Bullies in Brussels are bringing about their own downfall
IF WE needed yet another reason why it’s good news that we’ve finally taken a big step towards Brexit then the European Commission provided it this week. In a largely underreported story the EU is taking legal action against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to accept their massive migrant quotas.
These nations quite rightly stuck to their guns and refused to help German Chancellor Merkel’s catastrophic opendoor policy to mainly Muslim migrants – and now the EU wants to take them to the European Court of Justice.
As the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants surged across Central Europe in 2015 it was the bold Hungarians who could see this was bad news and introduced their own strict border controls, halting the flow so that those unable to get to Germany remained in Greece and Italy. Furious Brussels mandarins said this was not acceptable and insisted that Hungary share the refugee burden along with other Eastern European states.
But this was Germany’s fault, they argued. Not once had Frau Merkel asked them their views on the unfolding crisis. Acting as the de facto Empress of Europe, the Chancellor had high-handedly issued a reckless invitation to hundreds of thousands of refugees, assuming that the EU would then sort this out by relocating the immigrants throughout the union.
Brussels jumped to her command and hoped to intimidate Hungary and the other Eastern European countries by hitting them where it hurt most – in the pocket – by threatening to cut off their flow of financial subsidies.
BUT the EU bureaucrats had badly miscalculated. Hungary and Poland are governed by fiercely nationalistic leaders who seized the opportunity to stand up to the EU bullies.
Key to their resistance was a wish to protect their nations against a sudden influx of immigrants with different cultural values. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are all strongly Christian countries. Until a century ago many of their citizens lived under the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire and that was a mighty