Analysis
Featured Image
EU leaders meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a summit in Brussels, Belgium, on February 9YouTube/Screenshot

(LifeSiteNews) — The European Council met in Brussels on February 9 for a one day summit, which saw President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine make his first appearance in person at an EU meeting since February 2022.

It was an occasion which highlighted increasing strains in the bloc, within countries and between them, bringing the vaunted values of the EU once more into question. It was a meeting which highlighted the deepening divisions in the West over Ukraine, the economic fallout of the war policy, and of the vision of EU itself as the guarantor of a uniform, supranational managerial state.

This summit was convened to address several urgent matters of increasing concern. Firstly, the extraordinary economic pressures facing Europe following its sanctions on cheap Russian energy. Secondly, the issue of European asylum policy, which eight European countries said was “broken” in a letter to the president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Finally, the summit witnessed a renewed effort from Zelensky to escalate the war in Ukraine, who appeared in person to demand long range weapons granting him the power to strike deep inside Russia.

The Council ended with some predictable rhetoric – that the “European Union will stand by Ukraine with steadfast support for as long as it takes” – despite being dedicated to economic issues in part, completely ignoring the worst economic crisis in Europe since the Second World War and preferring to focus on Net-Zero goals.

The longest section covered the increasingly fraught issue of illegal – now rebranded as “irregular” – migration, to which the EU refuses to provide a definite answer to a crisis which threatens to undermine the integrity of the union itself. It was a meeting which tried its best to avoid the deepening fissures in Europe, to which its own format had contributed in the past.

When this council was convened last year, Zelensky used his video address to lambast the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

“Listen, Viktor, do you know what is happening in Mariupol?” Zelensky said, adding “I want to be open once and for all: you should decide for yourself, who are you for?”

The Zelensky method has relied on this combination of shame and shine. It collapses the war into us against them. Zelensky compels his audience to choose between himself and Putin, hoping to railroad the West into a third world war which seems to him the only realistic hope of avoiding defeat.

Orbán was the only EU leader to refuse to applaud Zelensky’s sales pitch for Armageddon, as this video shows.

In a riposte which has taken a year to ripen, Orbán declared that Hungary is for peace, repeating his commitment to supporting Ukraine with humanitarian aid:

But we will not be sending weapons…

We support an immediate ceasefire to prevent the further loss of human lives. Hungary belongs to the peace camp!

It is clear to Orbán that Zelensky and his photo opportunity friends are committed to prolonging a war that cannot be won. He finds himself not alone in his assessment, as Henry Kissinger, former Ukrainian propaganda chief Alexei Arestovich, and the U.S. Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley have all echoed the position of the RAND Corporation – that a swift negotiated end to the war is the best outcome.

For Orbán to take this sane position is to be vilified as a traitor, since to support the breaking of the nuclear threshold is now identical with European values. It is a strange time when the voices of sanity are smeared as friends of the enemy, yet this is simply another example of the factionalism which is dividing Europe between the reality- and ideology-based communities.

Orbán’s apparent isolation in the EU is not as complete as these images suggest. It is not only the EU’s war policies which are fueling domestic chaos and flirting with international instability. The Schengen agreement, which brought passport-free freedom of movement across the EU, has led to a broken asylum system, where illegal immigrants cannot be prevented from entering countries and cannot be returned home when they do.

This issue topples governments. Illegal migration saw the Sweden Democrats take power, and swept the anti-migration party of Georgia Meloni to power in Italy. Migrant flows are an effective form of regime change in Europe. Ukraine itself may be a further source of sudden shifts in voting patterns towards the preservation of nations.

“Fences protect Europe,” said Orbán to his fellow leaders in a phone call placed a day before the summit. It is a position supported by Malta, Denmark, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Austria, and Slovakia, who have all called upon the European Commission to fix the “broken” asylum system of the EU.

EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen, to whom these remarks were directed, has said in the past she would refuse to fund “barbed wire or walls.”

Public opinion, however, is not on Von der Leyen’s side. She speaks for an elite whose agenda is fatally bound up with the failed attempt to promote regime change in Russia. In a time of migration-fueled riots and crime in Sweden, Britain, Germany, and France her legacy of opposition to any sensible controls is a position typical of a managerial class insulated by privilege from the consequences of their policies.

The regime most likely to change is her own. The future of the EU as a competent and legitimate governing body has been questioned by Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office. He summarized the years of EU harassment and economic bullying of the pro-family government of Hungary as “a difference in worldview” which may be irreconcilable.

“Brussels has long given up basic rule-of-law principles,” Gulyás said. The European Commission, he added, did not provide arguments based on EU law but doled out instructions or political demands. “This poses a massive threat to the European Union.”

Gulyás noted that the EU is incapable of resolving basic differences in outlook between itself and member states. Preferring to impose a uniform Europe which erases national culture and whose constitution makes no mention of God, it can neither accept nor respect any values which differ from its own. Hence, the EU may be “torn apart sooner or later” by the economic and social chaos promoted by its own policies, and its steadfast opposition to a nation whose pro-family agenda of “gestation not immigration” has seen it become the only EU country to reverse declining birth rates.

The mass-scale managerial bureaucracies are anti-life and normophobic, promoting policies of instability and destruction. It is not the representatives of reality who are now being marginalized.

In fact, it is Zelensky himself who seems increasingly isolated. His erratic behaviour is becoming difficult to ignore. In the past few months he has lost his closest aides, his interior ministry to a mysterious fatal accident, and many of his ministers to a purge which has seen them replaced with people much closer to the U.S. government than to himself.

The proceedings of the EU council demonstrate its departure from reality, and its dedication to the promotion of disaster for its citizens. It is steadfast in its opposition to Christian values and the protection and support of the family, preferring an agenda which refuses to acknowledge the damage its own policies have inflicted on the economic, social, and cultural lives of its citizens.

It is no longer a case of Hungary alone versus the EU. One reason for their love of the war in Ukraine is it provides for a distraction from the accelerating mess these leaders have made of their homelands.

With the generals, war planners, and permanent government on their side, it appears the party of peace has some temporary and unlikely allies – for the time being.

21 Comments

    Loading...