Key bill to appease Hungary, advance EU membership lands in Ukraine's parliament

The parliament on Oct. 1 formally registered a draft law that will expand the provision of education for national minorities in Ukraine, paving the way for a vote that could help unblock Kyiv's EU bid.

The bill, which is expected to be voted on Oct. 12, has been a key demand of the Hungarian government to lift its veto on Ukraine's EU accession process.

"Everyone has the right to receive education in their mother tongue, and we expect these rights to be fully respected and guaranteed in practice," wrote Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar in a social media post.

"I would like to thank all the experts — Hungarian and Ukrainian — for their constructive, forward-looking, and insightful work in the past weeks," said Hungary's Foreign Minister Anita Orban.

The law would give Ukraine's Hungarian-speaking community and other EU-language national minorities more room to use their language in education. Roughly 80,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine's westernmost Zakarpattia Oblast.

Schools where more than 50% of pupils study in the relevant minority language may be granted a special status, and the head or deputy head of such a school must be proficient in the minority language.

The bill is also being worded so as not to open the door to campaigns promoting the Russian language.

The draft bill repeatedly refers to "the language of a national minority of Ukraine, which is an official language of the European Union." Hungarian is one of the EU's 24 official languages, whereas Russian is not.

Ukraine hopes that the passage of the law could help restart its stalled EU accession bid.

In Brussels, EU officials aim to open all six enlargement clusters – to-do lists of reforms that Ukraine must complete to be fully aligned with the bloc – by the end of 2026.

The European Commission has said for over a year that Ukraine is technically ready to open all six, but politically motivated objections have meant that only two have been opened so far.

The law's passage could help open clusters two and three — lists of reforms covering the breadth of Ukraine's economy.

However, clusters four and five, which are more sector-specific, are still expected to raise concerns among countries like Poland, which are worried about Ukraine's competitiveness in the agricultural and trucking sectors.

Formal decisions to advance EU membership talks with a candidate country usually occur on the sidelines of a meeting of EU European affairs ministers, known as the General Affairs Council (GAC).

The next GAC is scheduled for Oct. 13.