Europe is set to witness a ‘constitutional moment’. At issue is whether illiberal democracies become part of the European public order as laid out in Article 2 TEU, or are opposed by it. In the first case, the conventional self-understanding of Europe can no longer be maintained because the European rule of law would accept what is happening at present in Poland, where the wilfull subversion of judicial independence is uprooting the separation of powers. In the second case, the European rule of law would be supplemented by ‘red lines’. This paper shows how European institutions should react, not least in the LM case.