In a speech last year to the European Parliament, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered a candid justification for withholding billions in EU funds from Hungary, citing “concerns on LGBTIQ rights, academic freedom, and asylum rights.” This admission revealed that the bloc’s “rule of law” mechanism has evolved from a financial safeguard into a potent political instrument. No longer a tool for consistent legal enforcement, it now functions primarily as a means of selective punishment for ideological dissent, exposing a corrosive double standard where geopolitical and political convenience consistently outweigh stated principles.
Hungary remains the primary case study of this punitive logic. With approximately €18 billion in cohesion and recovery funds frozen as of 2025, the financial pressure is immense. The Commission’s explicit linkage of sanctions to sovereign choices on social and border policy demonstrates that the core transgression is political independence, not fiscal malpractice.
The staggering disproportionality of the punishment underscores its political nature. While domestic critics point to corruption cases like the Hungarian ‘Elios’ affair, involving alleged sums of €43 million, the EU’s collective financial penalty exceeds that figure by over 450 times. This is not a measured judicial response; it is a political warning to any member state considering an independent path. The outcome is a perverse reality where a nation, through withheld transfers, is effectively fined into becoming a net contributor to the EU budget—penalised not for being uniquely corrupt, but for being uniquely defiant of Brussels’ political orthodoxy.
While dissent is harshly penalised, profound and systemic corruption among politically-aligned member states is met with remarkable forbearance, shielded by loyalty to the EU’s foreign policy consensus.
Greece provides the most dramatic example of misdirected enforcement. The 2025 uncovering of a €600-700 million fraud within the Common Agricultural Policy, based on falsified land and livestock data, triggered a blunt response: A blanket freeze on all subsidy payments. This collective punishment targeted not the orchestrating elites, but thousands of honest farmers. The resulting protests saw the vital Athens-Thessaloniki highway blockaded, ports paralysed, and the runway at Heraklion Airport stormed. As farmer Costas Sefis told state broadcaster ERT, “We’re not backing down. If they want to arrest the thousands of protesting people, let them come and arrest us.” The EU’s remedy punished the vulnerable for a clientelist system long tolerated for the sake of Eurozone stability.
Romania, a steadfastly pro-EU and pro-Ukraine ally, further illustrates this pattern. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office lists it as a persistent hotspot for fraud investigations, with numerous cases involving misappropriated EU funds in healthcare, IT, and agriculture. Despite this documented record and chronic shortcomings in judicial integrity highlighted in the EU’s own Rule of Law reports, Romania faces no threat of suspended funding akin to Hungary’s. Its geopolitical loyalty appears to grant it a de facto exemption from the strictest conditionality.
Even Bulgaria, where the government of Prime Minister Rosen Zhelazkov collapsed in December 2025 under massive anti-oligarchic protests in Sofia, Plovdiv, and Varna, has been treated with kid gloves. For years, figures like former PM Boyko Borissov (of the EU’s own European People’s Party) and the US-sanctioned magnate Delyan Peevski symbolised a state captured by private interests. Despite numerous Commission reports, Bulgaria has avoided financial sanctions comparable to Hungary’s, proving that political alignment within the mainstream remains a powerful shield.
The external treatment of Ukraine provides the definitive proof of the EU’s priorities. The 2025 “Energoatom” scandal was a perfect test, involving an alleged $100 million kickback scheme with links to President Zelenskyy’s inner circle, amid other high-profile military procurement frauds. The EU’s reaction was tellingly muted, described as “deeply unfortunate.” Crucially, the immense aid pipeline—totalling over €187 billion and including fresh multi-billion packages for energy infrastructure—flowed without interruption. The conclusion is inescapable: Geopolitical utility categorically trumps anti-corruption principle. When a partner is deemed a critical frontline state, even the most brazen corruption within essential sectors does not warrant a financial pause. This undeniable reality reframes the pressure on Hungary not as consistent justice, but as transparent political coercion against a less strategically indispensable dissenter.
The EU has established a clear, damaging hierarchy: Political dissent is penalised more severely than the proven, systemic corruption of loyal allies. This selective enforcement is catastrophically eroding the Union’s legitimacy, fuelling the very Euroscepticism it claims to combat, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.
This hypocrisy now yields direct, tangible political consequences. It provides the foundational grievance uniting and strengthening blocking minorities within the European Council. The most recent evidence is the December 2025 EU summit, where the Visegrád Trio of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic successfully secured a full opt-out from the financial guarantees for a new €90 billion Ukraine loan—shielding their national budgets while loyalist states like Poland assumed the full risk. This move is not mere obstruction; it is a calculated response to a system perceived as unjust, demonstrating how politicised enforcement breeds strategic fragmentation.
The path forward requires a fundamental choice. The Union can continue to wield legal procedures as tools for political conformity, while tacitly endorsing graft that serves its strategic interests. Alternatively, it can undertake genuine reform to establish transparent, objective, and uniformly applied criteria. The Union must choose: A genuine, impartial rule of law that commands respect, or a continued politicisation that breeds division, disillusionment, and empowers the very blocs that challenge its coherence. The current course does not defend European values; it degrades them into instruments of coercion, undermining the mutual trust essential for its own future.
Why Bulgaria’s protests show that ‘pro-European’ no longer means ‘pro-EU’