If you ever doubted that woke ideologues are heartless hypocrites, look at what the liberal European Union just did to Poland and Hungary, even while those conservative countries were doing their best to accommodate 1.7 million Ukrainian refugees streaming across their borders.
It is hard to believe in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, but the European Parliament voted last week to slap millions of dollars in economic sanctions on the former Communist countries, including freezing pandemic loans, as punishment for refusing to go along with so-called EU “values.”
Their sin is to have conservative populist governments that rejected open border and LGBTQ policies imposed by Brussels. Like Florida and Texas, Poland and Hungary have passed laws banning schools from indoctrinating young children on gender ideology and sexual orientation. And the nations refused to allow illegal migrants from the Middle East overrun their borders after Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally ushered millions of mainly young Muslim men into Europe in 2015 during the Syrian crisis.
“Taxpayers’ money needs to be protected against those who undermine the EU’s values,” the European Parliament declared in a press release on Thursday.
Coming just three weeks before Hungary’s conservative nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban asks voters for a fifth term, the EU intervention is nothing less than election interference, says his chief political adviser, Bolasz Orban (no relation).
Bolasz Orban, 36, says Hungary’s government has been under “ridiculous pressure for years” from Brussels because of its conservative, family-first policies.
“Liberal policies became very popular in some of the Brussels institutions, especially in the European Parliament,” Bolasz Orban said on the phone from Budapest Sunday.
“Those politicians, the majority are leftists, liberal, green progressives. Politically, they are on a different side. The problem is they think about European cooperation from an ideological point of view when it never was originally about ideological homogeneity [but] economic prosperity.”
On border security, energy policy, education and family values, he says, Brussels’ liberal overlords are trying to impose their will on Hungary’s democratically elected government.
“We are warm-heartedly welcoming the Ukrainian refugees,” says Orban, pointing out that Hungary has accepted “about 400,000” refugees since the Russian invasion, a significant burden on a country of 10 million people.
But Hungary wants to retain the right to distinguish between illegal migrants from half a world away and refugees fleeing a war zone next door.
The EU is trying to “destroy all the legal mechanisms which are necessary to secure our borders, the structures we invented, the fence, the physical borders and legal mechanisms … They want to make it impossible [to stop] illegal migrants.”
Similarly, the EU is trying to force Hungary to overturn laws passed by its parliament that ban the indoctrination of children in the finer points of gender fluidity.
See FULL STORY at New York Post.