The Czech Republic became the first EU country to formally request to join the EU Commission’s lawsuit against Hungary over its ‘Defense of Sovereignty’ law, a bill passed in late 2023 to protect the country’s electoral integrity from foreign interference attempts.
Despite the EU itself working on multiple very similar pieces of legislation to prevent interference, it considers the Hungarian conservative government’s approach illegal under EU laws. It opened an infringement procedure in February last year, then, after Hungary refused to scrap the law, it sued the country at the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) in October.
Czech PM Petr Fiala’s (at least nominally) right-wing government apparently feels the same way, as Czech Foreign Minister Daniel Drake confirmed on Tuesday that Prague submitted its request to the ECJ to join the case on the Commission’s side on January 30th.
What’s more, Drake said they have knowledge of twelve other EU countries “seriously considering” doing the same and have already begun internal preparations. According to the unconfirmed reports of the NGO Reclaim, Denmark is one of them and might have already applied but is yet to make it public.
Czechia’s “policies have long supported measures to protect fundamental human rights and freedoms,” Drake said, and that’s why the country felt compelled to join the lawsuit against Hungary.
While the Commission alleges that the law violates the fundamental right to free speech and was meant to intimidate opposition journalists and NGOs from criticizing the government, Budapest maintains that its goal is only to investigate foreign-funded entities that are working to influence the outcome of elections or the will of the voters.
Moreover, there was a legitimate reason to implement such a law after it was revealed and proven in court that opposition parties, media, and NGOs received millions of dollars in undisclosed illegal ‘donations’ from Action for Democracy and other U.S.-based organizations during the 2022 general election campaign.
“The national law on the Defense of Sovereignty was not adopted for fun. It was a response to the valid outrage of Hungarians when they learned about the illegal foreign funding,” Hungarian MEP András László (PfE) explained when the Commission initiated the lawsuit late last year.
The MEP described the incident as the „biggest interference in Hungarian elections” in the country’s democratic history, but whatever became public is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
If anything, the need for the sovereignty protection law has become all the more justified following recent revelations. After the Trump administration shut down the infamous USAID, it turned out that the mostly Democrat-controlled CIA front was involved in influencing a lot more countries than previously thought, funneling billions to foreign media and political organizations through its countless subsidiary NGOs. Its goals were just as often ideological as geopolitical, promoting the unmistakable progressive and liberal agenda of the Western leftist elites for decades. USAID may have been the biggest, but certainly not the only one—think Action for Democracy or Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and dismantling this shadowy foreign influence network will not happen overnight.
Yet what best shows Brussels’ hypocrisy and double standards toward conservatives is the fact that the Commission is also working on its own ‘foreign agents law,’ the Defense of Democracy Package, which will require all foreign-funded NGOs operating in the EU to disclose their financiers in the name of transparency. Although it’s meant to weed out Russian and Chinese interference attempts, its primary critics are U.S.-funded NGOs, with over 200, mostly leftist, civil society organizations protesting against its implementation.
Another EU initiative that was recently brought into the spotlight is the Democracy Shield, which will implement a set of instruments to counter online interference, primarily on social media. It gained momentum after Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook aligned themselves with President Trump in the name of free speech. This prompted the EU to begin working on new laws that will ensure the continuation of online censorship with the help of professional “fact-checkers,” who are usually Democrat-funded NGOs themselves.
More interesting, given Prague’s enthusiasm to ally itself with Brussels, is that the Czech ruling party, ODS, belongs to Meloni’s conservative ECR group, the same as the Romanian AUR. While there is still no conclusive proof that Russia interfered in last year’s Romanian election, former EU Commissioner and censorship chief Thierry Breton admitted that the country’s constitutional court annulled the first round—a clear violation of democracy according to AUR and ECR—after pressure from Brussels. There could hardly be a more blatant case of foreign interference than canceling an election based on an undesirable result, and one that ECR rightly challenges—yet the AUR-allied Czechs don’t seem to realize the contradiction in their actions.
So, while the EU reserves the right to hold foreign-funded entities, even NGOs accountable, it wants to take away the same right from conservative states—lest they defend themselves from even more Western interference, both from the U.S. deep state and Brussels.
