Very good piece about the state of democracy in Europe;
”Here the battle over democracy in Europe becomes part of a far wider struggle across the world. In 2024, some four billion people across more than 60 countries are due to vote in national elections, and the ones for the European Parliament. We might imagine that the world’s biggest-ever carnival of democracy is something to celebrate. But not, apparently, for the political and media elites atop our alleged Western democracies.
These elitists are terrified of the prospect of billions of people refusing to do as they are told and instead voting as they see fit. ‘Democracy’ is all very well so long as it suits the interests of those with the kratos; but if the demos take democracy too literally seeks to assert their will, that’s an entirely different matter. As one former member of President Barack Obama’s administration put it, they believe that you can have “too much of a good thing” and that Western society “might be a healthier democracy if it were a slightly less democratic one.” For some liberals in high places these days it seems that, where popular democracy is concerned, less really could be more.
It should now be clear that, yes, democracy is indeed under threat in 2024. But the danger to European democracy comes from above, not below. The Brussels elites are determined to hold back the democratic tide.
That’s why they have spent years politically threatening and financially blackmailing democratically-elected conservative governments in Hungary and Poland, hiding behind talk of the ‘rule of law’ to disguise the attempt to enforce the rule of unelected judges and bureaucrats. Having played their part in installing EU lackey Donald Tusk as Poland’s prime minister, and turned a blind eye to the new regime’s purge of its political opponents, Brussels officials are now making plans to wreak havoc on the Hungarian economy in order to bring its prime minister Viktor Orbán to heel; and if that fails, to strip Hungary (and any other dissident nation) of its democratic right to vote ‘no’ in European Council meetings. In the eyes of the high priests of EU conformism, Mr. Orban has committed the cardinal sin of repeatedly winning elections on a platform of ‘illiberal democracy’ that refuses to accept mass migration at Hungary’s borders or LGBTQ ideology in its schools.”
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Germany’s far-right AfD is soaring. Can a ban stop it? - politico
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Orbán’s victory at the EU summit - Remix
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