The EU has several means to address rogue Member State behavior. Some of them, for example infringement proceedings, are regularly used to monitor Member State compliance, whereas others have never been applied. Its most powerful tool, for instance, the Article 7 procedure has not been tested until recently: the procedure has been launched against Poland in 2017 and then against Hungary in 2018. Even though the proceedings have been ongoing for years now, no tangible results can be shown so far. The situation deteriorated so much that the European Parliament adopted a report in September 2022 stating that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy, but it is rather a ‘hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.’

In April 2022 the European Commission issued its first notification to Hungary under the budget conditionality mechanism that is the most recently activated tool of the bloc which has the capacity to withdraw EU funds from Hungary. As a response to the possibility of withholding funds, Hungary proposed several remedial measures to address the Commission’s concerns. There was an intense polticial dialogue between Hungary and the EU institutions involved, and at the end of the day a political consensus was reached in this matter and the EU did not take the hard stance against Hungary.

The EU’s procedures to protect rule of law in Member States are different in nature, as some of them address mainly fundamental rights and democracy issues, while the latest methods are mainly targeted against corruption and aims at protecting the EU budget, thus they would have different consequences if they were carried out entirely. The proposed paper discusses the ways Hungary is coping with these mechanisms. It analyzes the measures Hungary takes in its 'battle' with different EU institutions and try to find out if new model(s) can be identified in Member State behavior based on how a certain, autocratic country complies with rule of law requirements within a democratic organization, and also how the EU is capable of protecting rule of law against certain Member State actions.

The aim of my paper is to carry out a political analysis of the dispute over EU values between the Polish government and the European Commission. Poland and Hungary were the first EU member states in the history of the EU subjected to Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. The changes implemented to the structure of the justice system in Poland, restricting the independence of judges, after the victory in the national elections in 2015 by Law and Justice, a EU-sceptical party, caused a conflict over the rule of law between Warsaw and Brussels. Moreover, this highlighted the differences between the old and new EU member states regarding their approach to EU values, which are specified by Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

It should be emphasised that the changes to the justice system were accompanied by restrictions of human rights, including the tightening of abortion laws and restriction of media independence.

The purpose of the presentation is to show the internal and external consequences, namely how the conflict has influenced the Poles’ attitudes towards the EU and the priorities of Poland’s foreign policy. This analysis attempts to answer the question whether EU values are attractive to member states and whether EU institutions have at their disposal effective mechanisms that can be used to ensure that EU values are upheld. It is also worth considering to what extent the attitude of the Polish government is a response to increasingly loud Eurosceptic voices in other Member States, and to what extent Euroscepticism is used to mobilize voters.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is an indispensable actor of European Union (EU) politics. Nevertheless, despite extensive research on the CJEU’s role within the EU, and in the process of European integration more broadly, we know rather little about individuals holding leadership positions within the CJEU. This paper focuses on the Presidents of the CJEU, with an emphasis on their powers, roles, importance, and influence on the Court’s internal functioning.

Generally speaking, the paper covers three topics: formal powers, informal influence and practices, and leadership styles of the Presidents. With respect to the first, the aim is to find out whether it is possible to observe any changes in the formal powers and responsibilities of the Court’s Presidents. This part of the article is based on an analysis of formal rules governing the functioning of the CJEU. Obviously, the formal rules do not tell us everything about the real powers of the CJEU Presidents. Therefore, in the second step, the goal is to identify presidential informal powers and informal institutions operating within the CJEU. Lastly, starting with and building on Danelski’s conceptualization of judicial leadership and the distinction between task and social leadership, my intention is to evaluate whether and to what extent we can detect differences in the leadership styles of the CJEU Presidents. In other words, what type of leaders are they? The analysis of the informal dimension of CJEU politics as well as of Presidents’ leadership styles and strategies builds on data gathered from semi-structured elite interviews with the CJEU judges, lawyers, and experts on CJEU’s internal functioning.