The political brinkmanship of Charles Michel, former president of the European Council, and his somewhat right-wing populist Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán phenomenon of the EU in a worse world.
The first president of the European Council was the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy. He was followed by Poland’s Donald Tusk after Polish voters kicked him out as prime minister by the nationalist anti-European Law and Order party. And after Tusk, another Belgian, Charles Michel, took the stage to become the council’s third president.
Former Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel will probably be remembered, but not in a good way. He created a huge problem in Brussels by resigning as president of the EU Council to be able to run as an MEP in the June elections. And having made this seemingly absurd decision, he has now compounded it by dramatically changing his mind and deciding to stay on as president after all.
His U-turn has made the EU as a whole look weak and poorly governed at the worst possible moment, leaving leaders in Brussels facing the twin challenges of a possible second Trump presidency and Vladimir Putin.
He was Belgium’s second youngest prime minister and the second French-speaking prime minister in Belgian history. The latter point brought him to Emmanuel Macron’s attention because France never came to terms with the fact that the 21st century EU had virtually stopped speaking French. The emergence of so many new countries in Northern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, whose elites receive their higher education in English, has deprived French of its role as the dominant language in the EU.
Macron was happy to promote his French-speaking Walloon right-wing liberal colleague to the presidency of the European Council, and Michel as president became a mediocre disappointment at best, but then the situation became embarrassing, for example when he appeared uninvited at various meetings that Ursula von der Leyen had organised with world leaders. But even the most cynical officials in Brussels were stunned when Michel announced that he was stepping down as president of the EU Council to run for the European Parliament.
The reason he changed his mind was the huge presence of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, whose pro-Putin government is due to take over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council.
The presidency of the EU Council is largely ceremonial, with the full-time European Council secretariat doing all the actual work in the run-up to council meetings. But if Michel were to step down, there would be no president in place, and Orbán would become proud and take over as head of the European Council. This idea horrified everyone in Brussels, who made it clear to Michel that his name would be tarnished if he left office. So he changed his mind and stayed.
Meanwhile, Orbán was forced to back the EU’s €50 billion economic aid package for Ukraine. He had previously objected to the support plan and vetoed it at a meeting in December, falsely complaining that it involved too much EU co-borrowing. Orbán was made clear that if he continued to obstruct, the EU would invoke EU Article 7 to remove Hungary from EU membership, which would have serious economic consequences for both Orbán and Hungary. This threat alone caused the Hungarian currency to plummet and Orbán finally backed down.
Michel’s antics and Orbán’s disgraceful behaviour, as well as the possible increase in the number of extreme right-wing and populist MEPs in the June European Parliament elections, have severely damaged the image of the EU as a coherent, well-oiled, economically sustainable, liberal-democratic entity and also shows that the idea of a “superstate Europe” is a myth.
