(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El supuesto benefactor es enemigo del pueblo)
Brussels stays silent in the face of all the abuses committed across Europe against conservative and national forces, because Brussels is the one fomenting and, in large part, perpetrating them.
We have been on this downward drift for years. But the succession of causes for alarm is accelerating. In a single week, scandalous evidence has piled up that in the European Union the forces that decide the actions of Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission, the forces of the People’s Party, the Socialist Party and the Greens, are determined to impose extraordinary measures that prevent the populations of the member nations from freely exercising their will. Not only do they multiply their interference in the purely internal affairs of the nations. They sponsor anti-democratic ventures in every capital where they see a threat to their hegemony.
With Brussels’s blessing, the new government of Hungary, which is a product created, promoted and financed by von der Leyen, delivered a radical blow to the institutions. It has been a cascade of retroactive laws, raids on opposition party headquarters, seizure of files, takeover of the media with demands for self-criticism from those in charge in Bukharin style, and other emergency measures, and even ad hominem constitutional changes.
It has deposed the head of state, simply because Prime Minister Peter Magyar, Brussels’s man, felt like it; it has disqualified a large majority of the politicians of the former government’s party and imposed an “Orban law” so that Viktor Orban cannot run in the elections.
For these unprecedented outrages there has not been a single complaint, not a single lament, from a European Commission and a European Parliament that spent ten years harassing Viktor Orban’s government and the Hungarians with sanctions, defamation, disqualifications and slander, falsely accusing him of doing what Peter Magyar, the man chosen by Brussels to finish off Orban, is now doing without scruples or shame and in plain sight.
In Germany, too, the government has lost all sense of shame when it comes to finding formulas to prevent the party that is already the Germans’ favorite from coming to power, the Alternative for Germany, which is ten points ahead of the CDU across the country and is already close to an absolute majority in the two federal states holding elections in September, first in Saxony-Anhalt and at the end of the month in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The interior ministers of the Länder have made clear that they are already coordinating extraordinary measures with the secret services to confront the AfD’s very probable absolute-majority victories.
They have not yet said which measures, but we can get an idea from the fact that this week the Socialist interior minister of Lower Saxony disqualified some AfD candidates in the upcoming municipal elections on the grounds that mere membership in this legal party “raises suspicions of unconstitutionality.” In the Germany of jurists, an interior minister constructs an argument like that and imposes it without judges or anyone from the other parties denouncing the abysmal unconstitutionality of the measure. The Socialists, who are falling toward 10% and heading for single digits, are still tempted to try to ban the party that is heading toward a majority in every state and an absolute majority in many of them.
The CDU keeps falling, clinging to these Socialists, and the incapable, indecisive and mendacious Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has broken all his campaign promises like any Pedro Sánchez, is incapable of taking the step of opening talks with the party that represents all the voters who have left the traditional parties. And they have gone to the AfD because of the brutal failure and deceit of the past decades that have led Germany to a terrible degradation, with its ecologist delirium, its devastating energy policy and the immigrant invasion that has destroyed security, trust and coexistence. September will be tremendous for Merz, because the AfD’s victories will make unbearable the pressure from within his own party to change an alliance policy that is leading the government to collapse and the alliance of the People’s Party and the Socialists to irrecoverable catastrophe. The AfD has offered the CDU an alliance to carry out the policy Germany needs to halt, for now, the collapse marked by the permanent closure of businesses, lack of motivation, deep depression among social actors and an insecurity that keeps the population unhinged.
The anti-democratic measures in Hungary and Germany are like those practiced by Donald Tusk in Poland, another protégé of von der Leyen who wages a brutal harassment of judges, a strangling of critical media and police raids on unruly figures, without Brussels saying a word. When Poland had its previous conservative government, Brussels harassed it almost as much as Hungary and spent years sabotaging and attacking it through its media and encouraging the opposition until it managed to make it lose four years ago. Soon there will be elections again in Poland, and the national forces that are in the process of realignment could make the Tusk/von der Leyen government short-lived. Although these two will use every means to prevent it.
Brussels stays silent in the face of all the abuses committed across Europe against conservative and national forces, because Brussels is the one fomenting and, in large part, perpetrating them. There are many factors: the panic over the growth of the AfD, the horror at Le Pen’s probable victory, the absurdity that in Austria the FPÖ, with 40% of the vote, is shut out of power while three other parties survive in agony in a government that no longer has a majority, in permanent paralysis, the growth of patriotic forces across the East.
All of this is making ever more possible the end of this failed adventure that has been the socialist, ecologist project of authoritarian, anti-national centralism. It has become ever more irrational, ever more interventionist in a permanent assault on subsidiarity, with ever greater abuse and usurpation of competences and sovereignty and a permanent aggression against freedom of expression by the European Commission and its tentacles.
And, of course, the European Commission has kept silent in the face of a Spain mistreated, trampled and plundered by an ever more abusive criminal government that it has been generously subsidizing all these years. It has also helped that government lend credibility to its permanent swindle of statistics, false data, manipulation of information and systematic abuse. It has been a mutually beneficial pact that has worked for two figures without scruples or limits. Spain is in a deep crisis, in a dizzying impoverishment and a collapse of overburdened infrastructure, in addition to institutions hijacked by an openly criminal government that is an enemy of all truth.
But the European Union, instead of denouncing and combating the scandalous behavior of a government hounded by the justice system for its intensely criminal record, is bent on creating instruments to defend the governments of the social-democratic majority against the national forces that enjoy ever greater popular favor. With the bunkerization of its shrinking majority, the EU is an objective ally of Sánchez and the PSOE; even if he were to fall, it will protect the criminal party that the PSOE is today in order to impose an alliance between the People’s Party and the Socialists and attempt to marginalize VOX. Just as they will try to the very end in every country against the patriotic forces. In this sense, it can be said today that the European Union has already become the enemy of the people.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
