The European Union faces a paradox: Hungary has become a constitutional parasite, drawing nourishment—funds, veto power, prestige—while corroding the very norms that justify the Union’s existence.

At the base lies a double fracture. First, Hungary no longer meets the minimal criteria of a liberal democracy: judicial independence is compromised, media pluralism is hollowed out, and academic freedom is systematically constrained. Second, its domestic autocratisation is coupled with full enjoyment of membership rights, including the capacity to block sanctions, budgets, and enlargement in pursuit of narrow regime interests. The EU thus shelters a regime it could not, under its own Copenhagen criteria, admit today.

The case for exclusion—or its functional equivalent—rests on three core claims. Normatively, a polity that styles itself a Rechtsgemeinschaft cannot indefinitely host an “electoral autocracy” without emptying Article 2 TEU of meaning. Institutionally, a government that repeatedly weaponises veto powers to dilute rule‑of‑law conditionality and unfreeze funds is not exercising sovereignty but practising internal sabotage. Systemically, tolerating this pattern signals that EU values are decorative rhetoric, not constraints, undermining the Union’s authority when it lectures neighbours or candidates on democracy and law.

Yet outright expulsion is neither legally provided for nor normatively cost‑free. EU citizenship is also Hungarian citizenship; punishing a captured public for its government’s constitutional engineering risks deepening nationalism and martyring the very elites responsible for backsliding. A reckless push to eject Hungary could fracture the Union into moralising core and resentful periphery, confirming the illiberal story of “Brussels versus the nation”.

The intellectually serious answer is not fantasy expulsion but graded dis‑membership. Article 7 TEU and conditionality mechanisms can be interpreted and developed towards a regime of constitutional quarantine: Hungary remains territorially inside the Union, but its government is progressively stripped of co‑authorship rights in the European legal order. Voting rights are suspended in sensitive domains; funds are redirected around central authorities to municipalities, universities, and civil society; participation in grand bargains is conditioned on verifiable institutional repair.

This is not technocratic tinkering: Either the EU accepts that any government, however illiberal, enjoys unconditional equality at the constitutional table, or it affirms that membership is conditioned on maintaining a minimally rights‑respecting, law‑bound state. Hungary forces the question: is the Union a community of convenience, or a constitutional project willing to defend its own conditions of possibility? On any serious reading of its treaties, it cannot remain both.

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