Are “Unelected EU Bureaucrats” Hungary’s Main Nemesis? Unlikely

The mantra about “faceless,” “unelected EU bureaucrats” driving a crusade against Hungary’s democratically elected government, and thus against the Hungarian people in general, is one of the omnipresent narratives within the conservative political discourse.

National conservative forces, leaning to the right within the political spectrum, all across Europe keep using this expression when communicating the reasons behind the decline of their societies. Unelected, vindictive technocrats on the one side, an elected, constitutional executive representing common men on the other – an unaccountable bureaucracy is railing against the legitimate, national executive, we hear.

But is this really the case? The three main institutions of the European Union, the European Council, the Commission and the Parliament, are all run by elected officials. The Council consists of elected heads of nation-states (presidents, prime ministers). No unelected bureaucrats here. Members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg are also elected directly by voters in EU Member States. The Commission is somewhat suspect in this regard, but it does have its own electoral process, albeit once removed from ordinary European citizens. Its head is selected once in five years by members of the Council, and the president is typically proposed from the largest party in the EP. Fair enough for a democratic mandate, one should think.

So no, they are clearly not an unelected bureaucracy, although these institutions sometimes do behave as an unaccountable supranational elite that is actively chipping away from the competences of EU Member States, gradually elevating themselves above the authority of national parliaments. Still, the conceptual confusion perpetuated by the political right must be scrapped:

what we experience in Europe is not a crisis brought about by an unelected bureaucracy. It is the crisis of democracy itself.

Through their membership in the European Union, countries such as Hungary, and many others in the Central European region, are bearing the devastating consequences of the inexplicable and self-destructive choices of the Western-European electorate. Citizens there repeatedly voted for a political elite that has enacted a radical transformation of their societies at the expense of the indigenous population, traditional culture, and religious foundations. Open borders, forced Islamization, anti-family LGBTQ propaganda, the sexualization of children, two-tier legal systems favoring ethnic or sexual minorities, severe restrictions on the freedom of speech, and persecution of political dissent, only to name a few. And yet voters continue to refuse to see the direct connection between their electoral choices and the rapid decline of Western European societies. This should make one thing clear: what goes on in Brussels and Strasbourg is merely the symptom. The real causes can in fact be traced back to political preferences in national hubs such as Torino, Barcelona, Marseille, Munich, or Antwerp, for that matter.

Hungary’s woes thus likely stem from the progressive radicalization and multicultural transformation of Western societies, rather than a transnational bureaucracy gone rogue. Our country is bearing the negative consequences of political and ideological choices made on a national level by real voters, the ones who also determine the make-up of the European institutions. The root of the problem is that Western-European societies have a fundamentally different vision for their future than their Central or Eastern European counterparts. Yet as the former ones are in a numerical majority in the European structures, their elected representatives constantly override the will of voters from smaller nations, such as Hungary. We have, it seems, entered a stage where the structural limitations of democracy have reached a crisis point in Western Europe – a phenomenon that manifests itself in prosperous societies devouring themselves culturally, economically, and politically.

What we currently experience can be best summed up by Benjamin Franklin’s famous saying –

Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The former U.S. president described democracy as “two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” In other words, if we relinquish our duty to “contest the vote,” that is, our duty to actively preserve freedom, what we get is a democracy of wolves where the will of the majority is ruthlessly enforced at the expense of the minority.

The national-conservative reaction to the crisis of democracy, as expressed in their rhetoric against a real or imaginary “unelected bureaucracy,” shows that the Central European conservative sphere is in dire need of reform, of renewal. Hungarian conservative leaders, opinion-makers, or the media are not exempt either. Misidentifying our opponents, simplifying the struggle between national values and their supra-national replacement down to a parody of our enemies in Brussels, seems to be an anomaly that stems from the reluctance to reach beyond our comfort zone, created by four consecutive terms in power.

Hungary is the last domino of national sovereignty, a Christian vision of the state, and true European culture standing in the European cacophony of nihilistic relativism and parallel truths. It is therefore imperative that we approach this existential struggle with the use of a language that corresponds to the essence of this conflict.

We are faced with the corruption of democracy that is not so much a consequence of some bureaucratic conspiracy against the sovereign electorate, but one that in fact stems from the foundational idea of a union between European nations.

Photo: Wikipedia

The current power grab of our elected, but fundamentally corrupt and destructive leadership in Brussels is an unintended but logical consequence of the very ideas that Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, or Robert Schuman presented after WWII as a safeguard against nations turning against each others’ throats. To say this is almost a sacrilege in the current conservative discourse, but say it we must. And to ask about whether the current situation has been brought about by an organic development or rather a betrayal of their founding ideas, is purely academic: it is here, it has happened, it is a fact.

The combination of vision and courage that Hungarian conservatives have shown in the face of overwhelming pressure from other Member States has given a glimmer of hope to Europe for a possible alternative to the authoritarian catastrophe that Western societies are currently descending into. The alliance between the far-left and radical Islam that has turned once prosperous societies into an Orwellian dystopia is an existential threat to our way of life, and indeed to our physical survival as Europeans. There is an undeniable element of choice in the unfolding fate of our Continent, and this is why ordinary European citizens, voters, cannot be exonerated by a “bureaucracy” narrative of their own responsibility for the destruction of Europe by transferring guilt to the supranational political class that they have in fact elected, then reelected.

However overly academic this might sound, European resistance must start with language that points to reality, uncomfortable though it may be. Describing our present situation accurately is where the healing of our democracy, Hungarian democracy, can start to take shape. It is here that one can now proceed to find something more resilient, capable of shielding Central Europe from the disastrous choices of our Western counterparts, many of whom have now reached a civilizational point of no return.

Featured Image: Hungary Today, AI rendering