PIRAN, Slovenia—Anti-immigration leaders may applaud the victory in Britain favoring exit from the European Union, but many in Central Europe will regret a weakening European Union. Despite dislike for some EU policies, leaders in Hungary, Poland, and Czech Republic remain too dependent on the union to wish for its demise.
Hungary’s right-wing firebrand prime minister, Viktor Orban, wasted no time after Britain voted to leave the European Union to crow vindication for his anti-migrant stance and blame a “disorderly” EU for the Brexit result. Days later, his chief of staff said that were Hungary to hold its own plebiscite on EU membership he would vote to leave. Across Central Europe’s former communist EU newcomer states of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, where far-right sentiment is surging, leaders followed Orban’s lead to bash the EU. Slovakia’s conservative premier Robert Fico blasted EU migrant policy, calling for “fundamental changes,” and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the ruling Law and Justice Party, urged a new European treaty because “federalist concepts lead to unhappiness.”
To hear the rhetoric, one might assume that “Huxit” or “Czexit”—departures by Hungary or the Czech Republic—may be around the corner. Don’t be fooled. Central Europe’s Visegrad group countries—named after the 1991 alliance forged in the Hungarian town of the same name—are deeply attached to the EU, if not exactly europhile then euro-dependent. This is among the reasons why these nations are in mourning over Brexit. By weakening the EU, the British referendum poses a direct threat to the economic efflorescence that, thanks to the scorned EU itself, has allowed them to outperform the rest of the bloc. Poland’s economy grew by 3.5 percent last year; Hungary’s by 2.9 percent, although it shrank unexpectedly in the first quarter of this year; the Czech Republic’s expanded by 4.3 percent; Slovakia’s by 3.6 percent. Overall, the EU grew 1.9 percent in 2015.
