Sovereignist Parties Will Become Even More Important After Orbán’s Defeat

Viktor Orbán has lost the election, and the globalists in Brussels are celebrating as if Adolf Hitler himself had fallen. Hungary is a strange kind of dictatorship, in the view of von der Leyen and her circle—one where the leader holds elections, loses them, and peacefully congratulates his rival. Major European media outlets and mainstream parties, from the center-right to the far left, are all celebrating Orbán’s downfall and proclaiming that Hungary is now “returning to Europe,” as if Budapest had spent the past 16 years adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

The president of the European Commission has been unstinting in her jubilation over the Hungarian election results, even going so far as to say that now, in this country, “the heart of Europe beats stronger.” Someone should tell her that Europe doesn’t have a heart and that, in any case, such a metaphor would only apply to the individual nations that comprise it. More importantly, perhaps it is time to assess whether the European Commission is violating its prohibition against influencing member states’ elections.

The principle of conferral defines the powers delegated by member states, and national elections are by no means among them. Article 4(2) of the Treaty on European Union obliges the Commission to respect the essential functions of each state, including its political system and democratic processes. Article 17(3) requires von der Leyen to act independently, not as a partisan actor in national electoral processes. There is a legal gray area here because the Commission is supposed to be able to issue reports or political criticism, while, at the same time, it cannot influence electoral processes—a clear tension. In any case, it is difficult to argue that the attitude of von der Leyen and many other European commissioners has been respectful or independent with regard to the electoral process in Hungary.

The euphoria of centrists and leftists after the Hungarian election has not been limited to the leadership of the European Commission. In Spain, both corrupt Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (Socialist Party) and the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (People’s Party), have expressed their delight at the result. The same reaction has been seen among Christian Democrats and Socialists across the rest of Europe, as well as in their more partisan media outlets, which still constitute a majority. Numerous editorialists have gone a step further, interpreting the Hungarian result as the beginning of the end for what they call the “far right” and what we, less manipulatively, call the new right.

In reality, von der Leyen, the European People’s Party, and the string of left-wing and far-left parties that are undermining Europe are committing a serious diagnostic error, at best—or engaging in yet another attempt to poison public opinion, at worst. It is not that Hungary has ‘fallen’ because Orbán’s anti-immigration or pro-sovereignty policies have gone out of fashion across Europe; rather, he may have been able to lose precisely because his 16 years in power have allowed Hungary to enjoy a relatively privileged position—in immigration, security, sovereignty, and the containment of woke excesses—that none of its European neighbors share.

Orbán’s defeat not only fails to signal the beginning of the end for sovereignist parties in Europe; it actually confirms that those who most need Orbán’s policies are no longer in Hungary but in France, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere across a Europe that von der Leyen’s policies have helped turn into increasingly soulless nations—stripped of culture, history, pride, security, and justice and marked by deepening impoverishment.

It is important to emphasize the idea of injustice. The promotion of illegal immigration—and even more so Pedro Sánchez’s mass regularization policy in Spain—though presented as an exercise in justice, is in fact profoundly unjust, both to citizens in their countries of origin and to immigrants who entered legally and have earned their right to citizenship through hard work, effort, and respect for the law.

Finally, the case of Pedro Sánchez is particularly striking. He has had the audacity to celebrate Orbán’s downfall from China, where he is on an official visit, while not uttering a single word of criticism about the largest and most oppressive dictatorship of the 21st century—the very one that has been hosting him all week and the one that most clearly stands in opposition to the ‘European values’ that, according to Sánchez—and Emmanuel Macron as well—the new Hungarian government will now represent.