A quarter of an hour after Viktor Orban conceded the Hungarian general election, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, could no longer contain herself and she took to social media. “Hungary has chosen Europe,” she declared: “Europe has always chosen Hungary. A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”
On balance, it is probably indelicate for any European Union official to react in such terms, or at all, to an election in a member state. But on the facts of the matter, she was entirely correct. Over the 16 long years in which Mr Orban ruled Hungary, he became increasingly truculent and stubborn, making many wonder why Hungary didn’t just leave the EU. At home, he eroded Hungary’s relatively young democracy and the freedoms it won after the end of the Cold War by taking over the media and the judiciary.
