European commissioners will boycott informal meetings held by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and be represented by lower-level bureaucrats until Hungary holds the EU presidency.
The decision was made after Orban met Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“In the wake of recent developments, which mark the beginning of the Hungarian Presidency, the president [of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen] has decided that the Commission will be represented at the level of senior civil servants during the informal meetings of the Council,” wrote on the X platform Eric Mamer, von der Leyen’s chief spokesman.
“The visit of the College to the [Hungarian] Presidency will not take place”, he added.
The College is the leadership of the European Commission and consists of 27 commissioners.
Hungary protested against this decision. The Minister of European Affairs, Janos Boka, said that the Commission chooses the institutions and member states with which it wants to work.
“The EU Commission cannot choose which institutions and member countries it wants to cooperate with. Are all the Commission’s decisions now based on political considerations?”, wrote Boka in X.
The Commission’s decision follows an unconfirmed report in Politico that EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell plans to convene the bloc’s foreign ministers for the “official” Council meeting at the same time as Hungary has planned a similar meeting in August.
Orban, whose country took over the EU presidency on July 1, traveled to Moscow on July 5 and then to China, apparently to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine with Putin and China.
However, he did not inform the EU in advance and the EU distanced itself from his travels.
Orban, who has maintained friendly relations with Putin, has been repeatedly at odds with the rest of the EU, voicing his opposition to sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
