MEP Gyöngyösi: Contemporary Merkelism – Why keep funding autocrats?

Jobbik MEP Márton Gyöngyösi’s thoughts via press release: 

Angela Merkel’s chancellorship will likely be written in the history books as a remarkable era in many respects. Beside her many virtues however, the former German premier undoubtedly committed mistakes with long-lasting ramifications, some of which are demonstrated by the Ukraine conflict today. We are suffering the dire consequences of the opportunistic deals she made with autocrats and Europe’s enemies. That’s why we must never make these mistakes again.

Angela Merkel’s foreign and EU policy was often criticized for its extreme pragmatism and overzealous representation of German business interests, sometimes at the expense of values. That’s how Germany, despite being the leading force of the European Union, developed and maintained proverbially special bilateral relations with Moscow, and refrained from even mildly criticizing a corrupt and anti-democratic Member State government as long as it served the business interests of the big German corporations.

This policy may basically have seemed to be right – from the German point of view, that is.

They even manufactured the ideological garnishment for their actions:

“yes, yes, Putin and Orbán, they do things that are not quite to our taste, but we must still keep up the communication with them”. We heard it so many times…

Now we can see the result: Putin now uses European money to destroy Ukraine just so he could keep chasing his dreams of the Russian empire. In the meantime, his Hungarian crony Orbán is still busy building a one-party regime in Hungary, while making spectacular gestures to Moscow and going against all the other EU member states. Just like his mentor, he loves using European money for it.

However, as the EU (excluding Orbán) finally learned to take a united stance against external threats, the community has also made significant efforts to create an internal unity over the past few years.