(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La razón frente a la histeria)

Last Wednesday, at the midpoint of the rotating Hungarian presidency of the EU, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to lay out its guiding lines. A debate on the grave problems afflicting the EU — problems that have already produced serious effects of impoverishment, the collapse of industry and agriculture, insecurity and regression in freedoms — proved impossible. The MEPs of the majority of the People’s Party, Socialists, Greens and communists turned the plenary into a grotesque farce.

Some brainless people in the hemicycle went so far as to compare Orbán to Hitler. There followed one intervention after another by deputies of parties with barely any representation, some of whom take part in governments as failed as Olaf Scholz’s German one, lecturing a ruler who has three absolute majorities behind him. Who governs successfully and with ever greater influence abroad. And who has predicted for years the problems that have been accumulating in the European Union because of the policy of greater centralism, greater socialism and greater arrogance which of course, under Ursula von der Leyen, has reached never-before-imagined levels. But no one wanted to hear about the real problems and the feasible solutions.

The day before, Viktor Orbán gave a two-and-a-half-hour press conference such as no European ruler dares to give today. He answered with patience, seriousness and good humor dozens of questions, the vast majority of them vitriolic and hostile and in large part coming from Hungarian media. Anyone who heard the journalists of the Hungarian media put questions of unusual aggressiveness to their prime minister will never again believe the lies of those who say that Orbán has the press under his thumb. What a joke to think of the press conferences at the Moncloa with Sánchez’s three obligatory henchmen facilitating, with their questions, the dissemination of the official lies.

The already very long campaign against Hungary for its firm conservative policy and its rejection of illegal and Muslim immigration has been exacerbated to unheard-of levels of aggressiveness by its disagreements with the way the EU is handling the war in Ukraine. That, no sooner had he assumed the presidency, he undertook on his own initiative a tour to meet with Zelensky first, then Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, generated infinite fury in Brussels and Berlin.

It was then that Orbán began to be treated as if he were an agent of Putin, which is a rigorous falsehood. The Hungarian leader has made clear that those who say Ukraine has to win without negotiating should have given it the weapons to do so much earlier. However, the large Western European countries and especially France and Germany, which egg the Ukrainians on to persevere, have always denied them the weapons to do it successfully. Orbán made clear once again in Strasbourg that if the EU and NATO — of which he declared himself a proud member (fortunately, Hungary was a member of NATO) — want Ukraine to win, they have to change strategy, because the current strategy, which is von der Leyen’s, is, he said, a resounding failure, a losing strategy in which Hungary does not want to take part.

On Wednesday the reputation of a parliament hit rock bottom, a parliament that looked like an assembly of leftist adolescents competing to be the author of the worst rudeness, insult or slur against Orbán. He came to propose changes that are increasingly necessary in European politics and in the way the European Union functions. They are the changes that Europeans are demanding, as was seen clearly from the results of the elections. But he ran into a president of the Commission who from the very first moment treated him as an enemy and who violated all parliamentary decorum, procedures and logic with a grotesque attack on the country that presides over the European Council for these six months. Von der Leyen has grown accustomed to despising and ignoring all the procedures that circumscribe her action and mandate. She arrogates to herself competences she does not have and behaves as the supreme authority in the EU, which she is not, with punitive powers over the nations, which she does not have.

Orbán once again displayed not only the seasoning of the most veteran head of government among the 27 current member states. Also his proverbial humor and how much he enjoys seeing his enemies unhinged. And in the hemicycle it was clearly perceptible how things have changed. It was no longer a small minority that applauded Orbán but a very substantial part of the hemicycle, in which the Patriots group — which includes Fidesz, Orbán’s party, and also Vox — is the third-largest in size. All the forces to the right of the PP were applauding.

Meanwhile, the PP and the left called him every name, accused him of everything and invented a nonexistent Hungary, little short of a concentration camp. The ridicule that so many made of themselves was cringeworthy, and there are many who suffered catastrophic reputational damage among the deputies. And Orbán, with all calm, not only responded with rationality to the cascades of ridiculous sentimentalism, pathetic anger and litanies of lies about Hungary that have become the “official truth” of the Commission. Beyond that, he responded, naming names, to some of the aggressors, in certain cases with refined cruelty, as with Manfred Weber. The latter, head of the European People’s Party — of which Fidesz, Orbán’s party, was a member until a few years ago — had permitted himself a perfectly contemptible intervention against a prime minister with an absolute majority and the overwhelming support of the Hungarian nation for fourteen years.

Lamentable and out of place was the speech of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission who has already forgotten that she is at the service of the rulers of the EU’s member nations and is not the queen of Europe who can devote herself to disparaging and attacking her provincial governors. Von der Leyen has managed to keep the presidency of the Commission by leading the People’s Party to embrace all the losers of the elections and to persist obstinately on the failed course of the past legislature with its green and socialist social engineering. That is what the 188 seats of the European PP, harvested thanks to the general turn to the right across Europe, have been used for.

The parties that have grown the most are in the three groups to the right of the PP and make possible that new possible majority which needs neither the leftists and supposed liberals of Renew nor the Socialists. The alternative majority took shape in the resolution on Venezuela last month in Strasbourg. Since then the People’s Party seems to have entered a hysterical phase, aggravated by the elections in Austria where its people’s party lost 20 seats and the party to its right, the FPÖ — a member of Patriots along with Fidesz and Vox — grew by 26. European politics has entered into motion and the PP is sinking into a dilemma that will soon lead to internal tensions. The confrontation is scheduled between those who want to cooperate with the conservative and national parties to their right, where a viable majority exists, and those who want to continue with the left and the Greens down a path that has already proven to be a generator of poverty, socialism, massive interventionism, a legislative and regulatory jungle, bureaucracy, censorship and, as a reaction, every time there is a national election in a member country, massive growth of the parties to their right.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.