Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wording was awkward, but I think the meaning is clear. "...in the EU--the union of countries primarily located in a continent that..." ? And what am I missing? They were dictators of Spain and Greece respectively. There are millions of people who can remember their rule alive in those EU countries today. What changed in the last fifty years to make a recurrence impossible? Turkey narrowly missed joining, and it's…
The threat of being suspended from the EU and the (potential) economic damage from that? You can’t be a dictatorship and keep the same rights in the union, as per the Copenhagen criteria and Article 7. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria#Political_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_7_of_the_Treaty_on_Eur...
Spain just crushed a political movement trying to organise a referendum through force. It arrested the leaders and the rest of the EU is helping them catch the ones that fled. They call it a rebellion and state that Catalonia can never be independent.
Not an Article 7 violation, apparently. According to the EU it's merely an internal matter.
Hungary elects a government by a wide margin, it's a popular government, and the government reflects its people's disagreement with EU policies that aren't in any treaties and weren't in anything Hungary previously agreed to. This is apparently a violation of "rule of law" and "not democracy".
The EU's definition of democracy is anything that helps the EU, simple as that.