dumnezero

Call it the real nuclear option for bringing Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to heel — but also call it a risky thought experiment. Tom Theuns of Leiden University wants to empower the EU to sever ties with a rogue member state like Hungary, where Orbán has fashioned an autocracy and set about cultivating the EU’s strategic rivals. Introducing an expulsion threat could push EU autocrats like Orbán to show more respect for rule of law and democracy, says Tom, while the current lack of any such mechanism has instead emboldened them. For now, Tom’s ideas still are legally theoretical, not to mention politically delicate. In his new book, Protecting Democracy in Europe, Tom envisages democratic states each leaving the EU and then immediately re-founding the Union — an EU 2.0 — minus any autocratic states. More than two dozen countries would need to coordinate national consents in advance, using the same EU treaty article that Britain used in Brexit. But if all doesn’t go to plan — think obdurate legislators, sudden calls for referendums, or a even French demand for more subsidies — the exercise could usher in the kind of political warfare that sinks the EU for good. Tom’s goal is, above all, to end what he calls fatalistic and defeatist thinking — that the EU must remain stuck in perpetuity with Orbán’s brand of kleptocratic illiberalism. “Supranational union with an autocratic state is a choice,” insists Tom. “EU member states can also choose to disengage.” In this episode Tom also reflects on what happened a quarter-century ago, when European authorities failed to block Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) from government, to elucidate a pattern of insufficient EU responses in the Hungarian context.

PSA: Simion is as good at lying as Trump is, and his party is full of grifters, scammers and profoundly ignorant fools.

The US wants central and eastern European countries to join its path of “energy freedom” instead of following the wider region’s transition to a net zero economy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in Warsaw.

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“Central Europe faces a time for choosing,” Wright told conference participants. “We warmly welcome you to join us on Team Energy Freedom and Prosperity for Citizens.”

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“In fact, the clarion conclusion from economic studies of climate change is that net zero 2050 is absolutely the wrong goal,” he said. “Not only is it unachievable, but the blind pursuit of it will cause, is causing far more human damage than climate change itself.”

President Trump has repeatedly called on Europe to buy more American energy products if the bloc wants to avoid tariffs.

Extra context:

Climate Crisis Deniers Explain Why They Like U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright - DeSmog

Comic story by Eleri Harris

Contents

00:00 – Smokin’ hot Europeans

00:24 – State of the European Climate Report

01:15 - Headlines

02:27 – Extremes

04:16 – Polar impacts

07:50 – Global context

08:54 – Future change

10:02 - What to do

10:56 - Thanks

2024 was the world’s hottest year on record, and Europe is the continent warming the fastest. Extreme events ravaged Europe last year, including floods, wildfires and storms that claimed hundreds of lives and impacted many thousands more.

To find out more, I spoke to Julien Nicolas, a co-author of the European State of the Climate Report, a huge undertaking that was put together by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Meteorological Organisation.

by Benn Jordan

On 19 March 2025, Erik Møse, chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, updated the Human Rights Council on the findings of the Commission's latest report, which found that Russian authorities have committed enforced disappearances of civilians in the areas of Ukraine that they control and these are crimes against humanity.