Navracsics named as Hungary’s European commissioner

Appointment deepens Jean-Claude Juncker’s problem of securing gender balance in the next European Commission.

Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, has nominated Tibor Navracsics, the foreign minister, as Hungary’s European commissioner.

Navracsics is a close aide to Orbán, whose chief of staff he became in 2003. A political scientist, he had served as Orbán’s communications director during the first Orbán administration in 1998-2002.

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In 2006, Navracsics entered Hungary’s parliament and took over as leader of the parliamentary group of Fidesz, Orbán’s centre-right party, which was then in opposition. He was appointed deputy prime minister and minister for public administration and justice in 2010, when Orbán won a landslide victory in a general election.

As minister for public administration and justice, Navracsics was in charge of many of the reforms that put Hungary on a collision course with the European Commission. At the same time, he is seen as a more moderate and centrist figure than Orbán.

Hungary has signalled interest in the enlargement and neighbourhood policy portfolio in the Commission, for which there seem to be few other candidates. Orbán and David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, were the only EU leaders to vote against the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the Commission, which is likely to affect Hungary’s negotiating position in terms of securing a desirable portfolio.

The 48-year-old Navracsics is of ethnic Croatian background and speaks the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian; he knows the Western Balkans quite well.

His appointment deepens the problem facing Juncker, the Commission’s president-elect, of ensuring that enough women serve in his administration. Of the 16 confirmed nominations, just one is a woman.

Navracsics’s appointment had been widely expected and Hungary was unlikely to nominate a woman: there are no female members of the cabinet and the share of female MPs is among the lowest in Europe.