(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Solo vale el voto amable)
Former commissioner Thierry Breton is threatening that the European Union will annul any election held in a European country whose results it considers the fruit of outside interference. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it if it is necessary in Germany”, he proclaimed on television with the assurance of a man who has already talked it over with the people who matter and who can make it happen.
What Breton is saying is that the European Union, presumably the European Commission in agreement with the losers of the respective elections, just as has happened in Romania, will annul, using the argument, justification or pretext of foreign interference, any election whose results do not ideologically satisfy Brussels.
The former French commissioner, known for his outbursts against freedom of expression, expressed this absolute contempt for the sovereignty and democratic will of the EU’s member countries while commenting on the debate held on the X network between the owner of that network, Elon Musk, and the candidate for the chancellorship of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). The traditional parties, all of them now on the left of the political spectrum, brand the AfD as far right. When in reality it occupies the entire conservative space left orphaned by the CDU when Angela Merkel took the party of Adenauer and Helmut Kohl to the centre-left, pushing socialists and greens toward ever greater radicalism in their interventionist and social engineering theses, which have brought Germany to its worst economic and social crisis since the Second World War.
Europe’s power elites, among whom Breton plays a very prominent role, are in a panic after the catastrophe of the parties of the social democratic consensus in Austria. There the FPÖ won the election. In an operation applauded from Brussels and contrary to custom, to the rule and to logic, the head of state, Alexander van der Bellen, denied the FPÖ the right to try to form a government and gave it to the second most voted party, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). The ÖVP tried to build a three-party coalition against the FPÖ with the socialists and the left-wing liberals, but after months of negotiations they failed. Among other reasons because the polls showed that the public was responding with ever greater support for the FPÖ. In three months the FPÖ has gone from 28 per cent in the election to 39 per cent in the latest polls. The other parties and the discredited Van der Bellen had to entrust Herbert Kickl’s FPÖ with the task of forming a government.
What in Austria is a nightmare for the elites would in Germany be hell for them. That is why they appear to be announcing already that Europe’s elites are claiming for themselves the right to decide which electoral results suit the future of their peculiar democracy and which do not. And the latter are annulled, with the pretext of outside intervention.
That is exactly what has happened in Romania, where weeks after this scandal, more befitting Nicolás Maduro than Europe, there is not a single piece of evidence that there was Russian interference in the annulled elections. What is more, a week later the legislative elections were held with a result that struck them as acceptable and nobody complained. Why would Russia interfere in the presidential election and not in the legislative one, which forms the government and is far more significant politically?
On the contrary, there is a great deal of information indicating that it was the governing party of Marcel Ciolacu itself, the PSD, the so-called social democratic party that takes in the survivors of the communist apparatus, that was cheering on and promoting the candidate Calin Georgescu on social media, believing that he would be the easiest candidate to beat in the second round. But they underestimated the collapse in the popularity of the prime minister, who believed his passage to the second round was assured and was beaten by the centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi, so that the entire left and the old mafia apparatus were left without a candidate in the second round. That being so, they turned to their old president of the Constitutional Court who, as in Spain, is a lackey of the prime minister, and instructed him to correct his position. And if on the Tuesday after the election he said that everything had been correct, by Friday he had detected enough Russian interference to annul the election. Breton makes it clear that this coup d’état and theft of an election that has taken place in Romania was carried out under the baton of Brussels.
This used to be called “the Brezhnev Doctrine”, as older readers will recall. This direct threat to the popular will of the European nations reveals the true drift of the power of the bureaucracy controlled by those elites. It had already shown itself in other forms of abuse, such as Von der Leyen’s threats ahead of elections, for example in Italy, warning the electorate not to get its vote wrong because it would suffer the consequences. This has happened on a massive scale in other countries, and the interference of Brussels and Berlin in Poland, for example, has been scandalous and brutal. The ideological discrimination coming from the European Commission is already a scandal and a genuine act of brutality. Under Von der Leyen it already behaves openly like an authoritarian government toward its provinces, punishing and rewarding according to ideological submission, when in reality its legal function is that of a mere administrator of the decisions of the European Council formed by the sovereign nations.
It is not known in what capacity Breton speaks this way when he is no longer commissioner of anything. He is officially devoted to his lucrative businesses and connections with the big technology and telecommunications industry, which incredibly were no obstacle to his serving as commissioner for the Internal Market, despite such obvious and obscene conflicts of interest.
Take note that Breton was speaking in the royal plural, or perhaps as the representative of that unelected elite which controls the whole European bureaucracy, feeds the media and regards itself as a sanhedrin that would act as the real government of the European Union above the European Commission. We shall see what happens. For now all we know is that the AfD in Germany keeps rising and the CDU, the People’s Party, keeps falling. A year ago more than 20 points separated them. Today barely eight points separate them. If this continues, with Alternative for Germany showing itself moderate, reasonable and politically intelligent while the CDU remains stubbornly intent on displaying as its highest ambition a return to governing with the socialists or the greens in order to go on doing the same thing that has led to the disaster of insecurity, poverty, precariousness and exhaustion, they may urgently have to look for some outside interference. But if they annul an election in Germany as Breton threatens, they are annulling the European Union. And in one blow.
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.