The EU Calls Orbán A Dictator, But Its Own President Was Installed In A Soviet-Style Backroom Deal

Alexander Muse – There is a word that Brussels invokes with extraordinary frequency, and that word is democracy. EU officials deploy it against Viktor Orbán of Hungary, against the governments of Poland and Slovakia, against the elected leaders of Romania, and lately against Donald Trump and the United States itself.
The accusation carries a familiar structure: the targeted government is authoritarian, its leader is a threat to liberal norms, and the European Union stands as the righteous guardian of democratic principles. The argument has a surface plausibility that makes it easy to repeat. It has one fatal defect. The institution making it is itself the product of one of the most brazenly undemocratic leadership selections in the modern Western world.
Begin with the basics. In 2019, European citizens went to the polls in EU parliamentary elections. Those elections were supposed to mean something. The mechanism that was supposed to give them meaning was called the Spitzenkandidat process, a system under which each major political group in the European Parliament would nominate a lead candidate, those candidates would campaign openly across Europe, and the one whose coalition won the most seats would be installed as president of the European Commission. Continue reading