We can be scared of the future of the EU. As if the crisis management to stabilize the Euro was not difficult enough, the erosion of the democratic substance in Europe and thus its fundamental principles proceeds. Particularly alarming is not the mining of the minimum standards of democracy in key EU member states, but also the incredible lethargy and calmness by which the destruction of the central supporting pillars for a democratic society in the middle of Europe is accompanied.

Democracy is reduced

We can hardly understand that even Hungary, which as current President of the EU Council should play an avant-garde role in defending minimum standards of democracy in the Union, abolishes the basic competences of the Constitutional Court and of the elected governments with two-thirds majority just after legally strangulating the liberty of the press. Here, in the middle of the EU, democracy is being destructed – and how does Europe react? In Brussels, lame and inefficient protests emerge; European brother parties pussyfoot or even address solidarity.

Where is the indignation? 

This scaring political lethargy of the European institutions is also obvious with regard to the abolition of minimum standards of democracy in one of the founding EU member states: Where are the mass protests of European democrats against the intertwining of political and media power in Italy, imbrications which permitted to Berlusconi to stick to leadership – recently under the form of a reduced statutory limitation. And where are the democratic fight and the political pressure of Brussels against corrupted justice and administrations in Rumania and Bulgaria? Dead loss: only compulsory exercises and business as usual in Brussels.

I wonder with what sort of intellectual and moral standards the European Union can continue to be, on the one hand, coward and fallen from within, and, on the other hand, able to represent the colors of European democracy to the authoritarian heads of state in eastern Europe or to Arab potentates. A European Union which negotiates only its economical problems with an inner circle of administrative experts, thus letting down its community of democratic values, cannot provoke the enthusiasm of its population. No, it will be at the mercy of national populists, in Holland, Finland, Hungary, and soon in France.
Contribution by EM Germany President Dieter Spöri in The European (http://www.theeuropean.de/dieter-spoeri/6460-europa-in-der-krise)