Every democratic political system can be characterized by the presence of political actors’ competing views in various policy areas. The EU is no exception in that regard. Nevertheless, the EU is also based on fundamental values as envisaged in Article 2 TEU. These core values should be common to all EU Member States and the EU as a whole. As noted by Simon Hix, ‘if the values that constitute collective identity [of democratic international communities] come under threat, we should expect the international organization to defend them’. However, political developments of the last decades have shown that even when it comes to core values such as democracy or guarantees of the rule of law, EU political actors are not necessarily as united as one would in theory expect. This article aims to explore the role Article 2 TEU played in the debates on the rule of law in EU member states. In doing so, the analysis targets the only directly elected EU institution and arguably the most vocal proponent of the EU democracy: the European Parliament. More specifically, I ask two research questions: (a) How did the MEPs frame the debates on the quality of democracy and rule of law in backsliding EU member states?; and (b) Do the MEPs consider Article 2 values as a strong legal basis or rather as a proclamatory article with a limited practical use? Qualitative content analysis is employed for analysing more than 40 EP debates that have taken place since 2004.