#qualified majority voting

[thewordenreport]

Hungary Blocks €90 billion E.U. Loan for Ukraine: Holding the E.U. Ransom

Hungary's Viktor Orban is holding the E.U. hostage and helping Putin by vetoing the E.U.'s loan for Ukraine even though Russia, not Ukraine, damaged the oil pipeline to Hungary. The EU should retire the requirement of unanimity. https://thewordenreport-governmentandmarkets.blogspot.com/2026/02/hungary-blocks-90-billion-eu-loan-for.html

[thoughtlessarse]

Without qualified majority voting EU enlargement has no future

Many believe introducing qualified majority would require an arduous treaty change, but this is not true. If qualified majority is not intro

Many believe introducing a qualified majority would require an arduous treaty change, but this is not true. If a qualified majority is not introduced in the EU enlargement decision-making, the whole process will die, write Srdjan Cvijic and Zoran Nechev.

Dr Srdjan Cvijic and Zoran Nechev are Europe’s Futures Fellows of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

On 23 June, many hope for Bulgaria to lift its veto that would allow the European Council to open first negotiating clusters with North Macedonia and consequently, with Albania, whose further progress in the EU accession was conditioned by that of its eastern neighbour.

An unlikely greenlight of the Council for North Macedonia would have been possible thanks to an agreement discreetly negotiated between the governments in Sofia and Skopje in the weeks preceding the Council meeting.

Chaperoned by the French, this agreement was intended to send a positive signal to the Western Balkans EU membership hopefuls that the enlargement process is not dead and buried, at least for this part of Europe. Yet the truth is very different. Even if it passes, the deal would create a dangerous precedent, making a successful future enlargement of the EU, be it for North Macedonia or Ukraine, highly unlikely.

The Bulgarian veto has nothing to do with economic and democratic principles governing the EU enlargement process. They are about the nationalistic bullying of Skopje by Sofia. Similar policies normally have no place in relations between EU member states.

Bulgarian blocking of North Macedonia’s progress towards EU membership would be as if, in 2004, Germany had conditioned Polish accession into the EU by demanding that Warsaw relativises the role of German occupying forces during the Second World War. Or as if Denmark would have required Stockholm in 1995 to call the Swedish language Danish.

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