Can Central Europe Once Again Punch Above its Weight?

As Slovakia prepares to take over the rotating presidency of the Visegrad Group (V4) on July 1, there is cautious optimism that its year in charge could lead to a revival of this alliance of Central European states.

Certainly, the mood music has improved since Peter Magyar won the April 12 election in Hungary. Under his predecessor, Viktor Orban, the government's reluctance to back Ukraine and its permissive approach towards the Kremlin led to a falling out between Poland and Hungary, largely paralysing the diplomatic and economic effectiveness of the V4.

This warmer atmosphere could be felt at the recent European Political Community summit in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, when Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, tweeted a picture of himself with his Czech and Polish counterparts below the caption: “Three musketeers are waiting for the fourth and the revival of V4”.

Magyar’s decision to make Warsaw his first foreign trip after becoming prime minister was designed to signal both the democratic realignment and renewed regional ambitions of the two countries. On May 20, the two premiers stood, side by side, and pledged their support for revitalising the V4 format and restoring its influence within the EU.

“I have waited many, many years for this moment to sit down again at the same table with a Hungarian, a Slovak and a Czech to discuss what we can do together for our nations and in Europe,” Tusk said.

“The success of the V4 has always depended on the bilateral relations between Warsaw and Budapest,” points out Lorand Istvan Szakali, strategic director of the Budapest-based Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation.

This detente is leading some like Wojciech Przybylski, editor-in-chief of Visegrad Insight , to talk about a “cautious optimism that the group can once again become a force for good”.

While others like Andrius Tursa, CEE advisor for the consultancy Teneo, are more “cautious about a meaningful revival of the V4 format as an influential bloc within the EU”, most believe that greater cooperation on issues of common interest are likely to result over the coming months. Or at least until the 2027 parliamentary elections in Slovakia and Poland, when, as Tursa notes, we will be able to “determine whether the current political alignment is sustained”.

The Visegrad Group (V4) Prime Ministers Summit that was held in Prague, on 27 February 2024, featured on-camera rows between the leaders. (L-R) Slovak PM Robert Fico, Polish PM Donald Tusk, Czech PM Petr Fiala and Hungarian PM Victor Orban (R) at a press conference. EPA/Radek Pietruszka

Castled in Central Europe

The group was established in 1991 when the leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland – Vaclav Havel, Jozsef Antall and Lech Walesa – met in the castle town of Visegrad, north of Budapest, to symbolise the three ex-communist countries’ return to European values and to chart a path towards joining Western alliances like NATO and the EU.

Once the now four countries – Czechoslovakia split in 1993 – were embedded in NATO and the EU by 2004, the raison d’etre of the V4 inevitably had to evolve to reflect the times. It became an alliance that was avowedly not an alternative to all-European integration efforts, but rather a platform for the four countries to coordinate their positions at the EU level and amplify their voices in Brussels.

Given the importance of political alignment in any alliance, the V4’s heyday was arguably in 2011-2012, when all four countries were led by a party that was a member of the European People’s Party (EPP), a grouping of centre-right parties in the European Parliament.

Though this alignment subsequently began to unravel, the migration crisis of 2015 gave the alliance a boost, when all four states defied Brussels to declare that any move towards imposing mandatory migrant quotas for each EU member state were “unacceptable”.

“It’s not just a perception but it’s observable that the V4 cooperation and impact on EU policies have taken place only where there was a political alignment of the capitals. Such formats can only be amplified if they’re ideally of the same political group or very closely cooperating with each other,” says Przybylski.

It was around this time that Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) came to power, which shared many of the Eurosceptic views of Orban’s Fidesz party, and these two worked together to actively thwart Brussels’ will by using their veto power at the European Council. Czechia under Andrej Babis and Slovakia under Fico “were less interested in ideology but found the coalition useful”, said Stuart Dowell, a political writer at TVP World.

However, cracks began to appear over the following decade as Hungary increasingly began its ‘eastern’ turn to Moscow and Beijing, characterised by crony ties in the energy and other sectors. This turned into a full-blown fracture after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The nadir came at a summit in Prague in February 2024, when the leaders – Tusk and…