At the Salzburg meeting of the European People’s Party on the fringes of the EU summit, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission waited until Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had to leave for another, pre-scheduled meeting before proposing the exclusion of Fidesz from the group?, Magyar Idők reports.
But French politician Joseph Daul, who has been the EPP’s president since 2013 said after the meeting that the EPP decided not to exclude Fidesz before the completion of the legal process stemming from last week’s vote in the European Parliament to invoke the EU charter’s Article 7 against Hungary.
The press can’t force me to throw out Viktor Orbán,” Daul said at a joint news conference with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. “We have democracy in our party, rule of law, we have our freedom and we have rules.”
Wednesday’s EPP meeting was attended by all three presidents of the main EU political institutions as well as several heads of government, including Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, did not attend the meeting.
“We are the EPP’s most successful party,” Orbán told reporters at the summit
