Secession or Submission: Brussels Steps Up the Pressure

American  Thinker 

Europe’s deepening economic crisis and a rising conservative front in Eastern Europe are putting the European Union under pressure. Brussels is responding repressively to this growing strain, stepping onto the thin ice of censorship and thought control. This policy forces submission or encourages secessionist tendencies.

Two well-documented political flashpoints best illustrate the EU Commission’s shift in mindset. On one hand, the Brexit process, sabotaged by Brussels and London, and on the other, the ongoing conflict with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

Orbán has built a political model on resisting open-border policies, deliberate demographic shifts, and the escalating Ukraine conflict. His message is clear: neither a European unitary state nor further concentration of power in the hands of Brussels’ bureaucracy will happen under him. Period.

Orbán insists on national sovereignty and takes the bad press from Brussels, Berlin, and Paris in stride, along with the EU Commission’s recurring sanctions for his unilateral approach to migration policy (paid, of course, by taxpayers).

Over the years, Orbán has become the personified threat of secession in the face of Brussels’ grand ambitions -- a national-conservative “Gallic village” with psychological contagion potential for other nations.

Eastern European Résistance

Where globalist ideology inflates transgender claims morally and stages them in the media to achieve what socialists have always sought -- the devaluation of the traditional bourgeois family -- Orbán puts his family policy defenses in the way. Tax incentives for mothers signal clear priorities: in Hungary, the family is the nucleus of society. It is the civilizational powerhouse, a haven of social security, and a formative space for individuals across generations -- where the state has no business.

A debate like Germany’s spousal splitting would be unthinkable in today’s Hungarian political climate -- it would be political suicide with devastating electoral consequences. Looking at recent elections in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, a solid front has emerged around Orbán’s conservative agenda against Brussels’ increasingly invasive, centralist dirigisme -- a phenomenon that cannot simply be erased.

Sanctions such as Ukraine’s sabotage of the Russian Druzhba pipeline (recalling Nord Stream), which supplied energy to Hungary’s border regions, are likely to play into Hungary’s resistance. The societal immune system simply works better there than in Germany or France. 

Brexit as Punishment

Across the Channel, in June 2016, the UK declared its exit from the EU -- a sovereign act that dealt a significant blow to Euro-expansionism. We witnessed a morally condemned secession executed by the sovereign itself; in short, incompatible with Brussels’ claim to omnipotence.

From the start, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his continental allies planned to reframe this political step as a punitive action against a defiant people. Their strategy: to demonstrate that life outside the EU is possible, even necessary. The economic decline of the UK shows that London has stayed the course.

Subsequently, London delayed the relatively straightforward trade deal with the EU. A potential free-trade model was simply postponed. At the same time, the City of London used the situation to keep the pound undervalued, creating growing inflationary pressure on the population.

Always in the grotesque pose of the innocent victim: Brussels. Hands washed in moral righteousness, pathetically pointing to the “European peace project” and the sacred fight against man-made climate change. And who refuses to dance around the golden calf of CO2 in Europe? Correct: Orbán and his followers.

Brussels has always erected a moralistic cordon sanitaire around itself, a protective wall behind which real, hard-nosed geopolitical policymaking is hidden.

Rising Repression

We won’t speculate here on Brussels’ dubious role in the annulled Romanian elections of recent weeks. But the annulment of a somewhat pro-Russian candidate in the country hosting Europe’s largest NATO base raises dark suspicions, reinforced by the EU’s “proactive” role in Moldova’s elections. Resistance emerges, and Brussels responds with its proverbial heavy artillery, regardless of collateral damage or eroding reputation.

This ideological pattern also shapes the Ukraine conflict, which Brussels and London have portrayed under maximal media (and troop) display as a looming Russian invasion of the entire continent. The media-induced fear of Russia paves the way for war bonds or Eurobonds -- the next pillar of a European crony economy after the failed green art economy.

Now German industry’s drones and tanks are supposed to bring fire to the battlefield. At Rheinmetall and other manufacturers, champagne corks have been popping for weeks.

Amid growing resistance in Europe to the climate cult and the war in Ukraine, Brussels is using media manipulation. Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission is trying to dominate narratives in chaotic, unregulated social networks -- wielding laws like the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act as blunt instruments, a crude and unwise approach exposing its hostility to individual freedoms.

Defiant actors like Elon Musk’s platform X now feel Brussels’ wrath directly. The proposed chat-control system brings the EU against bastions of free speech, fully aware that digital opposition is growing there.

Open Civilizational Breach

This is a direct assault on Europe’s culture of freedom and the civilizational achievements of individual liberty and sovereignty. Brussels is attempting to break the privacy of correspondence and subjugate the last spaces of civic resistance.

It is telling that the Americans under President Trump and VP J.D. Vance have taken notice, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructing diplomats to document abusive censorship tendencies within the EU. Never before has it been so clear that Americans are defending freedom, dignity, sovereignty, and civilization.

Pressure on European civil society is growing, as the U.S. conflict forces Brussels into maximal action. With the introduction of digital identity in England or the upcoming digital euro, the window for meaningful resistance is closing.

Political Explosives

The role CDU will play after its recent stance against private chat-control remains uncertain. But it would not be surprising if Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as in the automotive debate, falls before Brussels’ green centralist god.

Orbán and his Eastern European allies face a tough defensive battle. The continent’s upcoming flood of new sovereign credit in the trillions will trigger another round of aggressive propaganda and coordinated NGO campaigns against national freedom movements.

At the same time, the long-prepaid subsidy streams will continue to wash away any criticism of the green destruction agenda by industry and unions. A convergence of political-national and civil opposition against Brussels’ invasive agenda seems unlikely at present.