The woman in question, Ilaria Salis, had been accused of participating in assaults on neonazis during Hungary’s annual “Day of Honour,” an event so drenched in historical irony that even Mel Brooks might have been reluctant to show it.
As news of her treatment spread, the continent briefly remembered that the rule of law is not a self-winding clock.
While the Hungarian government framed Salis as a dangerous extremist, the photographs told another story: a peaceful teacher in chains, prosecuted by an illiberal regime that cannot quite decide whether it is a democracy with quirks or a fortress with elections.
The Salis Affair reveals more about Europe’s moral geometry than about the defendant herself.
The story begins with a substitute teacher from Monza, who lives an unremarkable life but has a taste for antifascist activism. Even under Giorgia Meloni, this would still signify moral decency in most of Italy, not radicalism.
Then came the collision in Budapest between two political nervous systems: Hungary’s paranoid authoritarianism and Italy’s confused conscience. The former needs enemies, the latter prefers martyrs. Between them, Salis became both.
Her arrest was cinematic in its banality: police raids, confiscated pamphlets, murmurs of “Antifa terror cells.” But the real drama unfolded in the months that followed. The Hungarian judiciary—ever mindful of its choreography before Viktor Orbán’s government—kept her in a rat-and-bug-infested prison for over a year, then under house arrest, and paraded her before cameras in restraints that would have embarrassed a Roman slave market.
In Italy, these images ignited something close to moral panic: if this is what happens to one of ours in Europe, what hope for the rest? Suddenly, liberals discovered their appetite for sovereignty, and even the tabloids spoke of “national dignity”.
But Hungary’s authorities were unmoved. They insisted that Salis faced serious charges—“attempted murder”, some headlines screamed, though the evidence looked more like scuffles amplified for propaganda purposes.
It was the optics that mattered. Orbán’s far-right government had found a convenient morality play: proof that Europe’s “woke” left was violent, that the real threat to civilisation came not from goose-stepping nostalgists but from those who refused to let them march unmolested. The scene was perfect for domestic consumption, another act in Hungary’s long-running drama as a beleaguered Christian nation standing against cosmopolitan decadence.
Then Europe’s own procedural eccentricities intervened. In June 2024, Salis was elected to the European Parliament on the ticket of Italy’s Green-Left Alliance—an improbable triumph built as much on indignation as ideology. With the election came immunity, that arcane Brussels institution designed to protect legislators from political vendettas.
Overnight, the Hungarian legal machine found itself disarmed, and Salis was released from house arrest. The symbolism was exquisite: one supranational bureaucracy shielding a citizen from the judicial nationalism of a member state.
The right cried foul; the left raised a glass to the miracle of European law.
For months thereafter, the European Parliament deliberated over whether to lift her immunity, torn between its pieties about the rule of law and its fear of encouraging Hungary to double down with its imitation of it. In October 2025, after much procedural hand-wringing, the legislature narrowly refused Budapest’s request—306 to 305. It was the sort of vote that produces both triumphalism and despair in equal measure: evidence that Europe still had a pulse, or that it was too divided to notice the flatline.
What, then, does this small drama portend?
Nothing less than the ongoing attempt by right-wing populism to turn legal systems into instruments of ideological hygiene. Hungary is only the most theatrical example. Across the continent—and across the Atlantic, for that matter—conservatives who once railed against judicial activism have learned the pleasures of prosecution.
The new technique is not censorship, but criminalisation; not silencing opponents outright, but framing them as public dangers. In such a climate, a scuffle in a Budapest alley becomes “terrorism”, a graffiti artist becomes a “domestic extremist,” and the vocabulary of law enforcement becomes a moral language.
The genius of this method is that it inverts liberalism’s own values. The populist right has discovered how to weaponise liberal rhetoric—safety, order, freedom—against the very actors who demand them in earnest.
Hungary’s government presents itself as a defender of Europe against chaos, while dismantling the legal architecture that makes Europe Europe. Giorgia Meloni’s Italy performs a similar pirouette, invoking “Christian civilisation” to justify crackdowns on migrants and NGOs, even as it lectures Brussels about constitutional principles. One could almost admire the craftsmanship if the results were not so chilling.
Salis’s ordeal is less an anomaly than a forecast. The prosecution of antifascists as extremists fits neatly into a wider strategy: to equate dissent with disorder, solidarity with sedition.
The imagery of chains and shackles does not merely humiliate; it instructs. The purpose is to demonstrate that resistance to the far right is itself a crime, that the moral frontier has shifted. Once that equation is accepted, more dire consequences follow naturally: journalists become propagandists, NGOs become smugglers, and parliamentary immunity becomes a scandal rather than a safeguard.
The irony is that this authoritarian turn flourishes under the banner of democracy itself. Orbán’s Hungary still holds elections, still convenes courts, still cites the constitution as though it were scripture. But the substance of democracy has been drained away.
What remains is ritual: the choreography of consent. The spectacle of Salis’s trial, broadcast to domestic audiences, served the same function as the annual “Day of Honour”: a patriotic passion play where guilt and innocence are predetermined, and only faith in the nation’s virtue is on trial.
There is, of course, a deeper European malaise at work. The Union has long tolerated illiberal members in its midst, preferring procedural appeasement to confrontation. It has mechanisms—Article 7, infringement proceedings—but they are slow, legalistic, and allergic to political will.
When the European Parliament voted to protect Salis’s immunity, it was defending not just a person but its own dwindling relevance. The gesture was both noble and pathetic: noble, because it reasserted the idea that European citizenship carries rights even against member states; pathetic, because it underscored how little leverage Brussels truly has.
The right understands this weakness best. Its populist wing has mastered the art of playing victim and prosecutor simultaneously.
When accused of authoritarianism, Orbán thunders about “Brussels interference.” When accused of corruption, he invokes sovereignty. The move is foolproof: turn every rebuke into proof of persecution. Meanwhile, his counterparts in Italy, France, and Poland watch and learn. Law becomes an instrument not of justice but of narrative control, a tool to define who belongs to the political community and who does not.
For the left, this presents an almost theological dilemma. How does one defend democracy against those who exploit its every mechanism? To call for limits on national sovereignty sounds hypocritical; to stay silent invites complicity.
The Salis Affair exposed this paralysis in miniature. Italy’s government, led by the ‘postfascist’ Meloni, issued perfunctory diplomatic protests but avoided confrontation. It was left to civil society, unions, and the residual left to turn outrage into action. Their campaign—culminating in Salis’s election to the European Parliament—was a reminder that solidarity still functions, if only as an act of stubborn memory.
And yet, one suspects that the moral of the story will fade quickly. Europe’s attention span for principle is famously short. The same institutions that defended Salis’s immunity will, in some future crisis, discover new reasons for “balance”. Already, voices in the legislature mutter that immunity should not shelter “violent activists”. They forget—or prefer not to recall—that the history of democracy is largely the history of people once deemed violent activists.
Still, for a brief moment, Salis’s chains forced Europe to look at itself. The spectacle was almost allegorical: the continent shackled by its own contradictions, struggling to reconcile cosmopolitan ideals with national jealousies.
The photo of Ilaria Salis bound in court could have been a painting—Europe Defending the Rule of Law (After Caravaggio)—if only irony counted as a medium. The right exploited the image; the left sentimentalised it; and somewhere in the middle, the ordinary observer felt an obscure discomfort, as though glimpsing a truth too obvious to articulate: that the machinery of repression, once built, rarely struggles to find new targets.
It would be nice if her story ended with Salis’s vindication: her election victory, a memoir, Vipera, and a Zerocalcare-penned collection of comics about her case, Questa Notte Non Sarà Breve. More likely, it will dissolve into the background noise of continental hypocrisy.
But the Salis Affair could still linger as an anecdote, telling us that the line between liberal democracy and managed democracy grows thinner by the year, that the new populists no longer need to storm parliaments when they can simply litigate their enemies into exhaustion.
In the end, Salis’s greatest offence may have been to take Europe at its word—to believe that antifascism, human rights, and the defence of democracy were not just rhetorical furniture. For that belief, she was shackled, prosecuted, and, inadvertently, promoted to the status of an MEP.
It is a trajectory that would have amused a Brecht or an Orwell: the moral being that in our time, the fastest route to Brussels is through a prison cell.
Perhaps, then, the takeaway from this affair should be recognition rather than despair. The far right’s attempt to mute criticism is less a conspiracy than a system—one that thrives on the fatigue of liberal conscience. It does not need to win arguments; it needs only to make outrage boring.
The story of Ilaria Salis punctured that ennui, if only briefly. Whether the European Union can sustain the wakefulness it provoked is another matter. For now, her story stands as both symptom and warning: a reminder that democracy, like justice, can be handcuffed without anyone noticing until the chains begin to rattle.
Ultimately, the best lesson to learn from the Salis Affair is that the true measure of freedom is not how we treat our friends but how we tolerate our dissenters.
Photograph courtesy of The Left. Published under a Creative Commons license.
