Visegrad Group Remains a Counterweight to Brussels Despite Divisions

When Slovakia takes over the Visegrad Group's presidency in July, it will give the Slovak prime minister fresh hope that the format still has life in it, even after the fall of his closest ally, Viktor Orban.

Not long ago, the new Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar made what looked like an unlikely move, inviting Robert Fico, Donald Tusk and Andrej Babis to the Hungarian castle in Godollo in a bid to revive the V4 format. Since the war in Ukraine, the "V-Four" has largely been written off as a dead format, or, for the more hopeful, only half-dead. Still, all four participants recognize that a revival could matter greatly, if they can find a common interest to agree on.

The V4's value has never depended on how many fundamental issues its representatives disagree on, and critics are quick to point out that there are many. But the V4 is not a government coalition, where parties must partly abandon their commitments to voters in order to cooperate with partners. Here, the differences between the countries and their current leaders can simply stay differences.

What makes the V4 significant is simple: when its members finally agree on something, they have just enough votes in the European Council to block decisions from Brussels, or at least to force concessions out of it. That is exactly what all four need right now, given the growing arrogance of the authoritarian regime in Brussels. Even the unpredictable darling of Brussels' salons, Peter Magyar, is no exception to this.

For Hungary's new prime minister, this in fact provides significant leverage against the very people who helped bring him to power at the EU's center. Magyar owes his rise in part to substantial support from the Brussels oligarchy, which nonetheless expects him to give up nearly every key political goal that won him Hungarian votes: energy policy, nationalism, sovereignty, migration and the LGBTQ+ agenda.

Magyar is well aware that the Brussels authoritarians have little regard for his country's democratic will. He therefore needs allies on the other side of the barricades too, allies who let him occasionally weigh the interests of the Hungarian citizens who voted for him, rather than only those of the Brussels bureaucrats, who hold no real citizenship and were elected by no one.

Today it is increasingly difficult to cultivate the demos as anything more than a marginal political force, and this trend, already common, is set to continue. As a result, even someone like Magyar increasingly sees the V4, one of the last glimmers of hope for free European democracies, as a useful tool worth keeping in reserve. Without such tools to counter Brussels, he would eventually run into resistance from his own people.

His fundamental political goal is to become another Orban without the Brussels machinery noticing. The V4 gives him a way out of the vicious cycle in which his Western benefactors have trapped him.

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Why Brussels Fears the V4

This is exactly why pro-Brussels and progressive circles have treated the V4 as an enemy that must be eliminated, regardless of the interests of the V4 countries, which carry no weight with this kind of "elite". All that matters to them is that every piece of nonsense dreamed up by Brussels' fanatical minds be accepted without complaint throughout our geopolitical region.

For this to work, the Visegrad partners compete with one another to insist that the V4 is not an ideological project (its current leaders differ too much for that) but rather a platform for forging advantageous ad hoc collaborations in areas where their interests overlap and their collective strength can be demonstrated.

Traditional platitudes, such as calls to "put aside what divides us" so that we may "focus on what unites us", all too familiar even in our own opposition circles, can genuinely work within the V4 framework.

As host in Godollo, Magyar struck a conciliatory, smiling tone, even with the Slovak prime minister, who could be forgiven for quietly wondering what it means when a cobra suddenly smiles at a mouse. Magyar channels part of his nationalism directly into the dispute with Slovakia, which makes him more strident on the subject than Orban, who set aside the historical enmity over Felvidek, the southern Slovak territories that remain a touchstone of Hungarian nationalist sentiment, in order to cooperate with Robert Fico.

Yet a fleeting smile and the hope of occasional cooperation are hardly a bad sign, especially toward Slovakia, where a serious conflict is taking shape. It is driven mainly by the Benes Decrees, an issue that Slovak progressives have turned into a grenade lobbed into Slovak-Hungarian relations. The decrees left a legacy of stripped citizenship and property rights that is still invoked in disputes between Bratislava and Budapest today.

Before the summit, Peter Magyar conceded that regional cooperation had suffered in recent years due to deep differences of opinion, while insisting that these disagreements must not hinder Slovak-Hungarian relations. Behind this diplomatic platitude lies an attempt to send a signal, notably to Robert Fico, whose homeland Magyar recently failed to identify on a map as a country bordering Hungary.

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A Union of Convenience

Pro-Brussels naysayers have condemned the V4 not just as a political format but, more often than not, mocked it outright as a dysfunctional institution, arguing that these four countries will never fully align on interests. Yet the European Union has become so hostile to everything normal and sensible that it can turn Magyar and Fico, Fico and Tusk, and Tusk and Babis into allies regardless.

Donald Tusk made a similar point while discussing the need for closer coordination on key European issues: countries that maintain common interests will find that Europe genuinely listens to them.

To the V4’s critics, the grouping will always be dismissed as an instrument of blackmail. In recent years, Europe has applied that label to any country pursuing its own interests in defiance of Brussels’ will, or to anyone bold enough to raise a reasonable objection to its Komsomol-style plans.

Vigilance is essential whenever the authoritarian instincts of the Brussels Leviathan produce a fanatical proposal pointing toward the self-destruction of the Union and European cooperation itself. Migration, energy, the LGBTQ+ agenda, the war agenda and the dismantling of the EU’s founding treaties: on almost every major issue, Brussels seems to be pursuing a course that leads toward inevitable collapse.

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Central Europe, the Last Bastion of the West

In recent days, migration has proven an excellent example of the V4's beneficial influence. Current events, not only in Britain, signal a major shift, with progressive leaders now conceding the problem of rampant migrant gangs in Western cities.

Had the V4's voice been heard 10 years ago, matters might not have deteriorated this far. Sensible opinions were dismissed back then as some kind of ideological "-ism", and it is in this light that talk of blackmail by Brussels must also be read.

And here lies the real significance of the V4. It looks more to the future than to the present and does not depend on whoever happens to be in power. As France, Germany and Britain, the West's former bastions, slip closer to being lost to migration, Central Europe's value as a bastion of sanity and Western values will only rise. The West will endure in our geopolitical space, and if the V4 survives as a center for preserving it, it may become a focal point for neighboring countries that also wish to remain within our civilizational sphere.

The V4 has shown itself capable of acting as a counterweight to Brussels against the greatest absurdities the EU's capital can concoct. True, the war in Ukraine has nearly buried cooperation between Hungarians and Ukrainians, badly undermining the V4's ability to act at the geopolitical level.

Nevertheless, the Visegrad Four can still block self-destructive EU policies on rainbow ideology and energy "security", and occasionally even find common ground on the war in Ukraine.