Seventy years after the founding of the forerunner to the European Union, the bloc has done “a lot of damage” to the continent, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) said during a “birthday” event.
Professor Ryszard Legutko, a Polish MEP who serves as head of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, has lambasted the European Parliament in particular as having done “a lot of damage” to the continent during an anniversary event for the EU body held on Tuesday.
While many eurocrats have celebrated the supposed parliament’s role in Europe, Legutko lambasted the organisation as having significantly harmed Europe, saying that it now functioned to solely push the politics of the left.
“[T]he bitter truth is that the European Parliament has done a lot of damage in Europe,” the Law and Justice party politician said amid gasps from the floor of the assembly.
Legutko, a Plato scholar and professor of philosophy, went on to accuse the body of promulgating a false belief that there is a single European “demos” — that is, a common European nation capable of being properly represented in a single shared assembly — and warned that the body had been used as a vehicle to push leftist ideology without democratic accountability.
“It has been sending a false message it represents the European demos. There isn’t, and there won’t be any European demos,” he said, adding that it has “infected Europe with shameless partisanship and the infection became so contagious that it spread to other institutions such as the European Commission.”
“The Parliament has become a political vehicle of the left to impose their monopoly with their fierce intolerance towards any dissenting view,” the MEP continued. “No matter how many times you repeat the word ‘diversity’. Diversity is becoming an extinct species in the European Union and particularly in this chamber.”
“The idea that, say, Spanish, German, French, et cetera, deputies accountable to their own national electorates can dictate something to, shall we say, Hungarian society or any other society to which they cannot be held accountable and which cannot take them to task is simply preposterous,” he added.
“Call it what you will, but democracy it is not.”
While the almost four-minute speech appeared to provoke shock and outrage from a variety of people within the European Parliament building, Legutko’s sentiment that the body had caused harm to Europe while pushing a partisan agenda appears to be shared by a number of his fellow MEPs.
In a statement seen by Breitbart Europe, Dr Gunnar Beck MEP of the Identity and Democracy group also criticised the European Parliament, saying that it is now largely used by the unelected European Commission to push a further centralisation of the bloc.
“We fail at scrutiny,” the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany/AfD) politician remarked.
“The European Parliament is unable to scrutinize [President of the European Commission Ursula] von der Leyen’s text messages to Pfizer’s CEO and is barred from information about the final beneficiaries of the €750 billion [Next Generation EU] bailout,” he alleged.
“Time and again, this [assembly] has proved to be the mouthpiece of the [European] Commission based on the Chinese model and a catalyst for more European integration,” Beck continued. “And now, following the conclusions of the Conference on the Future of Europe, the EU wants to make a final push to give this Parliament full powers of legislative initiative.”
“The result: more EU, more debt, and the abolition of national sovereignty and our national borders,” the German representative warned.
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