Budapest: The procedure that was meant to be the European Union’s instrument of last resort is being quietly dismantled by the institution that started it, and the fact-finding mission commissioned to establish whether dismantling is warranted has not yet arrived in the city it was sent to examine.
Reports circulating this month indicate that a majority in the European Parliament is preparing to withdraw the Article 7(1) procedure it launched against Hungary in September 2018. The argument advanced by those pushing for withdrawal is a simple one. The procedure was directed at a governing arrangement that no longer exists. Peter Magyar’s government has been in office roughly four months. Several of the specific measures that populated the original Sargentini report have been reversed, amended or placed under review, and a new Hungarian recovery plan carrying rule of law commitments cleared the Council on 12 July. On this reading, keeping the file open is punishing a country for the sins of a predecessor.
The counter-argument is procedural rather than political, and it is the one that deserves more attention than it is getting. Article 7 has never been concluded. It has never been voted through to its second stage either. A procedure that is withdrawn because the government changed, rather than because the institutional damage was repaired, establishes something about what the article is for. It suggests the mechanism tracks personalities rather than structures. The next government that dismantles judicial independence can reasonably expect that an election will clear the docket.
The structures at issue are not abstractions. The 2026 Rule of Law Report country chapter published on 17 July recorded advances on the general conditionality regime alongside constitutional amendments still under consideration touching the justice system, the anti-corruption framework and institutional checks and balances. “Under consideration” is the operative phrase. Constitutional amendments that have been drafted but not adopted are commitments, not facts. The media ownership concentration that the report has flagged for six consecutive years has not unwound in four months. The judicial appointment rules that shifted control over the ordinary courts remain in the statute book unless and until a two-thirds majority removes them, and two-thirds majorities are not easy to assemble in a parliament elected on a fragmented map.
There is also the question of sequencing. The assessment mission exists precisely to determine whether the concerns that justified the procedure have been addressed. Deciding the outcome before the mission reports is not a procedural shortcut. It is an admission that the mission was decorative. Members who have spent eight years insisting that Article 7 is a serious legal instrument rather than a political gesture will find that position harder to defend afterwards.
Money complicates the picture further. Suspended cohesion funds and the conditionality regulation operate on separate tracks from Article 7, and the Commission continues to engage bilaterally on the remedial actions required. A government that inherits frozen envelopes has every incentive to make visible reforms quickly and slower ones never. Withdrawal removes one of the few sources of sustained scrutiny at exactly the moment the incentive to backslide returns.
None of this means the file should stay open indefinitely. A procedure that has run for eight years without reaching a vote has already demonstrated its limits. But closing it on the grounds that the problem has moved on, before anyone has checked, sets a benchmark that future governments will study carefully. The lesson would not be that European values are enforceable. It would be that they are survivable.
