Editors at Issues and Insights ponder the European Union’s future.
The European Union, no bastion of political tolerance to begin with, is letting it be known: It will not tolerate conservative parties sweeping into power among its members. Good luck with that. With each new national election, the EU’s power looks weaker and weaker.
The latest example of this comes from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, a passionate partisan of God, family, culture, and life, whose right-leaning coalition won Italy’s national election in a landslide, despite threats from the EU.
“If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said, in what can only be called a threat.
“We have tools”? This is an election in a sovereign country of which von der Leyen is not a citizen. Her remarks amount to interference with a sovereign nation’s democratic election.
As a warning to others, the EU recently suspended 7.5 billion euros in funding to conservative Viktor Orban’s Hungary due to alleged “corruption,” even though, by the EU’s own data, Hungary is nowhere near the most corrupt country in Europe.
It’s not as if Meloni’s victory came from nowhere. The EU’s leftist bureaucrats have been losing their grip over the continent they once ruled for some time now, but they don’t seem to realize it.
In country after country, moderate conservatives — or, as the left would have it, “far right” politicians — have won elections that undermine the EU’s ability to impose leftist policies on member nations.
Ever since the Brexit vote in June 2016, the EU has watched as multiple countries it thought were safely in the hands of socialist true-believers instead elected “God, family and country” conservatives.
In recent weeks, Britain elevated tax-cutting conservative Liz Truss to be prime minister, while Sweden’s recent elections brought in a new conservative government. Winning candidates have run on platforms limiting immigration, stunning elites across Europe.
