BRUSSELS - We have been saying it for years, and now the European Parliament overwhelmingly agrees with us: “Hungary is no longer a democracy.”

With that simple phrase in a decision yesterday, legislators called for greater action on Hungary’s ever-deepening autocracy. The European Union, which likes to think of itself as a club of only democracies, may finally be facing the fact it is not.

That realization has been slow to sink in.

Four years ago, the European Parliament triggered the EU treaty’s Article 7 procedure against Hungary, which allows the bloc to deal with governments straying from the EU’s founding values. But in those four years, as EU institutions largely failed to act, Hungary’s authorities have continued to blast away at the pillars of democracy in the country.

The ruling party in Hungary has undermined the judiciary and entrenched prime minister Viktor Orbán’s rule by decree. His government has criminalized civil society, decimated independent media, crushed academic freedom, undermined women’s rights, and assaulted LGBT rights.

Yet Orbán has faced no real consequences.

The EU Commission now needs to back the Parliament’s calls to push the Article 7 procedure, and the Commission should also suspend some EU funding when media and civil society cannot operate.

Democracy, human rights, and the EU’s reputation for both are at stake.