Guardian recovers balance?

If this is a sign of the Guardian's new European reporting, I think I'm going to like it. There is a rare critical piece today on the political tensions and machinations inside the EU.

The crisis of the centre-right could rot the European Union from within

The eurozone crisis and the subsequent enforcement of fiscal austerity exposed the coercive underside of Brussels. The arrival of refugees in 2015 tested the limits of European liberalism. Brexit, the first time a member state has handed back its EU membership, wounded the self-image of the EU as an ever-expanding bloc. But as serious as these challenges are, none of them threatens to shake European integration like the entrenchment of the far right in two member-state governments.

[Orban] has transformed the electoral system such that a real turnover in power is now virtually impossible..It’s hardly as if Brussels didn’t notice. In 2010, when the Hungarian government took control of the country’s independent media regulator, EU commissioners sounded the alarm and requested amendments to the law. Orbán outsmarted them with cosmetic adjustments and deployed an argument that you still hear today: if the EU interfered too aggressively it would turn yet another member state into a bastion of Euroscepticism.

Rather than cutting off their oxygen, the EU has perversely enabled autocratic politicians. The billions it pays out in infrastructure subsidies are the equivalent of petrodollars for oil-rich dictatorships – a free resource to distribute among cronies and buy popular support.

Soon enough, there was a second bad apple. Jarosław Kaczyński, current leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), ..Once there were two rogue actors, sanctions against either of them became practically impossible. As members of the European council, Poland and Hungary could veto such measures

[Hungary's] Fidesz belongs to the European People’s party (EPP) – the supranational family of Christian Democratic and centre-right parties in the European parliament. For the EPP, Orbán is a strategic ally who reliably delivers seats in the European parliament, allowing the affiliation to maintain its status as Europe’s largest group and therefore retain its claim to the post of European commission president...

There is only one sign of the old Graun theme:

For mainstream conservatives, a default option has been to denounce far-right parties while parroting their policies. The Conservative party in the UK has adopted the Eurosceptic policies of Ukip