Looking for Liberland

"My journey to Liberland began at 11 p.m. at a train station on the outskirts of Budapest when Vít Jedlička popped out of a silver Citroën rental van with his hand extended. Hulking, blond, wearing khakis and a blue blazer and sporting a goatee and a military haircut, he looked nothing like what I would have expected from the founder of an anarcho-libertarian microstate.

I had first heard of Jedlička after he visited Brussels on May 25 to meet with Syed Kamall, the leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament. Jedlička — a 32-year-old Czech politician affiliated with the parliamentary group headed by U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage — had flown in to try to convince politicians in the city to recognize a beet-shaped piece of no-man’s land on the Croatian-Serbian border as the youngest sovereign state in the world.

Jedlička’s pitch was simple. In April 2015, he had unilaterally declared 7 km² of unclaimed, uninhabited Balkan swampland on the west bank of the Danube as an independent nation. He would offer food and shelter to Syrian refugees willing to settle there. And, in exchange, the international community would overrule objections by Croatia and declare Liberland its newest official member.

Though I kept hearing about Jedlička and his quixotic proposal in Brussels and Strasbourg, I never managed to meet him. But I was intrigued by the idea, and I wanted to know more — which is how I found myself in Hungary, three months and a quick phone call later, accepting his air kisses on both cheeks and then waiting as he slid open the van’s door to reveal a row of pillows carefully arranged so I could sit comfortably on our long drive to Liberland...."