On Tuesday night, January 30th, the European Movement (EMI) projected a propaganda video onto the Berlaymont, the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels. While at first glance, the message seems only to be about Ukraine, the organization’s leader later stated that it was meant as an argument for sidelining Hungary and stripping member states of their veto rights.
The short video depicted the European capital being bombed by Russia, saying “If we tolerate [the invasion of Ukraine], then we will be next!”
Judging by what the EMI’s Secretary-General Petros Fassoulas had to say about the campaign, the unspoken part is what really matters.
“We had enough of Orbán’s blackmailing,” Fassoulas told Politico. “The sooner EU leaders reform the way the EU takes decisions, the quicker we will be able to stand up to autocrats.”
Clearly, the stunt is connected to the EU leaders’ upcoming special summit on Thursday, where the main point on the agenda will be the €50 billion aid package to Ukraine that’s currently held up by the veto of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Whereas the Hungarian PM is frequently portrayed as the one “blackmailing the EU” with his vetoes, Budapest—as well as many conservative MEPs—say it’s the other way around, with Brussels using extortion in the form of withholding EU funds and threatening outright economic sabotage if the country doesn’t comply with the majority’s ideas.
And while veto power was once conceived to be the ultimate safeguard of member states’ sovereignty and democratic decision-making in the EU, recent months have seen endless calls from Brussels’ mostly left-leaning federalist circles to scrap it by replacing unanimity with qualified majority voting in the Council.
Hungary’s opposition to certain joint policy decisions serves as the ultimate justification for these arguments, even though federalists would be making them anyway.
The European Movement, for instance, is an EU-financed umbrella organization that’s older than the Union itself, with a clearly stated goal to “influence decision-makers in Brussels and capitals around Europe” in order to facilitate “European integration.”
Whether it’s called “integration” or “ever-closer Union,” it always means the same: further steps toward an ever more centralized, federal structure of the European Union by weakening member states and strengthening EU institutions.
Scrapping veto rights, for instance, is one of the EMI’s “key recommendations” for future EU reforms. Specifically, the lobby group argues for replacing unanimity with qualified majority voting in case of foreign policy, defense policy, and rule-of-law decisions, as well as in any policy areas in which national competencies have been conferred to the EU.
“Treaty reform is a necessary precondition for a credible enlargement perspective that can enhance the EU’s capacity to act more vigorously in the international arena and enhance democratic legitimacy,” the EMI’s site says, adding that
Therefore, overcoming unanimity is a crucial step in the right direction for an enlarged Union by 2030.
Ending unanimity has also been a part of multiple reform proposals put forward by the European Parliament, alongside transferring ten major policy areas under EU competency (including defense, healthcare, border protection, and environmental policies).
The Parliament also called for the establishment of European citizenship, an EU-wide constituency for EU elections, EU referenda, and even a uniform, lower voting age—all designed to give transnational political movements an advantage and blur the lines between member states.
As Polish MEP Jacek Sariusz-Wolski (ECR) explained after one of these recent reports had been adopted in Brussels, the most infuriating aspect of this ongoing power grab is that it is deliberately being kept from the public:
The public is not supposed to notice that a putsch is about to take place, that the European Union as a community of sovereign states is being abolished and a superstate is being created without any consent of the people, and that the member states are being reduced to the role of German states.
This is a kind of group of political ideologues, some of whom I would even call fanatics, who want to build a superstate on the ruins of nation-states, where a political oligarchy will rule unaccountably and escape the democratic control of citizens.
