When The Renegade Takes The Wheel: Lessons Learned From Hungary’s 2024 Council Presidency

Author: Veronika Czina

In: ELTE CERS, Institute of World Economics Working Paper Nr. 283 (2026) August

Abstract

What makes a rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU successful? Existing studies have broadly argued that there are objective criteria based on which the performance of the Council Presidency can be evaluated e.g. being an honest-broker, agenda-setter, successful mediator etc. While doing so, they have problematically assumed that all Member States aim to achieve this goal when taking the helm at the EU and they disregarded the fact that renegade, EU-critical Member States might have other goals to achieve during the Presidency period. In this paper, I critically engage with the literature evaluating Presidencies’ success through the case study of Hungary’s Council Presidency of 2024. This is an interesting example because Hungary has been at odds with the EU in many ways in the past two decades, and even more so more recently, therefore, the Hungarian Presidency was a highly contested event, to an extent that some EU institutions even wanted to cancel or boycott some parts of it. Despite the controversy, Hungary held the position of the chair for six months, and it did not fail, especially not from the perspective of its own strategic priorities. Overall, Hungary’s case demonstrates that we need to rethink how we evaluate the rotating Presidency and how we define success. This paper argues that there is a difference between what counts as successful from the perspective of the EU and that of the presiding Member State. Moreover, if a Member State wants to and can exert national preferences during its mandate, then the Presidency can be considered successful, at least from the national perspective.