Von der Leyen Wants a New Brezhnev Doctrine

Once she gets her 'European Army' she can just invade like her mentors the Soviets did and take care of pesky irritants like Orbán.

From The European Conservative

By Rafael Pinto Borges

Like Soviets, the European managerial class think that national sovereignty is obsolete.

What a shambles that was: Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, presented the European Parliament with a fairly conventional, pro forma speech on the priorities of his country’s presidency of the European Council. But Orbán could hardly have known—though he might have suspected—that he had walked into a trap.

Scores of left-wing MEPs left little doubt on what was to come by absurdly heckling Orbán’s speech with a particularly vile rendition of Bella Ciao, the famous hymn of Italy’s anti-fascist Resistance. Not to be outdone, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen then jumped into one of the most extraordinary tirades ever launched by an EU official against the sitting leader of a member state. There was almost nothing she refrained from throwing at Orbán’s surprised face. The Hungarian leader—an undoubted patriot who once risked prison or death for opposing communist rule—was accused of acting as a Trojan horse for Russian and Chinese influence within Europe. He was presented by von der Leyen as disgracing the memory of the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian anti-Soviet revolution by supposedly taking the side of Russia in the Ukrainian conflict. Von der Leyen even attacked him for slowing Hungary’s economic growth and leaving his people worse off.

It was a nauseating charade: after all, the president of the European Commission was—until her recent U-turn on the matter—a longtime supporter of the same anti-nuclear agenda that left the continent so bitterly reliant on Russian gas. Orbán, meanwhile, was all-in on nuclear energy long before the Eurocrats drank the wind-and-solar Kool-Aid: his new Paks II reactors will ensure Hungary’s energy independence and overall competitiveness for decades to come. And, as far as the Ukrainian war is concerned, vdL hardly holds the moral high ground. Rather, she owns a crumbling strategy that everyone, from the commentariat to the politicians, now understands to be a catastrophic failure. She argued that negotiations with Moscow would amount to capitulation and that Ukraine would use Western military and financial aid to throw the Russian army out of its territory. But Orbán warned—in 2022, in 2023, and through 2024—that Russia could not be beaten on the battlefield, that Ukraine lacked the resources for a long conflict, and that any prorogation of diplomacy would only leave Kyiv further enfeebled. Here in October 2024, Putin’s forces are advancing across the front while Britain’s Telegraph candidly admits that “Mr. Zelensky and his government are getting desperate.” Who do you think was right? The hard realist Orbán, or the professional illusion-seller von der Leyen?

Von der Leyen raising the memory of 1956 and the heroic, ill-fated revolution that saw Budapest almost razed by the Warsaw Pact is, of course, particularly rich. If there is any parallel to be established between 1956 and today, it most assuredly isn’t how the president of the Commission imagines it. Indeed, as was the case in 1956, the Hungarian people find themselves besieged by a foreign power speaking the language of interference and coercion; once again, Hungary stands alone against an authoritarian vision of universal progress. Brussels may not have sent tanks to the heart of Budapest; but, then again, Brussels has none at its disposal. Powerlessness, not modesty or an ingrained sense of the worth of national sovereignty, is today the only check on the Eurocrats’ exorbitant ambitions.

Orbán understands this all too well. In his forceful response, he accurately pointed out that von der Leyen’s job, according to the treaties that formally rule the Union, was to uphold them, not to act as a ‘political weapon.’ Yet it is as a political battering ram against Hungarian democracy that the Commission’s President now acts. Her European People’s Party has gone even further, saying that “It is time for Viktor Orbán to go.” The statement will seem oxymoronic for anyone who believes in national democracy. Orbán is the leader of Hungary and Hungary’s people alone should have a say in whether or not he ought to leave. Hungarians have made their thoughts on Orbán abundantly clear by giving him four supermajorities since 2010. In the last of these, two years ago, the prime minister gleefully boasted that his victory was “so big that you could see it from the moon, and certainly from Brussels.”

Seen it may have been, indeed—but it wasn’t accepted. Ever since their defeat in the Brexit referendum, back in 2016, Eurocrats have seen their empire threatened and in decline. Their vengeful intransigence vis-a-vis the immensely reasonable Theresa May was planned as a vaccine that would dissuade further dissenters. Their intolerable, illegal, boundlessly hypocritical siege of Poland’s PiS-led conservative government followed the same playbook.

Like it once was for the Soviets, so too does the European managerial class understand national sovereignty as being ultimately obsolete and in need of demolition. And, for as long as they have to suffer whatever is left of it, the Eurocrats see it as purely conditional, to be tolerated only within the strict limits of silent obedience. They do not see this purely through the lens of ideological preference; it is also, for them, a practical necessity. The communists formulated this very principle in a 1968 Pravda article entitled “Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries,” penned by propagandist Sergei Kovalev.

That was the bedrock of what would later be known internationally as the Brezhnev doctrine. The Soviet leader, who elaborated on the matter weeks after Kovalev published his text in the Communist Party mouthpiece, explained the policy by claiming that, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” Replace “socialism” with anything akin to the ruling liberal consensus, substitute “capitalism” with ‘sovereignty’—or, as the globalist media would rather put it, the ‘far-right’ or ‘illiberalism’—and Kovalev’s words could just as easily have been spoken by von der Leyen in her recent anti-Hungary rant.

In Poland, Brussels was eventually lucky. The conservative government of Mateusz Morawiecki was indeed toppled; the unorthodox challenge to the bloc’s ideological stability was successfully pacified. It is no surprise, then, that the Brussels establishment is feeling bold. Their furious campaign was launched because they taste blood in the water; moreso now that their man in the country, former Orbán loyalist Peter Magyar, is polling well. When the Prime Minister argues that Brussels is plotting his overthrow—that is, in effect, a coup against the government of a member state—he is hardly exaggerating.

Faced with a Commission wholly captured by a hubristic thirst for revanche, Hungarians must be on their guard. Von der Leyen’s desire to act as an enforcer of liberal ideological purity—rather than, as the treaties demand, a guardian of European legality—is not just an imminent threat to that Central European democracy. Instead, it reinforces a precedent of EU institutional activism and foreign interventionism that no proud people could tolerate. Indeed, if the Commission’s idea of European unity is the vassalisation of the continent’s nations, it should not be surprised if, as in 2016, more decide that they are better off getting out, after all.

Pictured: Ursula von der Leyen, President of the unelected European Commission