essential for rebuilding institutional trust and restoring confidence in the neutrality of market governance after periods of politicisation and discretionary intervention.

In Hungary, questions of de facto independence must be addressed critically, and leadership appointments must be based on transparent, merit-based procedures, insulated from political influence, and subject to meaningful checks and balances. Internal decision-making structures, particularly the independence of expert staff and the autonomy of ultimate decision-making bodies, such as the Media and Competition Council, must be restored.

Likewise, institutional safeguards need to be strengthened. Judicial review, transparency obligations, and accountability mechanisms must ensure that regulatory authorities operate within a legally constrained framework with reduced risk of politicization. Independent regulators should ensure inclusive and fair participation in the economy and safeguard fundamental economic freedoms, while remaining sufficiently responsive and accountable to broader societal needs through democratic oversight, including engagement with civil society and consumer organisations.

Rule-based enforcement must be reinstated, with enforcement priorities and case selection guided by clear legal and economic criteria. Enforcement priorities should focus on politically connected sectors, the reassessment of public contracts, and increased regulatory scrutiny – particularly in sectors affected by past NER consolidation, such as media, construction, banking, energy, and retail – where acquisitions and significant state subsidies have reshaped market structures. The establishment of new anti-corruption and asset recovery mechanisms, together with more active competition enforcement, is expected to reinforce this approach. These areas will therefore remain central targets for sectoral investigations and sustained enforcement attention.

European coordination

Hungary’s restoration is not only a domestic constitutional challenge, but also a broader European question concerning the resilience of the EU legal order and the governance of the Single Market. Beyond alignment with the EU’s strict “super-milestones” on judicial independence and anti-corruption, Hungary must restore full compliance with Single Market rules, digital regulation, and green transition policies.

In this context, the effective implementation of key EU regulatory frameworks, including the Digital Services Act, the European Media Freedom Act, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, and the AI Act, will be particularly important for rebuilding democratic governance and regulatory credibility.

At the same time, restoring the independence and capacity of national regulatory authorities is essential to enable their effective participation in European regulatory networks, including the European Competition Network and the European Board for Media Services.

Ultimately, democratic restoration in Hungary requires the reconstruction of the economic foundations of liberal democracy: open markets, equal access to economic opportunity, and effective constraints on both political and economic power. At the same time, this transition represents a broader moment for Hungary’s European reintegration, economic modernisation, and institutional renewal.

Rebuilding a credible, stable, and predictable legal system will be essential not only for restoring democratic legitimacy internally, but also for reconnecting Hungary to the core economic structures and values of the European Union. This requires strengthening independent institutions, restoring regulatory credibility, and enabling competitive, innovative, green, and digital markets that support long-term social and economic resilience.

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