Tag: Viktor Orbán

The Story: There will be a parliamentary election in Hungary April 3. It will determine whether Viktor Orban is to continue as prime minister. Many...

Aa Aa Populist flop? Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has launched his movement to unite populist leaders across Europe. The kick-starting event held in Milan was noticeably missing some of the biggest faces of Europe’s far-right, including Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally and Hungarian President Viktor Orban of the Fidesz party. Last-minute sell Prime Minister Theresa May will travel to Berlin and Paris on Tuesday for talks with European leaders Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron ahead of the Wednesday’s EU summit. UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told his counterparts in Luxembourg that the UK still hasn’t given up on finding a Brexit solution. The UK is set to exit the EU on April 12 unless another extension is given this week. 'Great Debate' The results of French President Emmanuel Macron’s “Great Debate” were released on Monday after 10,000 hours of town hall discussions and 1.5 million online contributions were gathered in response to the yellow-vest protests. The French government had set out on a nationwide listening tour earlier this year, with hopes of quelling protests that evolved into anger over the cost of living and wages, which have rattled the country for months. Libya lawlessness Civil unrest in Libya escalated over the weekend as forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar — a former general under then-leader Muammar Gaddafi — continued a violent push to take the nation’s capital city of Tripoli. The UN-backed government led by Fayez al-Sarra has reported that 25 people were killed and 80 others injured in the fighting.

No, they belong to the same EPP Christian Democrat group, the dominant force in the European Parliament, and should in theory be close allies in May’s European Union election. Some traditional political powerhouses might start to crumble, allowing extremist, populist parties to gain more clout and throw a new wrench into the EU’s political machinery. “We’ve never seen something like this in EU elections,” said European politics Professor Hendrik Vos of Ghent University about the abrasive election climate. National political parties with common ideology then unite in EU-wide groups like the center-right EPP, the center-left S&D Socialists and the liberal, pro-business ALDE. Over the years, the major political groups started looking at adding unattached national parties to expand their bases. Orban’s Fidesz party followed soon after. Over a dozen EU nations have fragile minority governments and Poland has turned as hostile toward Brussels as Hungary. The first projections for the 705-seat legislature, produced this week by the parliament itself, show the EPP Christian Democrats struggling with 183 seats, the S&D Socialists losing big to land at 135 seats and their grand coalition short of a majority for the first time. That would be music to Orban’s ears and a massive defeat for Juncker. Since Juncker is not running for another term as Commission president, the vote in May could be the last round of their fight.

In the jungle, the jaguar reigns supreme. On Oct. 28, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Until the end of August, Bolsonaro trailed a man campaigning from a prison cell — former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In September, Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach by a man who claimed to be on “a mission from God” to bring Bolsonaro’s candidacy to an end. Far-right proclivities aside, Brazilians should worry about Bolsonaro’s dictatorial tendencies. As the campaign reached its closing chapters, Bolsonaro, in “Trumpian” fashion, suggested his political rivals would end up in jail or in exile. It would be a shame if they ended up in his jaws. Bolsonaro has suggested packing the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court with 10 new judges who would serve his political whims. Brazil’s democracy may be relatively young, but its political culture has become as rough-and-tumble as any. If those institutions are the casualties of Bolsonaro’s rule, Brazil will be worse off.

S houldn’t the anti-populists have started to rally by now? If the responsible liberal technocrats are right about populism, and it is led by dim bulbs, or the corrupt, or the compromised, we should see signs of it falling on its face. Shouldn’t we? The year 2015 was the year that shocked the system. You know what comes next: Brexit and Trump’s victory. Or you can try to shore up liberalism with a bit of authoritarianism and political brinksmanship of your own. Liberal European figures have tried mixtures of all these strategies, and they continue to fail. He now has an approval rating that matches Donald Trump’s at his depth. Populists may fail where they achieve power and office, because their ranks are so filled with amateurs, cranks, and bounders. You can’t write down Ireland’s debts, because the French consider the country a co-conspirator with American tax avoiders.

Ignoring the nuance that the European Parliament is, in fact, directly elected, he tried to reduce the importance of the vote, claiming that only "politicians of the past" voted against him, and the "pro-migration elites" are attacking him because they want to flood Hungary with migrants. Is this political game enough for him to win the European Parliament elections domestically? While Orban is increasingly open about his ambitions to become a serious European politician, there are five reasons why it seems it will be way more difficult than he thinks. The political forces that are supportive towards him now represent less than a third of the European Parliament. Second, immigration and the refugee crisis are not the only concerns of Europeans - as he assumes. Even Italy's Matteo Salvini is more diplomatic when it comes to this issue. Viktor Orban talks about defending Europe's borders, about protection in the countries of origin and investment in Africa, and I agree with him. An important takeaway of the European parliament vote was that Orban has many more supporters in central and eastern Europe, even from ideologically distant players (eg Czech communist and Slovakian socialists), than from western Europe. While he has popular supporters in big west European countries such as Italy (Salvini), France (Marine Le Pen) and Netherlands (Geert Wilders), it seems that in central and eastern Europe his message resonates better, and solidarity works more. While Orban looks for the upcoming European parliament election in May 2019 as a revolution that is coming, he will be dissatisfied with the results.

It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the rightwing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. In Russia, it is impossible to tell where the decisions of government end and the interests of Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs begin. We must understand that these authoritarians are part of a common front. The Mercer family, for example, supporters of the infamous Cambridge Analytica, have been key backers of Trump and of Breitbart News, which operates in Europe, the United States and Israel to advance the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. Our job is to fight for a future in which new technology and innovation works to benefit all people, not just a few. Together governments of the world must come together to end the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21tn in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and then demanding that their respective governments impose an austerity agenda on their working families. In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace. It is high time that Democrats from across the world form a Progressive International in the interests of a majority of people on every continent, in every country.

Tuesday was another Election Day in the United States, and the marquee showdown was a special election in Ohio’s 12th congressional district. It went decisively for President Trump in 2016. “Republicans will need to find a way to win back suburbanites or better galvanize rural voters,” wrote the New York Times. The push for Brexit and the electoral gains of the far right in France and Germany all required the mobilization of voters living outside major urban centers. Town and country divisions — and the cultural enmities they foster — stretch back to antiquity. In rural areas, about 40 percent of both college whites and non-whites saw a positive impact, compared to only about one-fourth of non-college whites.” In European parliamentary democracies, the segment of the population animated chiefly by anti-immigrant fears usually gets relegated to a junior seat at the table. But in America’s antiquated system of gerrymandered districts and the electoral college, less-densely populated parts of the country are favored over denser ones — a political reality crucial to Trump’s victory. “Democrats have become the party of the multicultural city, Republicans the party of the monocultural country — the party of urbanization-resistant white people.” It’s a dynamic, Wilkinson argues, that is toxic for American democracy in the long run. And it masks the extent to which the collective story of America — of both its glories and its inequities — is an increasingly urban one. The vast urban, middle-class support behind India’s right-wing nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, shows that cities aren’t always crucibles of liberalism.

In a recent article for POLITICO, “This time, Viktor Orbán has gone too far” (August 3), my colleague in the European People’s Party, Swedish MEP Anna Maria Corazza Bildt, made an urgent plea for the Hungarian prime minister’s Fidesz party to be expelled from her political group. I wholeheartedly agree with her. In recent years, the EPP leadership has been urged countless times to stop protecting Orbán and his all-out war on democracy and on migration. Each time, they responded that keeping him on board would moderate his actions. As a result, the EPP is deeply split — along with other traditional party families — over issues like migration, identity and values. What’s needed in Europe is a total shake-up of the political landscape. Pro-European, progressive liberal-democrat forces are scattered over the institution’s political groups. And, at the same time, populist and nationalist forces can be found in most of the mainstream political groups — and not just on the fringes. A great shake-up of the European political landscape would provide voters with clear choices between different political views. It would make Europe stronger.

Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party won 134 of the legislature’s 199 seats in Sunday’s election, ensuring it has the number of votes to pass major reforms and constitutional changes unilaterally. Hungarian political analysts and Fidesz officials said they widely expected their now four-term prime minister to do both. A spokesman for Mr. Orban said the prime minister would tighten restrictions preventing NGOs from getting involved in politics. There were hardly any bright spots for the fractured opposition, except for a statement by an international observer group that effectively agreed with them that elections in Mr. Orban’s country have become unfair. The country’s major TV outlets, virtually all of which are owned by Mr. Orban’s government or his allies, covered the prime minister “in almost exclusively positive terms,” the observers said. For three years, Mr. Orban has castigated the bloc and its 2015 plan to resettle 1,294 refugees from Greece and Italy in Hungary, comparing it to the Soviet Union, which once dominated the country. EU officials are looking at ways to link aid to countries that respect the rule of law, a proposal understood to target Poland and Hungary, two countries seen by the EU as increasingly autocratic. But Mr. Orban has powerful supporters within Mr. Juncker’s own European People’s Party, an umbrella organization of center-right parties including German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Ultimately, 51% of voters in the national election split their ballots between nearly two dozen parties—ranging from socialists to nationalists to liberals—that agreed on little besides opposition to Mr. Orban. Mr. Orban successfully tagged it as a liberal, pro-immigrant party funded by Mr. Soros.