Hungary’s incoming government has moved to distance itself from accusations that Hungary served as “Moscow’s Trojan horse” inside the European Union, with new Foreign Minister Anita Orbán pledging a less confrontational approach toward Brussels and NATO allies.
Speaking during her parliamentary confirmation hearing on Sunday, Anita Orbán (no relation to former long-time PM Viktor Orbán) said Hungary would no longer use its veto power as a political bargaining tool within the EU, acknowledging that Budapest had repeatedly obstructed collective decision-making under the previous administration.
“Too often Hungary has been a problem in Europe’s decision-making,” she said. “We used the veto not as a last resort but for political theater.”
The remarks are being interpreted as part of a broader effort by the new government of Prime Minister Peter Magyar to reassure Western allies that Hungary is seeking to rebuild trust after years of tensions with Brussels over rule-of-law concerns and accusations of being overly aligned with Russia.
Under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Hungary frequently blocked or delayed EU initiatives related to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, prompting critics to label the country “Moscow’s Trojan horse” within the bloc.
During last month’s election campaign, Magyar’s Tisza party promised to repair relations with the EU and restore access to tens of billions of euros in suspended European funding. Those funds had been frozen over concerns regarding judicial independence, corruption oversight, and democratic standards.
Orbán said the new administration would pursue reforms aimed at strengthening judicial independence and improving transparency in public spending in order to unlock the frozen funds and revive Hungary’s stagnant economy.
At the same time, she stressed that Budapest’s support for Ukraine’s closer integration into the European Union would remain conditional on what she described as Hungary’s “strict national interest.” She added that the government would continue pressing Kyiv for expanded rights for Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority.
The shift in tone comes days after Peter Magyar was officially sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister on May 9.
For years, Budapest functioned as one of the Kremlin’s most useful disruptors inside the bloc, repeatedly slowing or obstructing joint EU action on sanctions, Ukraine aid, and foreign policy. If Prime Minister Peter Magyar makes good on his word of abandoning the confrontational strategy pursued under Viktor Orbán, Russia certainly loses one of its most valuable internal pressure points within Europe.
The episode has also revived debate over the EU veto system itself, which is a mechanism increasingly criticized as structurally contradictory. The veto only functions smoothly when member states act in good faith and use it sparingly, primarily in exceptional or existential circumstances. Yet the European Union was created precisely because Europe’s history demonstrated that informal goodwill between states was insufficient on its own. The entire logic of the EU rests on replacing fragile voluntary cooperation with binding institutions and shared enforcement mechanisms. In that sense, the bloc’s unanimity rules contain an inherent paradox: if all member states consistently behaved with altruism and strategic restraint, the EU’s elaborate legal and political architecture would arguably be far less necessary in the first place.
Equally, defenders of the veto argue that it remains politically indispensable to the legitimacy of the European project. For many Europeans, especially in smaller or more euroskeptic member states, the veto serves as proof that national sovereignty survives EU membership. Removing would mean, to a degree, that member states surrender their meaningful control over core national decisions.
As a result, while momentum for limiting veto powers is growing, particularly in foreign policy and security matters, such a change would only be politically sustainable within the framework of a much larger constitutional transformation of the EU itself. The last major attempt at such a project, the proposed European Constitution, collapsed in 2005 after being rejected in referendums in both France and the Netherlands.
