In January last year the European Union revealed that it had dreamed up a ‘secret plan’ to sabotage the economy of one of its member states. Brussels was growing impatient with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had shown the temerity to dissent from EU orthodoxy on a number of issues. In this particular case it was Orban’s continued use of the veto to block a £50 billion aid package to Ukraine that had angered the bureaucrats and liberal politicians. According to the Financial Times, the EU’s strategy in response would involve targeting Hungary’s economy, weakening its currency and reducing investor confidence. Some £20 billion of funding for Hungary was put on hold.
You look at that and kind of marvel on two counts – first that the institution would try to bankrupt one of its own member states simply because its democratically elected leader dissented from Brussels’ diktat. But you marvel, too, that the EU leaders gathered for the 61st annual Munich SecurityConference had the sheer effrontery to appear aghast at the lecture they were given by the US Vice-President J.D. Vance on this very stuff (their elitist, authoritarian refusal to let democracy take its course), as if pretending it didn’t happen. They should have been nodding their heads and saying: ‘Yeah, OK, we do do all of that, sure.’
The only problem with the Vance speech is that it didn’t go far enough and contained insufficient examples of the EU’s warped concept of democracy. The truth is that populist parties of both the right and left have been persecuted by the EU for at least 25 years and continue to be.
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