nam 22 uu 4500 10.17176/20260429-173409-0 DE-Verfassungsblog cr||||| 260429s2026||||xx#|||||o|||| ||| 0|eng|| 10.17176/20260429-173409-0 doi eng 342 23 Kaiser, Lena Author aut Heavy Artillery, Light Reasoning - A Doctrinally Thin but Significant New Autonomous Standard of Review under Article 2 TEU Kaiser, Lena Verfassungsblog 2026-04-29 Text txt rdacontent Computermedien c rdamedia Online-Ressource cr rdacarrier In its judgment of 21 April 2026 in Commission v. Hungary (C-769/22), the CJEU took the decisive step: its “value turn”. The Court for the first time applied Article 2 TEU as an autonomous and standalone review standard. The judgment deploys what might be called heavy artillery. Yet, the firepower of the instrument stands in uneasy tension with the lightness of the reasoning marshalled to justify its use. Nonetheless, the critical observations advanced by Riedl ultimately underestimate both the structural logic of the EU legal order and the functional mandate of the Court. CC BY-SA 4.0 Article 2 TEU C-769/22 EU Rule of Law Values (DE-588)10290611-7 gnd EU Max Steinbeis Verfassungsblog gGmbH Verfassungsblog 2366-7044 https://verfassungsblog.de/heavy-artillery-light-reasoning/ raw object