Gerald Warner: We should fight Hungary’s corner
Published on 21/04/2013 00:00
ON THE same day, almost at the hour, that Margaret Thatcher died the Eurosceptic baton was picked up by another European leader.
Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, denounced the European Parliament in a radio interview as a place where “liberal, left-wing and Green MEPs bellow at each other with bulging veins”.
We already knew that: what made the difference was hearing the truth articulated by the leader of an EU member state.
“Hungarians think debate is based on a sober, matter-of-fact, the-other-person-may-be-right logic, but the European Parliament is not a European place,” said Orbán. “Facts are secondary.” You could not ask for a more accurate description of the thieves’ kitchen that houses the Brussels kleptocracy, especially the culturally insightful statement that it “is not a European place”. The Hungarian prime minister was speaking ahead of an insulting debate in the European Parliament on the state of democracy in Hungary, the second such plenary session in two years. We shall wait in vain for a debate on the state of democracy in Brussels.
The EU is now running a full-blown vendetta against Hungary; not, as it pretends, against Fidesz, the governing political party, but against the Hungarian nation, its freedoms and values. This is because those values are incompatible with the ambitions of the expanding dictatorship in Brussels. Hungarians are fighting the battle that the British government has shirked but which a majority of the British people now wants to see fought and won. The federalist Green Party leadership claimed: “This is not just about Hungary, it is clearly a wider issue, with current concerns about developments in Romania and Bulgaria, as well as previously in Italy and Greece.”
Italy and Greece have already experienced EU interference in domestic government, yet MEPs criticised Fidesz for using its “supermajority” in the Hungarian Parliament to amend the country’s constitution. It seems majorities are undemocratic, but “Troika” diktat is respectable. The EU accuses the Hungarian Parliament of circumventing Hungary’s Constitutional Court, while ordering the Portuguese government to do exactly that after EU austerity measures were ruled unconstitutional by its court. A glance at Hungary’s enemies in Strasbourg tells us the agenda. Most vociferous is the Belgian leader of the Liberal-Democrat group, Guy Verhofstadt. One would have thought a man pocketing so much money from European taxpayers would have been able to afford a haircut. He is demanding proceedings against Hungary under Article 7 of the EU treaty.
Leading the charge is Viviane Reding, vice-president of the EU Commission, trumpeting her “concerns” about the rule of law in Hungary. Her concern might more legitimately be directed towards the rule of law in Brussels: last November the Court of Auditors refused to sign off the EU’s accounts for the 18th successive year. In any milieu where the rule of law obtained, such an organisation would have been prosecuted for criminality in the first year. Another violent critic of Hungarian democracy is Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Danny the Red is now co-president of the Greens-European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament. Today this Marxist lectures the nation that rose up against Communist tyranny in 1956 on democratic practice. It is a pity János Kádár is not around to contribute his wise insights into democracy too.
The complaints of the Euro-federalist fanatics against Hungary ostensibly relate to the recent Fourth Amendment to its constitution. For example, they condemn Article 17 because, if they fine Hungary, the charge will be passed directly on to Hungarian taxpayers: “This could undermine the authority of the Court of Justice…” They would prefer a middleman to soften the blow. They also complain that judges retired early have not yet been reinstated: the EU believes reinstating Communist judges is the way to purify democracy in Hungary.
This is a diversion. The EU was attacking Hungary before the Fourth Amendment was drawn up; its real target is the constitution itself. That document is exceptional today in its cultural and moral integrity. In splendidly Burkean terms it is declared to be “a contract between Hungarians past, present and future”, the critical dimension omitted in post-French Revolution constitutions. It recognises “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood” and “professes that the family and the nation constitute the principal framework of our coexistence”, besides protecting human life from conception and defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
No wonder the Robespierres in the Jacobin Convention at Brussels are spewing hate. If such a document is allowed to survive, then so will Hungarian nationhood – and other European nations besides. Christianity, family, nationhood are precisely the trinity that the European Union aspires to destroy. Hungary is fighting our battle too; it is shameful that we are not battling alongside her. «