Hungary defied international concern and adopted Friday central bank reforms and other controversial measures that threaten to leave the country isolated just as its economy needs a bailout.
"Nobody can interfere with Hungarian legislative work, there is no one in the world who might tell the elected deputies of the Hungarian people which act to pass and which not to," Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on public radio ahead of the parliamentary session.
The raft of changes to many laws has triggered criticism at home and abroad about the threat to democracy in the former communist EU state where Orban's centre-right Fidesz holds an overwhelming majority in parliament.
You don't have to think Hungary is correct or incorrect to recognize that this is a threat to the whole euro and the EU itself. "National" solutions to fiscal problems cannot be allowed by the EU overlords:
There was perhaps a time when they might have rescued their currency by allowing those countries that should never have been allowed to join in the first place to leave – those countries that have exploited its low interest rates to run up debts they can never repay.
But this could not be allowed because the single currency was never designed as an economic venture. It was a wholly hubristic political gesture, the supreme symbol of the real agenda of the “European project” from its foundation: the desire to lock all the nations of Europe indissolubly together in ever closer political union. For any country to leave the euro would be a defeat too great to be countenanced.
Will Brussels be any more successful than Moscow in resealing the barriers that hold their empire together? Will the EU Brezhnev Doctrine that seems to be firming up be invoked as it was with Greece and Italy which had to accept EU financial oversight?
Or will other European nations decide that they too can defy the center and let their currencies flee the empire?
