The Great Reset: The far right’s detailed plan to dismantle the EU
An initiative by Hungarian and Polish think tanks has secured the support of Spain’s Vox and other populist forces for a detailed program to liquidate the European institutions

Option A: Dismantle the European Union. Option B: Shut it down and replace it with a mini version. Either way, say goodbye to the current EU. Both “scenarios” are described in The Great Reset, a document penned by the Ordo Iuris Institute of Poland and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) of Hungary, backed by Spain’s far-right Vox and other parties of a similar ilk. Usually couched in vague rhetoric against “Brussels bureaucrats,” Vox’s support for the report represents a dramatic step forward for Spain’s third-largest political party. The Great Reset, which the two think tanks are promoting as a roadmap for the far right on a European scale, is far from a nationalist rant or a vague declaration of intent. It is an orderly and detailed plan to reduce the current EU to ashes.
Among the effects of Brexit, there is one unexpected one. “The exiters [supporters of leaving the EU] have practically disappeared,” explains Anna López, a doctor in political science and author of the essay The Far Right in Europe (Tirant, 2025). The extremists, López analyzes, have internalized the advantages of being inside the EU for two reasons: one, economic, because it guarantees “resources, visibility, and financing”; the other, electoral, because “disputing the idea of Europe politically and symbolically” is preferable to fighting to leave it. So the parties in this group, the researcher adds, have opted to shelve the exit rhetoric and replace it with appeals to nostalgia for an “idealized” Europe that could have been “strong, prosperous, and Christian” but has been ruined — the far right maintains — by the onslaught of a bureaucracy taken over by progressives and out-of-control Muslim immigration.
Since the rhetoric works, details are rarely added. In politics, details can scare those who agree with the general idea. The Great Reset, however, is an exception to the rule of vagueness. Who are these think tanks who have decided to roll up their sleeves to move from grand proclamations to the small print? They are two Central European organizations. The Polish one is Ordo Iuris, the shadowy promoter of the “normative architecture” of the previous government of the ultranationalists of Law and Justice, including the “intellectual authorship” of its restrictive abortion law, the “criminalization of sexual education,” and the “LGBTQ+ ideology-free zones,” explains anthropologist Nuria Alabao, author of Gender Wars.
Registered as a lobbyist with the EU institutions, Ordo Iuris maintains contact with extremist parties both in Poland — where it also works with the even more right-wing Confederation — and in France, Italy, and other EU countries. Its interest in Spain, where it has been active and in contact with Vox since at least 2022, is explicit. Ordo Iuris was also one of the sponsors of the anti-abortion summit held in the Senate last December under the umbrella of the Political Values Network, an international group with strong Spanish roots, particularly in the figure of former Spanish Minister of the Interior Jaime Mayor Oreja.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium is, explains Anna López, a factory of “political and intellectual elites aligned with illiberal nationalism” born to feed Viktor Orbán’s regime. This is a model that Vox in Spain seeks to emulate with its support for the ISSEP center for training and dissemination of ideas. Like Ordo Iuris, the MCC is interested in Spain, where it has collaborated with the CEU, the educational arm of the Catholic Association of Propagandists. The director of the MCC’s Center for European Studies is the Spaniard Rodrigo Ballester, a former EU official and one of the authors of The Great Reset. The president of the MCC is Balázs Orbán, chief of staff to the Hungarian prime minister.
Dismantle or refound
Both Ordo Iuris and the MCC exemplify the European far-right’s determination to “consolidate a transnational cultural, educational, and strategic project,” notes Anna López. This is the foundation of The Great Reset, which is based on the premise that the European project has abandoned its initial ambition of being a mere zone of “free trade” and “peaceful coexistence” and has become a bureaucratized monster that castrates national sovereignty and imposes a progressive creed.
Ordo Iuris and the MCC offer two alternatives. The most detailed one is presented under the name of “Back to the Roots” and would bring the EU — as the report explains — closer to its embryonic model of 1957, when Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Rome, the origin of the European Economic Community. The first change would be to truncate the European institutions. The European Commission would be transformed into a “general secretariat” under strict state control. This idea is in line with the one put forward more than five years ago by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally: reducing it to “an administrative secretariat without a decision-making function.” It would mark the end of the Commission’s capacity to exert pressure in the face of what it considered the authoritarian tendencies of Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary.
The European Parliament would be transformed into a mixed assembly, composed of members elected through European elections and others nominated by national governments, with advisory powers. The functions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) would be restricted to “dispute resolution,” leaving it outside its scope to interpret treaties or reverse national judicial decisions.
The entire design is consistent with a pervasive idea: that nothing should restrict national governments, which would retain all power. The European Council, as “the voice of national leaders,” would be the “ultimate authority” and could even push through new legislation to overturn CJEU rulings.
The second change would end the current integration model, replacing it with an “à la carte” model in which each state would decide which areas it wishes to remain in, and those which it does not. For example, immigration and renewables, no; free movement of workers, yes. Each state could “exempt itself from policies that conflict with its priorities.” What can be inferred from this? If a government is pro-abortion and wants to eradicate the LGBTQ+ “influence” from its classrooms, the EU could do nothing to oppose it. The report even identifies four untouchable areas: “Family, public order, moral order, and education.” Above all, the EU must have “no direct or indirect impact,” the document states.
Just as the EU is debating how to streamline decision-making to compete in a fast-paced world, Option A of the report advocates “strengthening and expanding” the “unanimity” rule. This is the third change: fewer qualified majorities and more need for everyone to act as one to take any action. The fourth and final reform to get “Back to the Roots” would be to change the name of the EU to the “European Community of Nations.”
All of the above pertains to the first option outlined in the document. The second is more “out-of-the-box,” according to the report. It is what its authors call “A New Beginning,” which would consist of “A new Union treaty” that transcends the “mid-20th century paradigm of interventionism and management via regulatory measures.” Each state would decide when, how, and to what extent its participation in each cooperation project would be achieved. It would be necessary to “negotiate the detailed structure of the new Union” and a “transition plan,” the document states.
Vox’s support
The text was presented in Madrid on May 22 at an event promoted by Ordo Iuris, the MCC, Vox — through its foundation, Disenso — and the Center for Fundamental Rights, linked to Orbán’s Fidesz. Participating on behalf of Vox was its head of the European delegation, Jorge Buxadé, who published this message: “We know where to go.” “Now we have a project,” stated the party leader, Santiago Abascal. EL PAÍS asked Vox whether it supports the first or the second option, but received no response. In a statement released by the Center for Fundamental Rights, Buxadé expressed his enthusiasm: “We are in a position to face a term that will be the beginning of The Great Reset.”
Vox’s support is not the first that Ordo Iuris and the MCC have garnered. The report has the backing of Fidesz in Hungary and figures from Law and Justice and the Confederation in Poland. Its promoters, through the Patriots for Europe group — the third-largest in the European Parliament and to which Vox belongs — are preparing a launch in Paris with the presence of the National Rally and are “in talks” with entities “across Europe,” including the Machiavelli Center, linked to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, according to an Ordo Iuris spokesperson.
The report is supported by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful influence on Trumpism and the driving force behind Project 2025, a plan for conservative subversion of the administration that has raised suspicions even among the remaining moderates in the Republican Party. The idea for The Great Reset was born at a conference organized by the Heritage Foundation and Ordo Iuris in Warsaw in September 2024 to study what Europe could look like in the world envisioned by the nationalist international. This idea of a future Europe is taking shape.
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