There were sighs of relief throughout the European Union after President Emmanuel Macron beat back a serious challenge in France from populist far-right champion Marine Le Pen.
Then another populist went down, in Slovenia, where the country’s three-time prime minister, Janez Jansa, lost to a loose coalition of centrist rivals in parliamentary elections Sunday.
Those two defeats were widely seen as a reprieve for the EU and its fundamental principles, including judicial independence, shared sovereignty and the supremacy of European law. That is because they dealt a blow to the ambitions and worldview of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, who avidly supported both Le Pen and Jansa in an effort to create a coalition of more nationalist, religious and anti-immigration politics that could undermine the authority of the EU itself.