Viktor Orbán

It is easy to take exception to the "infelicitous semantic choice" of ditsy new job titles that "reflect a sense of detachment from European realities", as one EU law professor put it to The Guardian.

Experts on the Western Balkans, as well as international law and civil society figures, took to social media to voice their concerns on Tuesday after the new European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, announced Hungary's Laszlo Trocsanyi as her proposed Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Policy.

Former Australian conservative prime minister Tony Abbott has urged Central Europeans to be tough on the issue of migration, adding that Hungary and other countries in the region had every right to close their borders as they saw fit.

A conservative theologist, Semjen is leader of the Christian Democratic People's Party, the pseudo-coalition partner of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's governing Fidesz party. In his doctoral thesis, he famously called Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger "the devil".

Then there was the suspension of Hungary's governing party, Fidesz, from the European People's Party due to the party's overt shift toward authoritarianism in the past years and straightforward attacks on European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The European Union's executive on Tuesday agreed new measures to better police democracy across the bloc, tightening scrutiny of nationalist rulers in the east who stand accused of attacking judicial independence and media freedom.

Slovak politician Maros Sefcovic and Bulgarian economic analyst Kristalina Georgieva, head of the World Bank, were left disappointed after being tipped for high-profile parts. Romania and Croatia had also sought a greater role for the Balkan region in the EU's decision-making process.

Fidesz, meanwhile, has rowed back on threats to join a rival political family after right-wing nationalist parties failed to win enough EU parliamentary seats to upset the balance of power in an increasingly fragmented European Union.

In Czech Republic, scandal-hit Prime Minister Andrej Babis shows no sign of stepping down following the country's biggest street protests since the fall of communism, writes Tim Gosling. On Thursday, Babis survived a no-confidence vote.

The group includes Balint Erdei, a friend and former business partner of Orban's son-in-law, Istvan Tiborcz, as well as Radovan Đumić, whose company Keep Light is prospering thanks to the public contracts it is winning, Dragoljub Zbiljić and Nenad Kovač, businessmen with links to SNS, and Mark Crandall, a former boss of Brnabic.