Membership of the EU no longer guarantees access to its core benefits. With funding now tied to rule-of-law compliance, aspiring member states are subject to increasing scrutiny. Beáta Bakó examines how this shift reshapes accession prospects – and why candidate countries may find themselves caught in a new cycle of disillusionment
Citizens in most aspiring EU countries say that what they would value most about membership is the freedom to move and the promise of economic prosperity. The latter, of course, is closely tied to EU funding. Member states receive billions each year for critical development and cohesion projects. While candidate countries do receive some pre-accession funds, the real financial windfall comes only after accession.
That post-accession payoff, however, is no longer guaranteed. Since 2021, access to EU funds for member states has been subject to compliance with rule-of-law standards. The EU introduced a new rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, initially focused narrowly on corruption linked to EU funds. Under this system, the European Commission can propose suspending payments, with final decisions taken by the Council. This was the basis for the suspension of funds to Hungary in late 2022.
Post-accession payoff is no longer guaranteed, because access to EU funds is now subject to compliance with rule-of-law standards
At the same time, the Commission began applying broader de facto conditionality, suspending payments from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), along with Cohesion Funds to Hungary and Poland, over concerns over judicial independence. The Commission made these decisions unilaterally – without Council involvement – under powers granted by the RRF Regulation and the 2021 Common Provisions Regulation; the latter links EU funding to respect for the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
This ‘horizontal enabling condition’ effectively gives the Commission discretion to suspend funds to any member state in which it perceives Charter rights to be under threat. There is every indication that this framework is not a temporary feature of the 2021–2027 financial cycle. Indeed, the European Parliament has already called for its extension in future budgetary cycles. Initial proposals for Treaty reform include enshrining rule-of-law conditionality as a core principle of EU financing.
For candidate countries, the message is clear: even after completing the long, difficult road to accession, they may find one of the EU’s core benefits — financial solidarity — still subject to new and evolving conditions.
The shift from pre- to post-accession conditionality raises a fundamental question: how will this affect public attitudes in candidate countries?
As Magdalena König noted in her contribution to this series, many Western Balkan states already feel stuck in the EU’s waiting room. Disillusionment is growing — and may deepen further as countries realise that even the long-promised reward of EU funds now comes with new conditions.
Meeting rule-of-law standards at accession offers no guarantee against future funding suspensions. Before accession, the Commission leads, but the Council has the final say. After accession, the Commission alone can withhold funds under horizontal enabling conditions, without Council involvement.
Meeting rule-of-law standards at accession offers no guarantee against future funding suspensions
The inconsistency between these two phases reinforces the perception that politics drives conditionality more than law. The Commission’s selective blindness to rule-of-law breaches in Serbia or war-torn Ukraine mirrors its tactical use of conditionality instruments in the pre-accession phase.
The same is the case within the EU. As the European Court of Auditors has pointed out, the application of these tools has been inconsistent and poorly documented. The Commission released funds to Poland before any meaningful judicial reform had taken place, and Hungary received partial payments just ahead of a critical Council vote on Ukraine. These examples suggest that financial conditionality is not applied solely on legal grounds, but in line with shifting political calculations.
The rise of rule-of-law conditionality also impacts how current member states view enlargement.
As Veronica Anghel argued in her foundational post in this series, geopolitical urgency is the main driver of today’s enlargement push. But geopolitical logic doesn’t erase institutional memory. Member states have not forgotten the post-accession backsliding in Hungary and Poland over the past decade. They are likely to welcome mechanisms that give the Commission leverage over new members, particularly through financial sanctions.
In this sense, rule-of-law conditionality could help ease some of the mistrust surrounding enlargement — at least on the surface. But that reassurance has limits. Economic and strategic considerations tend to outweigh legal concerns in actual enlargement decisions. And if conditionality appears to target only certain 'suspicious' member states — often from the East — it risks deepening intra-EU divides.
Generalised rule-of-law conditionality also calls into question whether the EU needs specific post-accession monitoring mechanisms at all. Romania and Bulgaria were subject to the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), a bespoke process designed to track progress on judicial reform and anti-corruption measures. But with the introduction of horizontal conditionality, these legacy instruments may now be redundant — or duplicative. In fact, even after the CVM was officially closed, its benchmarks reappeared as milestones under the RRF for both Romania and Bulgaria.
Does the EU needs specific post-accession monitoring mechanisms at all? With horizontal conditionality, these legacy instruments may now be redundant
The layering of multiple oversight regimes creates legal uncertainty and raises questions about consistency. If post-accession conditionality is to matter, it must be part of a coherent, rule-based framework — not an ad hoc collection of tools used inconsistently and with shifting objectives.
The rise of a ‘conditionality culture’ in the EU legal order carries risks — chief among them, a shift from mutual trust to mutual suspicion. If core membership rights, like access to funds, depend on opaque and politically driven decisions, the EU risks eroding its legitimacy.
Conditionality may be necessary to uphold shared values. But to be effective and credible, it must rest on clear procedures, transparent criteria, and robust safeguards. Otherwise, the message to aspiring members is simple: the rule of law is less a principle than a political tool, and the rewards of membership are never guaranteed.
Beáta earned her PhD in law at the University of Münster in 2020.
She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence in 2020/2021 and a Re:constitution Fellow in 2021/2022.
Between 2013 and 2021, she worked as a journalist for various Hungarian media outlets.
Her recent academic publications focus mostly on the EU’s rule of law crisis and financial conditionality.
Challenges to EU Values in Hungary: How the European Union Misunderstood the Government of Viktor Orbán
Routledge, 2023
