ANOTHER WIN FOR EU ‘DEMOCRACY:’ Leading Presidential Candidate Kicked Off Romanian Ballot.

Nothing says ‘democracy’ like restricting who gets on the ballot.

And nothing is more democratic than banning the leading candidate because the European Union technocrats disagree with him. Nothing says “protecting democracy” better than a bunch of bureaucrats carefully vetting candidates to ensure that they will give those bureaucrats all the power to make the most important decisions. Because bureaucrats, not stupid voters, know best.

IF that is the case, the European Union just got a lot more democratic. So democratic, in fact, that they may just decide to dispense with national elections in just the way that the European Union Parliament gets very little say in actual EU policy–it’s left to the European Council which is “elected” as a slate by the Parliament and never faces the voters themselves.

So the EU is “governing” as it was originally intended to, as Mark Steyn wrote in 2006’s America Alone:

The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union’s governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism—which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading “nation state” in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.

It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we’d be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European “constitution,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.”

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU’s rulers were keeping quiet about it.

And they very much want the voters to keep quiet as well. Insert obligatory Bertolt Brecht quote here.