The Man and Brussels

 

Who dares defy the might of Rome? The question would have faced different answers, at least in analysis, if asked in the third century before or after year 1 or on it, and with . With the might, or so we might say proverbially, of Brussels - a project founded as if an experiment pushing the substance of soft power to its extreme - being a purported heir to Ancient Rome, mighty yet peaceful and democratic (and in practice, as the great Arouet would have put it, neither of those things) 

The great rebel against this cause, and emblematically so against a "European" foreign policy over all else, has for a decade and a half been Viktor Orbán, the all but self-professed devil of the new European order. Among his acolytes, or rather followers, we can count . Should this man fall, will the union stand strong? 

Autocratic yet popular, but now apparently failing in both regards... will the man in black hold the crowd firm in defiance of "Europe" he, and they, both claim to be and rally against? 

With the emergence of Tisza, a party named from a river emblematic in the aphorism that "the Tisza is overflowing", heralding a bountiful harvest and bright future, typically under the banner of a former Orbán scion Peter Magyar (an emblematic name as well), 

Europe is decidedly grander than Brussels, or the common American trope of "You-rope-eons", and it will be incumbent on those in charge to justify their own ostensibly democratic credentials against such rising populist-but-undemocratic waves, rather than ignore and suppress them successfully, in what is more and more apparently a game of whack-a-mole and simultaneously doing deals with the Devil just stoned by your hand, as the managers await the impending tsunami. "It" needs reform, but reform where it is most needed will not be born from the successful toppling of Orbán, but if anything obviated by it. The maintenance of the system, beyond national boundaries and with active putting of lips and fingers against the scale against anomalies of the Orbán kind, including dropping the erstwhile credible result in the Romanian election in favour of a better one, or numerous other interventions of a salient kind often, and often credibly, denounced when Russians are at the helm of them (mirroring, say, physical and military interventions in formally-formerly colonies)