Democracy Digest: Battle of the Budget Has Poland and Hungary Claiming Victory

European Council President Charles Michel spoke for many when he tweeted: "Now we can start with the implementation [of the budget and recovery package] and build back our economies."

Under the compromise deal, the wording of the original text remains unchanged, though the European Commission will refrain from implementing the rule-of-law mechanism - which will make EU funds conditional on upholding fundamental rights - until Hungary and Poland have the opportunity to challenge its legality at the Court of Justice of the European Union. Furthermore, funds made available under the current budgetary framework will be excluded from the rule-of-law conditionality and only applied to the new 2021-2027 period.

What the compromise effectively means is that the effects of the new rule-of-law mechanism will only appear years from now, which allows the Polish and Hungarian governments to sell the deal as a victory domestically.

In Poland, this has also meant a victory for the more moderate voices in the governing coalition, namely Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Jaroslaw Gowin, deputy prime minister and leader of one of three parties in the coalition. Over the last few days, Gowin had been pressing to avoid a Polish veto of the EU budget by marginalising the position of hardline Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro in the eyes of Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. On Wednesday, Gowin had said his faction had rejected the idea of "veto or death" (the formulation used by Ziobro's party to define Poland's negotiating position), arguing that, in fact, "veto was death".

On hearing about the new deal, Ziobro tweeted his dissatisfaction: "'Interpretative conclusions' and 'criteria' are not law! The regulation is law. If the...