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The end of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rule in Hungary is a major domestic political event, but its implications extend beyond Budapest. For the European Union, the transition has foreign-policy consequences, weakening one of the bloc’s biggest obstacles to meaningful action against Israel’s violations of international law.

After Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, officially took office on May 9 and Hungary dropped its veto, the EU agreed to its first new sanctions package against individual Israeli settlers and organizations since July 2024. Whether Brussels fully uses this opening to shift its policy approach toward Israel, however, will depend on the political will of other key member states.

The end of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rule in Hungary is a major domestic political event, but its implications extend beyond Budapest. For the European Union, the transition has foreign-policy consequences, weakening one of the bloc’s biggest obstacles to meaningful action against Israel’s violations of international law.

After Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, officially took office on May 9 and Hungary dropped its veto, the EU agreed to its first new sanctions package against individual Israeli settlers and organizations since July 2024. Whether Brussels fully uses this opening to shift its policy approach toward Israel, however, will depend on the political will of other key member states.

Before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the EU was reluctant to impose sanctions on Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territory. The bloc regularly condemned Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and incidents of Israeli abuse against Palestinians, but it failed to translate condemnation into real costs. The closest thing to tangible EU pressure was the implementation of measures requiring that products made in illegal settlements be labeled as such.

That changed after Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attacks with a war in Gaza that the United Nations and leading human rights watchdogs have called a genocide. While the EU continued to tolerate Israel’s offensive, the scale of devastation helped make sanctions over Israeli conduct in the West Bank politically viable within the bloc. In December 2023, EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell proposed sanctions on Israeli........

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