m e s a 

Today, the President of Hungary released a dramatic video message announcing that the democratic rule of law in Hungary has come to an end because he was unlawfully removed from office. Nothing like this has happened in modern European history. A puppet will now be installed in his place, but that person’s mandate will be illegitimate from the very beginning. At the same time, the governing parties have barred their political opponents from standing in future elections. These are the very people who spent decades calling Viktor Orbán a dictator. Yet the moment they won a democratic election, they turned against both him and democracy itself. They did not act on their own. They did it with the support and at the direction of Brussels. The European Union is increasingly behaving like a liberal authoritarian empire, determined to tell people what they may say, what they must do, and even whom they are allowed to vote for. No person who truly values freedom can accept this.