Eighteen months of Hungarian obstruction over Ukraine’s EU accession appear to be ending, and the institutional consequences are already moving faster than most capitals expected. Péter Magyar, who assumed the Hungarian premiership on 9 May after his Tisza party ousted Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in last month’s elections, used a phone call with European Council President Antonio Costa to confirm that Budapest had initiated technical consultations with Kyiv. The conversation, which Magyar disclosed on Monday in a Facebook post, was the first explicit signal from a Hungarian prime minister in nearly two years that the bilateral chapter on the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia is being separated from the broader question of whether accession talks can proceed at all.
The unblocking matters because the architecture of EU enlargement is intergovernmental in its decisive moments. Each of the 33 negotiating chapters requires unanimity to open and to close, and Hungary’s veto had effectively frozen Ukraine’s process despite the September 2025 completion of screening — the technical exercise in which the Commission maps national legislation against the acquis. Without an opening of cluster one, on fundamentals, none of the subsequent clusters can advance. Incoming Hungarian foreign minister Anita Orban’s statement on 11 May that Budapest would stop deploying its veto as “political theatre” formalises what Magyar’s Facebook post implied.
For Ukraine, the timing is operationally tight but politically welcome. Kyiv has signalled its objective of provisionally closing accession negotiations by the end of 2028, a target the Commission has called ambitious but achievable. Achieving it requires not only Hungarian acquiescence but a sequence of intergovernmental conferences that the Council presidency has been quietly drafting calendars for. With cluster one now likely to open in the second half of 2026, Ukrainian negotiators can begin moving into the substantive chapters on judiciary, fundamental rights, public procurement and financial control — exactly the areas where the war and post-war reconstruction will impose the greatest reform burden.
Moldova benefits from the same shift. The Commission has assessed that Chișinău has met the conditions to open cluster one on fundamentals, cluster two on the internal market and cluster six on external relations. Hungarian obstruction had not been formally targeted at Moldova, but the procedural entanglement of the two files meant that Ukraine’s delay slowed Moldova’s progress in practice. A reactivated process gives both candidates a synchronised, if asymmetric, runway.
Brussels remains cautious about declaring the enlargement deadlock resolved. Magyar’s openness comes with substantive conditions on minority rights, education and language, and the Hungarian government has been explicit that it will continue to veto where it considers “real Hungarian interests” engaged. The new prime minister’s domestic coalition is not unified on Ukraine, and his foreign policy posture has to be calibrated against an electorate that Orbán spent years conditioning to view EU enlargement to the east with suspicion. The political risk premium on the file has fallen, but it has not disappeared.
The European Parliament, which adopted a resolution earlier this spring urging mechanisms to override unanimity blockages on enlargement, will likely seize the moment to push for procedural reform. If the EU emerges from this episode with a more resilient enlargement framework, the Magyar government’s pivot will have been catalytic. If unanimity returns as a weapon under a future Council configuration, the lesson of the past two years is that the bloc’s eastern policy remains hostage to its weakest link.
