Republican congressman Thomas Massie, one of the loudest internal critics of Donald Trump, just lost his seat. At the Kentucky Republican primary, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein won by 55 to 45 percent. It was the most expensive primary in the history of the US Congress - 32 million dollars spent on advertising alone.

Massie had been in Congress since 2012. And for most of that time he voted "yes" on Trump - by his own count, in 90 percent of cases. But those 10 percent were the reason for the wipeout. He voted "no" on Trump's tax law (out of concern for the national debt). "No" on military strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean. "No" on extending the war with Iran. And he filed a request along with Democrats to publish all the Epstein documents.

Trump described Massie as a "big slob" and "the worst Republican congressman in history". He used social media regularly to attack him. And in the end, he sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally to Kentucky to back Gallrein the day before the election. "They panicked, so they sent the war secretary, and you stopped a war for a day," Massie said after the defeat, while his supporters cheered.

What does this mean? Trump does not allow internal dissent in the party. Massie was the last real fiscal conservative in Congress - the kind of politician who cares about the national debt and doesn't want endless wars. That no longer has a place in the Republican Party. "There's an appetite for someone who'll vote on principle, not on party discipline," Massie said. That's no longer that kind of party. It's the personal party of one man.

For a Balkan context this is a well-known script. Parties that turn into the personality of a single leader - that's the political model of the region since the '90s. Massie made a good analysis: "They're only angry about those 10 percent of cases when I don't want to vote for war, when I don't want to back surveillance without a warrant, and when I don't want to take the state into bankruptcy." That's a story that - on a smaller scale - has played out here too. The result: a party with no real internal opposition. Just loyalty.