Will the EU stand up for its values?

European lawmakers pulled no punches
last week in their dressing-down of Hungary’s
increasingly authoritarian leader,
said Andrew Byrne in the Financial
Times (U.K.). Prime Minister Viktor
Orban went to the European Parliament
in Brussels to defend Hungary’s draconian
new education law, which would
effectively shut down Budapest’s Central
European University—the nation’s last
bastion of academic freedom. CEU was
founded by Hungarian-born U.S. financier
and philanthropist George Soros,
whose promotion of open societies and
civic activism make him Orban’s favorite
enemy. Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian leader of the parliament’s liberal
faction, accused Orban of acting like Stalin, asking “What’s
next, book burning?” Socialist leader Gianni Pittella of Italy called
Orban a liar bent on suppressing “science, research, schools, and
culture,” claims Orban dismissed as “absurd.” Yet despite all the
harsh rhetoric, “Orban emerged relatively unscathed.” The European
Commission demanded changes to the education law, but
it stopped short of triggering the EU’s “Article 7” mechanism—
which would find Hungary in breach of the rule of law and suspend
the country’s EU voting rights—because it knows Poland’s
ruling conservative party “would veto the sanction.”
What a ridiculous spectacle, said Tamas Lanczi in Hungary’s
Mozgasterblog.hu. The Brussels elite resorted to “highly distorted
and extremely slanderous” statements to denounce
Orban. They are using the CEU as an excuse to criticize the
prime minister, when what they’re really angry about is his refusal
to allow the mass resettlement of illegal Muslim migrants
on Hungarian soil. Fortunately, Orban
“remained steadfast, led astray neither
by intimidations nor by blackmail.”
This whole flap is an election stunt
staged by the prime minister, said
Tamas Torba in Magyar Nemzet (Hungary).
Orban is simply trying to make
sure his Fidesz party doesn’t lose votes
to the even-further-right-wing Jobbik
party in the 2018 national election. His
attempts to block the flood of migrants
passing through Hungary with walls,
detention centers, and nationalist rhetoric
boosted his support among far-right
voters. But now that the refugee influx has slowed to a trickle,
the prime minister needs a new threat to Hungary and Christian
Europe, so he’s settled on CEU and Soros. And by giving him an
international stage on which to promote his nationalist agenda,
the EU did exactly “as Orban wanted.”
Worse, they appeased a would-be dictator, said Rudolf Ungvary
in Nepszava (Hungary). Just as Europeans in 1938 thought
they could deal with Hitler “through democratic means,” so
the EU has met Orban’s fascistic actions with nothing but the
threat of legal action. Of course, this is “not a similar tragedy,”
as the lives of millions of Jews are not at stake—just “the hopes
of Hungarian democrats.” The EU is wrong to treat Hungary
as just another democratic member state. Orban rode a wave
of nationalism to power in 2010, and used his two-thirds legislative
majority to rewrite the constitution, gutting judicial
oversight and eviscerating the free press. We’ve had only “the
appearance of democracy” for years.