Szeged: The Article 7 procedure against Hungary has been open since September 2018, which means it has now outlasted two Commissions, three Council presidencies’ worth of promises to do something with it, and the political careers of most of the people who voted to start it. Reporting in early September suggests that officials are quietly working through what it would take to close the file rather than escalate it – and that the closing is being framed as a technical exercise measured against a checklist rather than a political retreat.
The checklist is where the exercise runs into trouble. Any credible wind-down would have to record that the concerns which triggered the procedure have been addressed, and several of them have not been. The 2021 child protection law, which restricts minors’ access to certain content, remains on the statute book; the government has neither repealed it nor indicated it intends to. The Commission’s own 2026 Rule of Law Report, published on 17 July with a country chapter on Hungary running to dozens of pages, catalogues continuing problems in judicial independence, the anti-corruption framework and media pluralism. A file cannot be closed on the grounds that nothing is wrong when the institution closing it has just published a document saying otherwise.
That contradiction is not new, but the incentive to live with it is. Article 7(1) has proved to be a procedure that generates hearings rather than consequences. The General Affairs Council received its most recent update on Hungary on 16 June 2026, the latest in a long series of state-of-play discussions that produce a summary, a date for the next one, and no decision. Unanimity minus the member state concerned is required for the sanctioning stage, and no capital has been willing to test whether that arithmetic exists. Keeping the procedure formally alive while it does nothing costs the Council very little; closing it costs political capital and invites the accusation of capitulation.
What has changed is that the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism and the suspension of cohesion funds have done the work Article 7 was supposed to do, and done it with qualified majority rather than unanimity. Money moves; hearings do not. Once an institution has a working instrument, the broken one becomes an embarrassment – a standing demonstration that the treaty’s constitutional safeguard is unusable. There is an argument, made mostly in private, that retiring it honestly is better than leaving it open as a monument to institutional impotence.
The European Parliament does not share that view. Its November 2025 resolution on Hungary was blunt about the deterioration it sees, and Parliament has no procedural role in ending what it started: Article 7(1) is triggered by Parliament or by a third of member states, but the determination belongs to the Council. If the Council decides the file has run its course, Parliament can object loudly and change nothing.
There is also a sequencing problem. A mission to assess reforms is reportedly being planned, which places the fact-finding after the political direction rather than before it. Assessment missions dispatched to confirm a conclusion already reached tend to produce documents that read like conclusions already reached. National courts, the Commission’s own infringement lawyers and the Court of Justice will continue to treat Hungarian legislation on its merits regardless of what the Council decides about the procedure.
The question nobody in the General Affairs Council wants on the agenda is what replaces it. Closing Article 7 without a successor concedes that the Union’s answer to a member state drifting from its founding values is money, not membership obligations – a workable answer, but a narrower one than the treaty drafters imagined. Leaving it open concedes the same thing more slowly.
