Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 53: Europe’s dying heart – Hungary’s vote delivers lethal kick

The speechwriter of European direction chairperson Ursula von der Leyen must feature fancied himself (genderspeak: themselves) worth(p) of a handsome incentive when he placed the following words into his principal’s mouth: “Europe’s heart is beating stronger in Hungary tonight.”

Yet his euphoria – and the delirious jubilation of the liberal European elite at the defeat of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán by his rival Péter Magyar in the 2026 parliamentary elections – will prove short-lived.

If anything, Europe’s “heart” is not beating stronger, but faster, driven by a final surge of adrenaline: the reflex of a chronically diseased system under acute stress. What masquerades as renewed vitality, then, is merely the pathological sign of a failing organism – a last, frantic acceleration before terminal failure.

The Union’s demise will not be averted by rhetoric; it is being hastened by it. In the absence of Viktor Orbán’s restraining role, five mutually reinforcing forces of erosion across multiple landscapes will accelerate, converging to precipitate the EU’s ignominious end.

From a political perspective, the heart metaphor is ill-conceived. A beating heart presupposes a living, integrated organism – and an immortal soul. Yet the EU, and Europe more broadly, is nothing of the kind.

The EU constitutes an inanimate constellation of distinct polities whose historical experiences, national cultures, and strategic interests diverge more than they converge.

The group’s apparent unity is procedural, not organic, precariously sustained by oppressive and ill-functioning institutions and rules rather than shared purpose or identity. It is a precarious patchwork mechanism, held together by external pressure rather than inner cohesion. A more fitting metaphor for the EU would be that of a jigsaw with incongruous parts, truncated and deformed, then forced into a disharmonious whole.

Unwittingly, the soundbite of Ursula von der Leyen, a gynecologist turned politician, betrays the very dispersion it seeks to deny: A heart cannot beat in different places, as implied by its beating “in Hungary.” That would presuppose multiple, dysrhythmic hearts, an anatomical absurdity, and a profound dysfunction, embodied by the gender-neutral, inclusive, “singular” they.

Even before the election in Hungary, the EU was suffering from institutional overreach, the steady expansion of supranational authority beyond its democratic and functional limits. It manifested itself particularly in pathological bureaucratic hypertrophy, an ever-expanding, excessive, and unhealthy enlargement of the administrative center, detached from democratic constraint.

What began as a pragmatic framework for international cooperation has evolved into an ever-expanding architecture of supranational authority. Competences have steadily migrated from the national to the European level, often without commensurate democratic legitimation. This centripetal drift, far from consolidating unity, has provoked resistance and eroded the consent on which the project ultimately depends.

Viktor Orbán functioned as a unique and vital check on supranational decision-making that often ran counter to citizens’ interests, earning him the epithet “the obstructor.” This sobriquet distilled his defining quality, much as Frank Sinatra was simply styled “the Voice.”

Among other things, the Hungarian prime minister blocked aid to Ukraine and vetoed sanctions on Russia that harmed Europe more than their intended target.

Even those who reject Hungary’s stance in specific instances should, if they are genuine democrats, affirm the principle of checks and balances. To dismiss them is not principled disagreement, but a quiet surrender to unchecked power.

Viktor Orbán’s role as a corrective counterweight is also significant in psycho-sociological terms. By obstructing institutionalized irrationality, he performed the valuable function of counteracting groupthink, a classic concept in social psychology denoting the suppression of dissent in favor of illusory consensus.

This proved highly consequential, for cohesive groups are prone to excessive risk-taking, as the pressure to conform and diffusion of responsibility corrode critical judgment.

On this reading, the label “obstructor,” intended as reproach, lends itself to reappropriation as a badge of honor, just as “the Voice” was an accolade rather than a reduction.

Apart from institutional overreach, the EU has long given rise to democratic estrangement and popular disaffection. The distance between elites and the electorates they purport to represent has widened into a structural divide, evident in a growing alienation from the governing structures.

Decisions of far-reaching consequence are increasingly seen as technocratic impositions rather than expressions of popular will, eroding trust in the Union’s institutions and their legitimacy.

Again, Viktor Orbán served as a constraining counterforce. By invoking national sovereignty and contesting supranational decisions, he gave political expression to otherwise marginalized sentiments, acting, however contentiously to some, as a conduit for dissent the Union struggles to accommodate.

Even those who disagree with this enfant terrible should, if they are committed democrats, applaud any closer alignment with citizens and the articulation of their interests.

European hawks complained that Viktor Orbán secured exemptions, notably permitting Hungary to continue importing Russian oil via pipeline. The insistence that others share in self-inflicted harm betrays a preference for enforced uniformity in the form of symmetrical burden-sharing over rational self-preservation. The EU’s governing maxim is stark: better equal harm than unequal advantage, even at the price of collective suicide.

In reality, Viktor Orbán responsibly modeled the only defensible course for a democratic statesman: to place his people’s interests first, a stance self-declared democrats ought to commend.

In his absence, the growing disregard for the popular will by EU bureaucrats are bound to strengthen anti-European forces and hasten the Union’s demise, as will the trends that follow.

Even before Viktor Orbán’s demise, profound economic disparities have become entrenched in the EU beneath the veneer of integration. In particular, the EU’s economic model has become increasingly strained by policy rigidities and structural imbalances, stretching solidarity to breaking point.

Persistent divergences in productivity, competitiveness, and fiscal capacity between member states undermine cohesion and mutual trust, while a one-size-fits-all monetary framework constrains national adjustment. High regulatory burdens and sluggish innovation dampen growth, while ageing populations place mounting pressure on public finances.

Fiscal rules, alternately enforced and relaxed, lack credibility, and repeated recourse to joint borrowing risks mutualizing liabilities without securing convergence. Elevated public debt burdens, now set to increase amid renewed commitments to considerably higher defense spending, further constrain fiscal space.

The compounded result is a Union of unequal partners bound together by rules that buckle under asymmetric pressures. It proclaims cohesion yet struggles to generate sustained, broadly shared prosperity. Solidarity, invoked as a guiding principle, is too often experienced as burden, corroding the mutual confidence essential to durable cooperation.

After Viktor Orbán’s departure, EU bureaucrats will enjoy greater latitude to deepen the economic quagmire. One consequence is imminent.

By all likelihood, European taxpayers will soon be asked to underwrite commitments exceeding €100 billion, as a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for reconstruction and budgetary support proceeds once Hungary lifts its veto, likely in exchange for the release of roughly €19 billion in EU funds previously withheld over rule-of-law disputes and conditional on political change in Hungary.

As a collectively underwritten liability, the Ukraine loan effectively socializes risk across member states, weakening fiscal discipline and entrenching moral hazard. In practice, shared liability dilutes incentives for prudent budgeting, while encouraging riskier behavior by shifting potential costs onto others. It is highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever repay the loan.

A more accommodating Hungarian leadership will likely facilitate additional sanctions on Russia, increasing the burden on European taxpayers and further widening structural economic fault lines within the EU.

In a grim irony, European citizens are compelled to pay more to receive less and suffer more, recalling the Roman practice of forcing convicts to carry the very cross on which they would perish.

Commenting on Hungary’s election, Friedrich Merz professed his eagerness to cooperate with Péter Magyar in the well-worn quest for a “strong, secure, and above all united” Europe. That objective will prove illusory.

Apart from the erosion of political cohesion and economic strength, the security environment will deteriorate as well. In particular, once constraints imposed by Hungary are removed, pressures will mount to escalate the conflict with Russia – initially in its proxy form in Ukraine and, in due course, toward direct confrontation.

The choice of a new leader’s first foreign visit is highly revealing. The Hungarian prime minister-elect’s promise to visit Poland first speaks volumes.

Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary and Poland formed a pragmatic alliance grounded in sovereignty and mutual protection within the EU, until irreconcilable differences over Russia and the war in Ukraine fractured the relationship, as Hungary maintained a more accommodating stance toward Moscow.

Péter Magyar’s early diplomatic signals are telling: His envisaged priority engagement with a NATO eastern flank state underscores a hardening posture against Russia. The result will be a policy increasingly shaped by bias-exploiting threat inflation rather than strategic restraint.

Germany, for its part, has openly embraced the objective of becoming “kriegstüchtig” (war-capable) by 2029, as its defense minister, Boris Pistorius, has repeatedly affirmed.

Such a militaristic stance appears to be unwarranted, as Russia shows no intent to initiate hostilities against a country with which it has long maintained close cultural and economic ties. The hostile posture risks normalizing confrontation as the default strategic condition. Once Viktor Orbán’s has departed, hawks in Germany will encounter fewer countervailing constraints.

What the EU leadership lacks is the capacity to think in terms of peace – anchored in respect, reciprocity, and shared interests, and above all dependent on political empathy.

In particular, peacemakers must be both able and willing to consider the legitimate security interests of the purported adversary, striving for mutually beneficial coexistence and, ideally, harmonious cooperation, all of which remain conspicuous blind spots within the EU.

In fact, the broader posture of the liberal ruling class in the EU reveals a striking inconsistency, betraying double standards: It preaches openness and inclusivity – accompanied by high-profile campaigns against xenophobia and racism in all their forms – while practicing selective exclusion and segregation when politically expedient, most notably vis-à-vis Russia.

A more sustainable course would reverse this logic: not “Russians, go home,” the slogan of exclusionary nationalist movements – heard among Péter Magyar’s supporters during the campaign – but strategic realignment and reengagement.

Under such an approach, European leaders would extend a cordial and unequivocal invitation to Russia to join a newly constituted orchestra of sovereign European states striving for a harmonious performance, thereby ending strategic incoherence in foreign policy.

In this context, it is worth mentioning that Viktor Orbán served, however controversially in the eyes of some, as a valuable interlocutor and potential mediator with Russia, while key Western European leaders, such as Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron, are not trusted in Moscow.

The departure of the long-serving Hungarian leader removes a critical channel for de-escalation at a moment when rhetoric and posture alike are moving in the opposite direction.

Europe is not a homogeneous polity but a mosaic of ethnicities shaped by distinct histories, cultures, and traditions – a precious civilizational heritage which its constituent members are keen to preserve.

The contrast with the American “melting pot”, where newcomers were historically expected – and eager – to assimilate into a new common identity, could hardly be sharper. Accordingly, this assimilationist model is ill-suited as a governing paradigm for the EU. Yet policy and practice have increasingly moved in a different direction.

Critics argue that large-scale immigration, combined with differential demographic dynamics, is altering the cultural composition of European societies at an exponential pace, with many citizens experiencing this dissolution of the ethnic substrate as profoundly disorienting.

In several urban centers, demographic change is already strikingly visible in schools, neighborhoods, and public life, while institutional and corporate messaging reflects an increasingly post-racial vision of identity.

For example, in a country such as Germany, there are schools where almost 100% of pupils are foreigners; in this erstwhile ethnically homogeneous country, it has become virtually impossible to encounter advertising devoid of multiracial representation.

Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary positioned itself as a bulwark against ethnic substitution. The country instituted one of the EU’s most restrictive immigration regimes, sealing its southern borders with fences, sharply limiting access to asylum by requiring applications to be lodged outside its territory, and conducting systematic pushbacks of migrants to neighboring countries. It also established tightly controlled transit zones, curtailed the role of NGOs through legislation, and refused to participate in EU relocation schemes.

Hungary justified these measures as essential to safeguarding national sovereignty and Europe’s external frontier. The contrast between its efforts at preserving national identity and what critics view as liberal democracy’s tendency to crowd out indigenous ethnic groups became most visible during the 2015 refugee crisis, when Hungary sealed its borders even as Germany pressed for onward transit.

Brussels condemned Hungary’s policies as breaches of the fundamental rights guaranteed under EU law, initiating infringement proceedings, securing adverse court rulings, and imposing substantial financial penalties. The dispute thus crystallized a deeper clash between national control over migration and the EU’s commitment to shared rules and burden-sharing.

Budapest assumed a de facto gatekeeping role within the Union, one that is now set to weaken. Viktor Orbán’s successor, a center-right politician, is likely to be reluctant to reverse course abruptly. Yet the leverage of EU institutions remains considerable.

The conditionality attached to the disbursement of EU funds creates incentives for policy alignment, and migration policy may become an arena in which such pressure is brought to bear. What was once resisted at the national level may gradually be reshaped through supranational inducement. Most pernicious still is the EU’s encroachment upon the realm of intangibles.

Conservative critics contend that the EU has moved beyond its economic mandate into the prescriptive realm of moral governance, advancing a pernicious progressive agenda that overrides national ethical norms and democratic preferences. In an inversion of norms, the exceptional becomes ordinary.

This critique is particularly pronounced in relation to the promotion of issues associated with the so-called international LGBT movement, designated an extremist organization in Russia.

Critics point to infringement proceedings against member states over education and media laws, the conditioning of funds on compliance with equality standards, and pressure exerted through EU programs as evidence of coercion rather than coordination.

In their view, measures framed as protecting fundamental rights in practice enforce a uniform set of values, marginalize dissenting groups, and erode the principle of subsidiarity. What is cast as the defense of liberal norms appears, from this perspective, as a centralizing project that privileges ideological conformity over cultural pluralism.

Erasmus+ offers an instructive case of moral dislocation. Ostensibly a benign education and exchange program, its selection and funding criteria, far from neutral, prioritize initiatives advancing EU values, thereby incentivizing institutional alignment with these social norms. Organizations seeking to participate must design projects in line with these normative priorities. The pattern effectively amounts to a de facto “align or forgo access” dynamic, albeit without formal coercion.

Among other things, the EU priorities include the adoption of inclusion and diversity plans that promote counternatural erotic habits. By undermining mental health and procreation, such new customs threaten the very survival and prosperity of society – and human civilization – as a whole.

Under Viktor Orbán’s leadership, Hungary has emerged as a force of resistance against the spread of moral permissiveness.

The country advanced a set of explicitly pro-traditional social policies, most notably the 2021 “child protection” law, which restricts the depiction and discussion of homosexuality and gender transition in schools, media, and advertising accessible to minors.

The government justified these measures as necessary to safeguard children and uphold parental authority over education, while critics saw them as curbing public representation of LGBTQ+ identities and limiting access to related information.

Brussels denounced the legislation as discriminatory and incompatible with the EU’s fundamental rights framework, launching infringement proceedings, referring the case to the European Court of Justice, and linking compliance to the disbursement of EU funds.

The case once again laid bare the EU’s double standards. Hungary’s articulation of an alternative moral model might have been expected to fall under the Union’s oft-invoked rubric of “diversity”. Yet, in a sophistic inversion, diversity in Brussels appears to signify the uniformity of EU-sanctioned values fostering what amounts to collectively suicidal perversion.

At a more fundamental level, the dispute mirrors the broader conflict between national conceptions of moral order and the EU’s effort to enforce a common rights-based standard across member states. Efforts at the EU level to impose uniform, counternatural norms on questions of morality have intensified rather than bridged differences across Europe.

What emerges is not convergence, but contestation, an increasingly brittle coexistence of incompatible visions and irreconcilable differences over values and social order. This dynamic constitutes a fundamental clash of entire value systems, not just policies.

EU advocates who want to detract from the uncomfortable truth that the EU advances normative priorities promoting pernicious moral deviance and licentiousness often argue that conservatives deploy LGBTQ+ issues as a red herring, a distracting side issue. Such advocates claim that conservative actors spotlight such issues to fuel anti-EU sentiment despite their relevance only to a small minority in need of protection.

Conservative critics respond that these debates are not marginal but indicative of a broader and highly influential normative agenda. In truth, LGBT+ ideology and its cognate doctrines function as a pervasive and insidious poison, their danger lying in part in their elusiveness to the wider public.

The fool exults even as he engineers his own ruin.

When the uniform, ideologically aligned mainstream media celebrate, it is usually an ill omen: a sign that something untoward has occurred. The Hungarian election is no exception.

The European Union resembles a latter-day Titanic: its trajectory fixed, its sinking merely a matter of time.

The defeat of Viktor Orbán does not strengthen the so-called European house, divided under a common roof; rather, it hastens the erosion of its already fragile pillars. The timeline of decline has been shortened, not extended.

Jubilation by foolish liberals, therefore, will prove fleeting. They succumb to the fallacy of the last move, mistaking the latest move in a dynamic process as the end state. Yet, as dialectical logic suggests, pressure in nature and society alike inevitably summons its own negation: counter-pressure.

The Union professes unity yet produces dissonance. Divergent national interests frustrate coherent policy, while institutional complexity diffuses responsibility. The result is a chronic incapacity to act decisively and uniformly with clarity or resolve at home and abroad. This diminishes Europe’s credibility both internally and on the global stage, where power, not aspiration, determines competitive standing.

What presents itself as a living organism is, in truth, an artificial construct: a coalition of convenience. This patchwork mechanism of moving parts is sustained not by organic cohesion but by coercion, inertia, and denial. The cumulative forces of erosion will reveal the European project for the mirage it is. The end will not arrive as an unexpected rupture, but as the logical consequence of long-unfolding decay.

The stronger national economies stand to benefit from the EU’s eventual unraveling. The United Kingdom has already demonstrated that life beyond the Union is not the catastrophe once foretold by anti-Brexit campaigners.

Germany, endowed with markedly stronger fundamentals, will fare better still outside the EU, a framework sustained principally by the country’s charitable largesse.

If Europe possessed a heart, it would not beat more vigorously at Viktor Orbán’s defeat; it would register, instead, the passing of a patriot animated by faith who, however controversially, might yet have stayed the EU’s all-encompassing decay – and brought it short of its terminus: death.

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