Another Domino Falls in the EU’s War on National Sovereignty

Another country has succumbed to the European Union’s war on national sovereignty in what has become systematic lawfare campaigns to impose Brussels’ progressive ideology on a European continent marked by populist frustration with the EU’s failed policies. Those policies have led to economic stagnation, high unemployment, soaring migrant crime, and the gradual erosion of citizens’ basic political and religious rights.

Last week, Hungary’s president was effectively forced from office after recently-elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s parliamentary supermajority amended Hungary’s constitution to terminate President Tamás Sulyok’s mandate years before its scheduled expiration.

Critics have argued that the change was a targeted political measure directed at an officeholder closely associated with the previous conservative government of Viktor Orban. Sulyok warned that removing elected officials through tailor-made amendments sets a dangerous precedent and weakens respect for fixed terms of office, separation of powers, and constitutional continuity. Supporters called the move democratic renewal; opponents viewed it as a crackdown on conservative institutional influence.

Magyar’s hollowing out of Hungary’s democratic institutions is a replay of Poland, where leftist Prime Minister Donald Tusk has sought to jail prominent members of his conservative opposition through criminal investigations, parliamentary commissions, prosecutions of former ministers, and legal proceedings against senior Law and Justice (PiS) figures.

Tusk’s government argues these actions are necessary to address alleged abuses committed during PiS’s years in power. PiS leaders characterize the campaign as politically motivated lawfare designed to weaken the conservative opposition, remove leading rivals from public life, and consolidate the governing coalition’s hold on power.

In both countries, conservative governments rejected the European Union’s efforts to impose its weak immigration policies, overzealous climate agendas, and anti-Christian LGBT extremism. In response, Brussels blocked billions in development funds in what amounted to economic punishment for implementing policies for which they had been duly elected.  

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In France, anti-EU populist Marine Le Pen was banned from holding elected office following her conviction for misuse of European Parliament funds. Although the ban was ultimately removed in a recent legal decision, her supporters accuse the French establishment of misusing the courts to sideline the country’s most prominent conservative-nationalist politician before the 2027 presidential election. The prosecution reinforced public perceptions of a double standard in the legal treatment of anti-establishment political movements.

In Germany, the Network Enforcement Act provides the state with a powerful political weapon to censor social media by threatening fines of up to over $50 million on tech companies for allowing “illegal content” that is subjectively labeled by its own regulators. The act effectively contracts out to corporations the role of policing speech.

The ruling parties in France and Germany are the core of EU authority. Losing at home to populist parties would undercut the EU’s power grab at the expense of national sovereignty and result in the loss of personal power and privileges.

Last year, the EU pressured Romania’s incumbent government to cancel its presidential elections after an anti-Brussels candidate looked poised to win. Election results were canceled based on unverified claims of Russian interference. The cancellation represented the worst foreign interference in European elections since the immediate post-World War II era.

The impact on the United States is significant, as the EU increasingly uses the same lawfare tactics to undermine American investments and influence. The EU’s Digital Services Act threatens to control speech—speech that leftist EU bureaucrats do not like. The EU’s war on American tech has resulted in $7 billion in fines over the last two years. Apple, Meta, Google, and Elon Musk’s X have all found themselves entangled in Brussels’ web of ideological coercion.

The Democracy Shield represents Brussels’ most ambitious attempt yet to institutionalize political narrative management across Europe. Presented as a defense against disinformation and foreign interference, the initiative would empower EU institutions, politically aligned nongovernmental organizations, fact-checkers, and “trusted flaggers” to determine what information is amplified, restricted, or labeled misleading. Critics warn that these tools could silence legitimate political dissent and allow Brussels to portray opposition to EU policies as a threat to democracy itself.

Most recently, in the Balkans, Brussels seeks to upend major U.S. energy and tourism projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Albania using the same authoritarian brew of anti-American narratives, mass protests by EU-funded NGOs, threats of economic sanctions by EU officials, and investigations by EU-funded special prosecutors.

Hungary is not an isolated case. From Budapest to Warsaw, Paris to Bucharest, a troubling pattern is emerging: Whenever voters challenge the political consensus favored by Brussels, the rules are rewritten, the courts are activated, and democratic institutions are bent to achieve the desired political outcome. The EU claims to defend democracy, yet it treats elections and national sovereignty as obstacles to be managed rather than principles to be respected.

If Europe continues down this path, the greatest threat to European democracy may not come from populists at all—it may come from the elites determined to stop them.