A defiant Facebook post from a Romanian MEP raises a question every European democracy is now wrestling with: when your country goes wrong, do you fight it at home, or do you take it to Brussels?

Rareș Bogdan does not do understatement. The National Liberal Party MEP, who has sat in the European Parliament with the center-right European People’s Party since 2019 and who built his public profile as one of Romania’s most combative pro-Western voices, published a Facebook post this week that reads less like a policy statement than a patriotic creed. It deserves to be quoted in full, because its force lies in its totality.

“Let us stop denigrating our nation and our country,” he wrote. “Let us say loudly, everywhere, that we are Romanians! Romania, before anything else! I will never vote for a resolution against my country! I will never betray Romania’s interests! I will never act in any way to harm the image of my country! Problems at home are solved at home. In a family, and for your country too. Not in the public square, not in Brussels! Whoever lends a hand to turning Romania into a new case of ‘Orban’s Hungary’ or ‘PiS-led Poland’ is unconscious. Or simply a traitor to nation and country. And not figuratively. In the end, the PNL and the EPP understood, fortunately, what is at stake. And that there are devastating risks for Romania. Personal or group interest must not take precedence over the interest of your country. Whoever does this does not deserve the status of Romanian.”

He closed with a note of sentiment, recalling how the seven-year-old George Enescu, travelling to Vienna in 1888 to enter the Conservatory, asked his mother whether he could tell people there that he was Romanian, worried they might think he was boasting. “Perhaps the moment has come,” Bogdan wrote, “to say loudly, everywhere, that we are Romanians, not to denigrate one another or our own country.”

To understand why a member of the European Parliament is insisting that Romania’s problems be solved at home rather than in Brussels, one has to understand the moment he is writing into.

Romania has spent this year unlocking a 770-million-euro tranche of its EU-funded recovery plan, money vital to a strained national budget, conditional on passing a package of reforms. One of those, a controversial integrity law on public officials, drew criticism from within Romania and, crucially, from Brussels. In late August, the EPP and the liberal Renew Europe group, Bogdan’s own political family among them, asked Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to withhold the funds over rule-of-law concerns.

That is the “resolution against my country” and the appeal “to Brussels” his post is answering. It is also worth noting the personal backdrop: Bogdan was recently removed as head of the PNL delegation within the EPP, a demotion that has made him a sharper internal critic.

The argument he is making has real weight, and it should not be dismissed as mere flag-waving. There is a genuine principle beneath it: that a nation’s citizens, and above all its elected representatives, owe their country a basic loyalty, and that airing every domestic grievance before a foreign institution can corrode both the country’s standing and its citizens’ faith in their own capacity for self-correction.

The Enescu anecdote is chosen with care. It speaks to a real Romanian wound, a lingering national insecurity, a habit of self-deprecation, a sense of being looked down upon in the European family. Bogdan’s call to “say loudly that we are Romanians” is, at its best, an appeal to national self-respect, and there is nothing shameful in that.

Finally, here lies the deeper dilemma his post exposes, and it is not Romania’s alone. Every EU member now lives in a system where the line between domestic sovereignty and shared European accountability is genuinely blurred. Is a Romanian MEP who supports withholding EU funds over a flawed law betraying his country, or defending it from its own worst tendencies? Is loyalty best shown by presenting a united national front abroad, or by using every available lever, including Brussels, to hold one’s own government to the standards it signed up to?

Bogdan answers unambiguously: loyalty first, laundry kept indoors. Others in his own political family answered the opposite way, and did so, they would argue, out of an equal love of country.

What makes his post worth taking seriously is not that it settles the question, but that it poses it so starkly. “Romania, before anything else” is a stirring phrase. It is also the phrase over which the country’s next political battle will be fought, because the hardest disagreements are not about whether to love Romania, but about what loving it actually requires.