Slovakia is defying the EU’s gender diktats

If you have any lingering doubts about the necessity of Brexit, just look at how the EU is currently meddling in Slovakia.

Slovak premier Robert Fico – a left-wing populist – may be a little too chummy with both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for many people’s comfort. He is also, like other Roman Catholics (the largest religious group in Slovakia) and many other Slovaks besides, socially conservative. Last month, he gained the necessary three-fifths supermajority in the Slovak parliament to change the constitution. That constitution now explicitly states that there are only two sexes, that only married heterosexual couples may be considered for adoption, that paid surrogacy is banned, and that parents retain a veto over the sex education their child receives in school.

Fico’s socially conservative constitution has prompted an international outcry from exactly whom you might expect. Amnesty International has slammed the constitutional amendments as inconsistent with ‘the rights of transgender and nonbinary people’. A group of UN apparatchiks is bitterly opposed to allowing parental choice over sex education. The Venice Commission – an oh-so-progressive outgrowth of the Council of Europe – immediately cast doubt on the new constitution’s democratic legitimacy due to an allegedly ‘insufficient involvement of civil society, vulnerable groups and the wider public’.

Even more fascinating is the attitude of the EU. By rights, Brussels shouldn’t be all that concerned – social policy isn’t generally seen as its domain. Furthermore, the EU purports to champion democracy – and whatever you make of Fico’s constitutional amendments, he has undoubtedly carried them out legitimately and democratically. Nonetheless, the European Commission lost no time in tearing a strip off Bratislava. These changes are ‘illegal’, it harrumphed, amid multiple accusations that Slovakia is turning into ‘another Hungary’. Brussels made clear its intentions to stop Slovakia, if necessary, through legal proceedings.

This is all very bizarre. Fico’s changes are popular, impeccably constitutional and largely uncontroversial to vast numbers of people (at least in Catholic-majority Slovakia). The fact that the EU is so determined to quash them suggests some rather ugly truths about the Brussels mindset.

The suits in the Berlaymont are clearly petrified of any challenge to their ‘progressive’ worldview. An eastern European leader with the temerity to suggest his people’s own values should take precedence over the EU’s abstract, DEI-centric dogma is, to their mind, an existential threat. Perhaps even more so than Viktor Orbán, Fico is a danger to the EU’s model of democracy, where nation states are guided by those who supposedly know best to reach the ‘correct’ outcome.

Undoubtedly, the EU’s posturing is a desperate move from a governing class that sees its power slipping. To its horror, the nations of Europe no longer meekly accept Brussels’ word as law. In fact, European governments increasingly insist that they, their people and their courts ought to have ultimate jurisdiction. For the beleaguered bureaucrats of Brussels, this is unpalatable.

In the case of Slovakia, the gloves are already off. The Slovak constitution explicitly states that Fico’s reforms apply regardless of EU law. The EU, on the other hand, insists this cannot be so – the most humble flip of a Eurocrat’s legal pen must trump the wishes of any member state.

For now, the Mexican standoff continues, with the victor yet to be determined. But whatever we may think of Slovakia’s proposals, it at least has democracy on its side.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.