(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. The EU Buries Democracy)
The European Commission presided over by Ursula von der Leyen and its colossal propaganda apparatus have announced that it is already intervening directly in the Hungarian elections. They are the same ones who used false—and now fully discredited—evidence to support the annulment of a presidential election in Romania. They are the same ones who have been accused by the United States Congress of massive interference in six elections in various European countries. They are the same ones who pay, with the taxpayer’s money, hundreds of NGOs and media outlets to produce propaganda in favor of the failed policy of this European Commission that has, for many years, been making Europeans ever poorer and ever less free.
Openly and this time without the slightest concealment, Brussels announces that it has activated a tool specially designed to censor, on social media, those opinions and pieces of information that are not to its liking and that do not suit the parties which still hold that dwindling majority formed by the European People’s Party together with the entire left. If it were up to the European Commission, there would never again be clean elections in the European countries—elections in which the different political positions face one another on equal terms.
The European Commission has activated the “rapid response mechanism against disinformation,” which will remain active until one week after the parliamentary elections of April 12. And it will be applied to everything related to these elections. This mechanism—like its fact-checkers, all of them paid by the European Commission, and like the numerous EU-subsidized NGOs, all of the same social-democratic ideological bent—has been created, as have several others, under the pretext of fighting against foreign interference, such as Russian, Chinese, or—now the most combated of all—American interference.
In reality, it is nothing but a mechanism of censorship, intimidation, and propaganda for the self-defense and bunkering of the policy of that social-democratic alliance led by the European People’s Party, with Von der Leyen at its head, together with all the forces of the left. There you have that Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Democracy Shield (EUDS), euphemisms behind which are hidden the mechanisms and instruments that answer to Brussels’s firm determination not to allow conservative ideas to compete on equal terms with the social-democratic ideas of the PP, socialists, greens, communists, or Islamists.
The European Commission and many governments of European countries ruled by the People’s Party and the left—led by the government in Berlin—have declared total political war on Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his conservative party Fidesz, which applies a conservative policy on education and the family, which refuses to accept immigration, and which seeks ways of confronting the war in Ukraine through negotiation rather than through the indefinite financing of Zelensky’s government.
Viktor Orbán is a symbol and Hungary a bulwark of these patriotic conservative forces that oppose the European Union’s policy of centralism, wokeism, mass immigration, destruction of the nation, socialism, and social engineering. Destroying Orbán is today the obsession of Von der Leyen, of Friedrich Merz, of Emmanuel Macron, and of all the principal defenders of that policy. The aim is to confront the ever-stronger minority formed by the parties they call “far right,” which are in fact all the conservatives, patriots, and sovereigntists.
The truth is that this European Commission and the increasingly precarious majority in the European Parliament have spent several years preparing mechanisms and instruments to confront forces against which they have already lost the political battle. That is why they have to resort to administrative and judicial mechanisms, or to this kind of barely disguised ideological struggle that fights the real right with underhanded resources.
That they are perverting and destroying democracy with these mechanisms generated by the Eurocrats is obvious. In practice, through the EU’s “Digital Services Act” (DSA), the platforms are obliged to collaborate with EU-financed “fact-checking” organizations in order to rapidly censor content under the pretext of “fighting against disinformation.”
The elites of Brussels and like-minded governments decide which content Hungarians may or may not access on social media during the campaign, during the vote count, and afterward. Von der Leyen and her troops once again use their tools of influence to interfere in the democratic elections of a sovereign state, with the clear intention of massively influencing the result. With methods now more sophisticated than the mere threats Von der Leyen issued to voters, as happened in the past elections that—despite it all—Giorgia Meloni won. It then became clear that the EU’s loss of credibility makes more forceful instruments necessary than mere propaganda and intimidation financed from Brussels.
The Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Congress recently revealed that the European Commission had interfered in at least eight elections in member states, by forcing censorship on social media. These are the Netherlands (2023 and 2025), France (2024), Ireland (2024 and 2025), Moldova (2024), Slovakia (2023), and the scandalous case of Romania (2024).
Publications, communications, and political statements contrary to the social-democratic, interventionist, and “Koke” policy of the EU were censored during the campaign. Information about the catastrophe of immigration policy, the invasion of illegal immigrants, and its clear connection to the dizzying rise in crime and sexual assaults in European countries was systematically censored.
Now they want to manipulate the Hungarian electorate in order to liquidate the conservative forces under their leader Viktor Orbán and to impose a Brussels puppet candidate who is a member of the People’s Party that comes allied with all the lefts. The aim is to use all these new instruments, generated with the public money of Europeans, to censor Orbán and his Fidesz party and to promote the vote for his stooge Péter Magyar and his party—TISZA—which is indirectly and massively subsidized through NGOs.
The fact is that throughout the EU, governments are preparing for fraudulent operations in the elections as the only method of stopping the national forces of the right. There you have that new form of digital identification imposed by the far-left, criminal government of Pedro Sánchez, which opens the doors to fraud as much as do certain cybernetic counting systems—among them Smartmatic, a device used for fraud in Venezuela whose use has spread to a multitude of countries. In the case of these upcoming Hungarian elections, the European Commission acts as an invading government against the popular will of the Hungarians and their freedom of expression, of information, and of choice. If it were to succeed, it would scarcely be possible ever again to have even moderately clean elections in Europe.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.
