The EU's unanimity rule means that all member states represented at the Council of the European Union must agree on a decision before it can pass. This grants all 27 member states a veto.

The proposal was put forward by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) at a party congress in Vienna. Reform's MEPs have sat with the ALDE group, now known as Renew Europe, in the European Parliament, but its delegation in Vienna abstained from voting on the unanimity principle.

"The Estonian delegation did not take part in the vote on the resolution as, alongside proposals we supported, it also contained broader proposals to amend the European Union's founding treaties, which the Reform Party does not support," said Reform Party MP Yoko Alender, who attended the ALDE congress in Vienna.

"For Estonia, as a small country, preserving the unanimity requirement in European foreign and security policy is important from a security perspective. There are in Europe various decision-making rules in different policy areas, with unanimity required in some and not in others. On sanctions and human rights, both Urmas Paet, the Reform Party's member of the European Parliament, and the party as a whole, have previously proposed preventing individual states from blocking decisions, as Viktor Orbán's Hungary did for a long time," Alender went on.

ALDE has called for a "collective veto" system in the EU, replacing single-state vetoes with a mechanism requiring at least five member states representing 15 percent of countries and 5 percent of the EU population. The party said it would in the meantime preserve qualified majority voting (QMV) and member states' rights.

ALDE's collective veto proposal also targeted EU enlargement delays, with Montenegro and North Macedonia's "disproportionately long and frustrating delays" on accession referred to, as well as the single-state obstruction of Ukraine's and Moldova's EU accession paths.

Background:

Most western European member states have generally favored the removal of the unanimity principle, with Hungary's actions under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán significantly hampering the bloc's efforts to support Ukraine, bringing the issue to the fore in other areas of the Union too – for instance in Estonia.

The Estonian government has so far maintained that the unanimity requirement—meaning the veto power of a single member state—in foreign policy should be retained.

However, MEP Paet has long argued the EU should abandon the consensus requirement in foreign and security policy, though not all Estonian politicians share this view. In 2023, Paet drafted a report in the European Parliament recommending the use of qualified majority voting in some areas of foreign policy, including human rights, the protection of international law and the adoption of sanctions. This, he argued, would boost the effectiveness and impact of EU foreign policy.

Researchers at the University of Tartu in 2022 published a report recommending Estonia abandon its longstanding position on the unanimity principle and begin supporting its removal in EU foreign policy.

Altering the EU's decision-making rules to this extent would, however, entail revising the bloc's founding treaties, something a large number of member states oppose on the grounds that the resulting negotiations and referendums could plunge the EU into years of political turmoil.

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