Hungary sadly shows us that the EU's defences against one of its own members going rogue are very poor. No doubt a relic of the idealism in which it was founded - we're all nice people, of course we're going to stay that way.

And also the pragmatism of not handing over too much control from national governments to the EU bodies.

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Author is European

https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/stanley-pignal/

Modern European democracy is indeed not immune to fascism (or something resembling it, to stave of a quibble of what actually fascism means). Most prominently Orban in Hungary. Poland was well on their way towards something similar, but luckily a major electoral defeat caused a reversal of this development.

Most European countries do have their own far-right parties (like Le Pen in France, AFD in Germany, etc.). But with multi-winner districts and lots of other parties, they struggle to gain anything resembling a majority that would enable them to rule by fiat. Also politics in most European countries is much more parliament driven, with the prime minister having a lot less power and more oversight than e.g. the US president.

>like re-armament and actually prosecuting politicians for their financial fraud. Not just Le Pen but previously things like Wirecard.

In the end, all those things can be traced to curbing Russia's direct and indirect warfare. Re-armament? Direct Russian threat. Le Pen? Financed by Russia. Marsalek? Part of a Russian spy-network that operated from Austria, where the FPÖ is not just financed by Russia but also has a literal cooperation contract with Putin. Similar story with the AfD in Germany.

The US used to be good at this as well. If they were as close to the war in Ukraine as Europe is, they might still be. But instead they have gone from being the biggest opponent of Russia to one of it's most subverted supporters.

We have plenty of foreign Rasputins to complain about, as well as some local ones.

I'd assume that when a UK publication writes an article like this, it refers to Europe as separate from the UK (esp as the UK is not mentioned).

Do you think the UK just can't access most of the internet that uses SSL encryption? What makes you think encryption is illegal?

"In March 2022, the investigation was dropped due to a lack of public interest in prosecution.In August 2022, the Hamburg Regional Court also ruled that the house search was unlawful and unreasonable."

Freedom doesn't mean that no errors are made but that they are aknowledged as errors.

The responsible politician still gets rediculed for that and isn't praised by his fanbase.

There are hour long videos of US cops shooting unarmed people in their own homes available online if you want to make a "LaNd Of ThE FrEe" dick size contest

The laws are different: "Incitement and defamation laws are far broader in Germany than in the United States, with some European legislation on the books that forbids defaming leaders and makes Holocaust denial a crime.".

You are not allowed hate speech on the internet in a lot of countries. You will be prosecuted for that.

But different to other countries, in a majority of the european countries (turkey, greece are currently problematic) people are not deported, put in jail or camps and forgotten, even without a sentence and hearing.

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