After Trump’s decisive re-election, Peter Boghossian, an American philosopher, warned at the Danube Institute, one of the EU’s leading conservative think tanks, that the international liberal establishment would be as dangerous as a cornered predator, and to watch out for its attacks on conservative actors. One instance of his warning materialized a mere two weeks later as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) began hearings to condemn the June 2021 Hungarian Child Protection Law. Only one month after its adoption, the CJEU had launched legal proceedings against Hungary. With 15 EU Member States now joining these proceedings as third parties, Hungary is, as often in its history, outnumbered on the frontlines, while its powerful but distant friends across the Atlantic gather their own forces.
Act LXXIX of 2021 — Hungarian Child Protection Law
To grasp the relevance and stakes involved, the full title of the law is all-revealing: ‘Act LXXIX of 2021 on taking more severe action against pedophile offenders and amending certain Acts for the protection of children’. The two areas are treated separately in the 11-Amendment law itself, yet liberal media insist on describing it as ‘equating LGBTQ+ lifestyles with pedophilia.’ They mainly and selectively quote only part of the legislation that strictly concerns pedophilia: ‘it is forbidden to make accessible to persons who have not attained the age of eighteen years content that is pornographic or that depicts sexuality in a gratuitous manner or that propagates or portrays divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality.’ Could it be that liberals themselves purposefully blur the demarcations between ‘LGBTQ+ lifestyles’ and pedophilia to disallow legitimate criticism and ease child protection legislation as a possible means of combatting conservative and family values, thus imposing ‘LGBTQ+ lifestyles’ at all ages as a human rights standard?
Unlike the mainstream tabloid sensationalism using under-verified attacks on the law, the Venice Commission provides a more serious but highly progressive-leaning assessment in its opinion published on 13 December 2021. Although in appearance less harsh than the liberals’ uncompromising public outcry against Act LXXIX, the Commission adopts a more methodological, legal, yet insidious line of analysis on the law’s ‘compatibility with international human rights standards’. The danger is in the eye of the beholder. This opposition against this Hungarian legislation could be an emanation of a much larger underlying strategy and effort to establish a ‘Great Human Rights Reset’, aligning international human rights along LGBTQ+ standards and thereafter, as a right, freely exposing children of all ages to LGBTQ+ lifestyles and, potentially, even as a matter of law, imposing it across all spheres of education, parenting and religion in private schooling, and at home. Further, more striking is the Venice Commission’s insistence on the lack of consultation of ‘civil society’ organizations by the Hungarian authorities as part of the passing of the child protection law. Experienced Hungarian lawmakers know better. Advocating ‘civil society’ interests most often means pushing the LGBT lobbying agenda. As the Hungarian people democratically elected Viktor Orbán four times to lead the nation, generously foreign-funded, Democrat-aligned elements active in the country thought, like Brecht quipped, to dismiss the people and elect another, rather than accept their will. The ongoing hearings are the fruits of their efforts to prevent the Hungarian Parliament from passing policies—by hook or by crook. In Europe, Hungary is at the forefront of this existential battle and challenges this shift in fundamental precepts, the underlying ocean current pushing for change in civilizational paradigms.
The Threat of Article 7 of Treaty on EU — Suspension of Voting Rights
One month after Act LXXIX was originally passed, the liberal legal-checking outlet Les Surligneurs deplored ‘the impotence of the European Union’ regarding the impossibility of punishing Hungary. Mark Rutte declared that Hungary had ‘no business being in the European Union anymore’, and Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg at the time, improperly parroting Karl Popper as is fashionable among liberals, declared that he would be ‘intolerant of intolerance’. Yet there was little recourse for these and Hungary’s many other detractors to bring Mr. Orbán’s government in line with the EU agenda. As Clément Beaune, France’s Secretary of State for European Affairs at the time, admitted that ‘financial sanctions are not strong enough’ to pressure Budapest, no provision in the European Treaties provides for the exclusion of a Member State. Although article 7 of the Treaty on EU offers the possibility of suspending a Member State’s voting rights within the Council, a previous attempt to muster the required unanimous article 7 support to punish Hungary already failed in 2018.
This all may have been true at a time when the Biden-led international liberal establishment was confident it could slowly wear down Hungary’s leadership. But the situation has changed. As can be read in a recent article in the European Conservative by Tamás Orbán, he believes that ‘should the Court find Budapest guilty of being in a “serious and persistent breach” of the fundamental EU values and principles’, the looming threat of article 7 under the TEU against Hungary over the years could become a reality. After the election of the EU-aligned Donald Tusk as Prime Minister of Poland at the end of 2023, Hungary may have lost one of its key long-standing allies in the EU. With the decisive victory of President Trump, his shared policy positions with Mr. Orbán and the recent Romanian Constitutional Court’s controversial cancellation of the country’s Presidential elections in favor of the sovereigntist and pro-Trump candidate, Calin Georgescu, the liberal EU establishment might try to further weaken Orbán’s and Trump’s foothold on the Union’s internal politics by suspending Hungary’s Council voting rights under article 7 of the TEU. The timer is on as the U.S. President will take office on 20 January. In Brussels, fear grows about Trump’s extensive foreign policy influence, as seen in his unofficial visit to Paris for the Notre Dame ceremony on 7 December and the informal meeting with Zelenskyy and Macron on the resolution of the Ukraine war. To counter Trump’s foreign policy offensive, will the EU leadership take that ‘irreversible step toward turning the EU into a centralized superstate, weakening all Member States in the long term forever’?
Hungary is the beating heart of conservatism in Europe. The liberal establishment intuitively knows that to disrupt the education and development of Hungarian children and support for family values will atrophy this most precious vessel of common sense on the continent. All friends of national self-determination have a genuine interest in backing Mr. Orbán in these hard hours for Hungary.
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