István Hegedűs was one of the experts who answered Judy Dempsey's question on Carnegie Europe's blog on 28 February 2018. He claimed: "It is understandable that there is a fear in the air of an even deeper East-West divide in Europe after any further enlargement. Still, the solution should not be to exclude applicants who fulfill the necessary criteria. Instead, current EU mechanisms should be operationalised to monitor and, if necessary, sanction member governments—not member states—that regularly breach the shared values of the European community."