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      Czechs Defeat a Populist, Offering a Road Map for Toppling Strongmen

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      A wide range of parties in the Czech Republic banded together despite their differences to oppose Andrej Babis, the country’s populist prime minister. Opposition parties in Hungary are hoping to duplicate the feat.ROZDROJOVICE, Czech Republic — Marie Malenova, a Czech pensioner in a tidy, prosperous village in South Moravia, had not voted since 1989, the year her country held its first free elections after more than four decades of communist rule.Last Friday, however, she decided to cast a vote again, an event so unusual that her disbelieving family recorded her change of heart, taking photographs of her slipping her ballot into a big white box at the village hall.She said she did not much like the people she voted for, a coalition of previously divided center-right parties, describing them as “a smaller evil among all our many thieves.” But they at least had a simple and clear message: We can beat Andrej Babis, the Czech Republic’s populist, billionaire prime minister.“I wanted a change,” Ms. Malenova said, “and I wanted something that could beat Babis.”For the past decade, populists like Mr. Babis have often seemed politically invincible, rising to power across Central and Eastern Europe as part of a global trend of strongman leaders disdainful of democratic norms. But on Saturday, the seemingly unbeatable Mr. Babis was defeated because opposition parties put ideological differences aside and joined together to drive out a leader they fear has eroded the country’s democracy.Petr Fiala, center, a former political scientist and university rector who led one of two opposition coalitions, at a news conference on Saturday in Prague.EPA, via ShutterstockTheir success could have major repercussions in the region and beyond. In Hungary and in Poland, where nationalist leaders have damaged democratic institutions and sought to undermine the European Union, opposition leaders are mobilizing, trying to forge unified fronts and oust populist leaders in upcoming elections.“Populism is beatable,” said Otto Eibl, the head of the political science department at Masaryk University in Brno, the South Moravian capital. “The first step in beating a populist leader is to suppress individual egos and to compromise in the interest of bringing a change.”The biggest showdown could come in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promoted himself as Europe’s standard-bearer for “illiberal democracy,” while his Fidesz party has steadily stripped away democratic checks, squeezing independent media and the judiciary. Mr. Orban has staked out right-wing political positions — including hostility to immigration, the European Union and L.G.B.T.Q. rights (if also proving adept at adopting left-wing welfare policies) — that have been emulated by his allies in Poland, the governing Law and Justice party.In recent years, champions of liberal democracy have been confounded in their efforts to battle their way back into power against nationalist leaders skilled at stoking fear and presenting themselves as saviors. Faced with well-oiled and well-financed political machines, like Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party or Mr. Babis’s party, Ano, opposition forces have been notoriously divided — until now.Prime Minister Andrej Babis after the election results were announced on Saturday in Prague.Petr David Josek/Associated PressThis weekend, six Hungarian parties will complete a weekslong opposition primary race, the first of its kind, to whittle down the list of potential contenders in every electoral district to oppose Mr. Orban’s party. The coalition includes groups ranging from nationalist conservatives to leftists, who disagree on most things but share a fervent desire to dispatch Mr. Orban.In Poland, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister and European Council president, returned to Poland this summer to rally the main opposition party and people who often do not vote, and lure support from a plethora of other opposition groups.The appeals for opposition unity have also been evident in Russia, where parliamentary elections held last month were neither free nor fair. Allies of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny had been trying to persuade voters to rally behind a single opposition candidate in each constituency, whether they liked the candidate or not, in the name of trying to win a single seat and breaking President Vladimir V. Putin’s complete stranglehold on power.It did not work — partly because most real opposition candidates were kept off the ballot, but also because Mr. Putin’s government pressured companies to remove a “smart voting” app that the opposition was using to coordinate its campaign.Mr. Babis, right, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary last month in Prague.David W. Cerny/ReutersLike Mr. Putin, Europe’s populist leaders claim to be defending traditional Christian values against decadent liberals, but unlike Mr. Putin, they have to hold real elections. Until recently, they were helped by the fact that opposition parties splintered the vote, meaning that few of those parties had much chance of beating highly organized governing parties.Those governing parties have also gained significant control over media in their countries. In the Czech Republic, Mr. Babis owns a media holding company with newspapers, internet portals and other news outlets. In Hungary, Mr. Orban has placed state television and much of private media under the control of loyal allies or business cronies.Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital, a research group in Budapest, described Hungary as “the most captured state with the most centralized media environment” in Europe. Yet he said the new mobilization by Hungary’s opposition parties could change the political dynamic there.“They have a good message: If you fight against populists, things can be different,” Mr. Kreko said.In the Czech elections, that was largely the theme. While Mr. Babis is seen as less extreme than Mr. Orban, he has alienated many people in the Czech Republic. They see him as a bully whose wealth and corporate ties have given him an inordinate amount of power.The Russian opposition politicians Aleksei A. Navalny, right, Lyubov Sobol and Ivan Zhdanov in February 2020 at a rally in Moscow.Shamil Zhumatov/ReutersMarie Jilkova, a successful anti-Babis candidate in South Moravia from one of the two coalitions of parties that came together to oppose the prime minister, said that banding together to confront Mr. Babis and his party machine “was, for us, the only way to survive — there was no alternative.”Her own party, the Christian Democrats, differs on issues like abortion and gay marriage from the more centrist parties in her coalition, so, she said, “we agreed that we would not talk about these things during the campaign.”Faced with a united bloc of center-right opponents, Mr. Babis and his Ano party veered to the right, railing against immigration and the European Union. He invited Mr. Orban to campaign with him.Since he first entered politics nearly a decade ago, Mr. Babis has been inundated with questions about his financial affairs and those of his conglomerate, Agrofert. A week before the election, documents surfaced as part of the Pandora Papers project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showing how he shuffled more than $20 million through offshore shell companies in 2009 to buy property in France.Experts disagree on whether the disclosure had a significant effect on the race, but the revelations clearly rattled Mr. Babis.“He was desperate to find issues that would scare people and convince them that only he could save them,” Ms. Jilkova said in an interview in Brno. “Fortunately, it didn’t work.”Nationally, the opposition coalitions won 108 of 200 seats in the Parliament, a clear majority.In Rozdrojovice, where Ms. Malenova cast her first vote since 1989, Ms. Jilkova’s coalition benefited from a high turnout and won 37.3 percent of the vote, a big jump on what its component parties got when they ran separately four years ago.Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, on Sunday in Warsaw. He has been trying to rally opposition support.Slawomir Kaminski/Agencja Gazeta Via ReutersPetr Jerousek, who runs a wine business and owns a pub in Rozdrojovice, said his customers did not usually talk much about politics, but, faced with a choice between Mr. Babis and his foes, “they sometimes got very excited in their discussion.”Mr. Jerousek was ecstatic about the final results late Saturday. “People finally opened their eyes,” he said. “They have had enough.”Petr Stransky, a former police officer who now drives a municipal bus, was despondent. “I don’t like disorder and like things to be clear in society,” he said, bemoaning Mr. Babis’s defeat at the hands of what he said was unfair ganging up by opposition parties.“When we were fighting as kids in the schoolyard it was always one against one. Five kids fighting against one was cowardly. It was clear who would win,” he said. “This election was the same. It was not fair.”The mayor of the village, Daniel Strasky, said that while he wanted to see Mr. Babis go, he did not vote because he objected to an alliance between his own party, which represents mayors and other local dignitaries, and the Pirates, a rambunctious group popular with young voters.But, he added, the loveless electoral marriage was probably worthwhile because it helped defeat Mr. Babis, whose handouts to pensioners, young rail travelers and other budget-busting measures offended the mayor’s belief in financial discipline.Mr. Strasky was also distressed by the prime minister’s anti-immigration tirades, especially because a family from Vietnam runs the village’s only food store.“I and everyone else in the village are so glad they are here,” the mayor said. “Nobody else would ever run that shop.”A demonstration on Sunday in Warsaw in support of the European Union. Poland’s governing party has long been at odds with the bloc over rule-of-law issues.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBenjamin Novak More

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      Trump may be gone, but Covid has not seen off populism

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      Politics booksTrump may be gone, but Covid has not seen off populism It is liberal fantasy to imagine that poor handing of the pandemic has lessened the allure of Modi and Bolsonaro. They are learning fast how to subvert votingJan-Werner MüllerMon 20 Sep 2021 05.00 EDTWhen the pandemic struck, newspaper opinion pages were full of pieces predicting the end of authoritarian populism. Surely Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro couldn’t survive their mishandling of Covid-19? Finally, people were waking up to the reality of what these leaders represented.Trump may not have lasted, but the expectation that the pandemic might see off populism is mistaken. Liberal observers have long assumed that populists are by definition incompetent demagogues. But populism is not all about promising simplistic solutions in a complex world and, contrary to a complacent liberal narrative, populist leaders are not incapable of correcting failed policies. The threat of authoritarian populism is compounded by the fact that these leaders are learning from each other – though what they are copying are not more effective strategies to combat the pandemic, but techniques for disabling democracy.When despairing about the rise of populism, liberals have been eager to identify underlying causes. And indeed, there are striking similarities in the way far-right populist leaders govern in different parts of the globe: Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jarosław Kaczyński, Viktor Orbán, Modi, and, as a hopefully historical example, Trump. But similar outcomes do not prove similar causes. Rather, the reason for the emergence of what we might as well call a far-right populist art of governance is that leaders can copy each other’s best (or worst) practices. They are busy perfecting the art of faking democracy: ballot boxes are not stuffed on election day, but between them we see voting rules manipulated, media outlets taken over by business leaders friendly to the government, and civil society systematically intimidated and therefore election outcomes are rarely in doubt. Liberals, meanwhile, are drastically underestimating their adversaries.Populist leaders are not all nearly as incompetent and irresponsible as Trump and Bolsonaro’s handling of Covid would suggest. Their core characteristic is not that they criticise elites or are angry with the establishment. Rather, what distinguishes them is the claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority”.At first sight, this might not sound particularly nefarious. And yet this claim has two consequences deeply damaging for democracy: rather obviously, populists assert that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values. Rather, populists allege that their rivals are simply corrupt, or “crooked” characters. More insidiously, the suggestion that there exists a “real people” implies that there are some who are not quite real – figures who just pretend to belong, who might undermine the polity in some form, or who are at best second-rate citizens.Obvious examples are minorities and, in particular, recent immigrants, who are suspected of not being truly loyal to the polity. Think of Modi’s policy of creating a register of genuine citizens. Ostensibly, this is about identifying illegal immigrants; but especially in combination with new refugee policies that effectively discriminate against Muslims, its actual message is all too clear to Hindu nationalists. Or think of Trumpists who would never really engage in argument with critics, but simply denounce the latter as “un-American”.Populists reduce political issues to questions of belonging, and then attack those who are said not to belong. That is not a matter of mere rhetoric. Sooner or later, the appeal to the real people – and the exclusion of supposedly fake people – will have effects on streets and squares: Trump rallies have been associated with a local increase in assaults. The concept of “trickle-down aggression” – coined by the feminist philosopher Kate Manne – captures this dynamic.Populist leaders present themselves as the great champions of empowering the people, and yet always exclude particular people. The shameless attempts by US Republicans to suppress the vote (and subvert election outcomes) are playing on the sense that the “real America” is white and Christian – and that black and brown people should not really be participating in politics in the first place. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is gearing up to repeat Trump-style claims about a stolen election, should he lose the vote next year; he will have learned that, beyond casting doubt on the legitimacy of those not casting a ballot for you, bringing at least parts of the military to your side might be decisive.In Hungary, Orbán has long provided a model from which others can learn how to stretch laws to the limit in order to create pliable courts and media organisations. They can also study subtle tactics of how to mislead the EU and the Council of Europe long enough to entrench partisan advantages.When Poland’s Law and Justice Party returned to power in 2015, it could reach for Orbán’s manual of how to build an autocracy under the eyes of the EU. Like the Hungarian leader, it learned the lesson that, during its first time in office, it had wasted political capital on culture wars, instead of capturing independent institutions. To keep oneself in power, one must control the judiciary, the election system and TV in particular – once that has happened, one can wage culture wars and incite hatred against minorities to one’s heart’s content.None of this is to say that the new authoritarian systems are invincible, but we need to better understand their innovative techniques. Some are so dangerous because they are getting technologically more sophisticated: Pegasus spyware, the use of private companies to spread misinformation, or the extensive use of social media by leaders such as Modi (the world’s most tech-savvy populist) are only the most obvious instances. Still more dangerous than digital autocracy, though, is the ability of authoritarians to disable democracy, while at the same time advancing democratic-sounding justifications for their actions.What is happening in the US and the UK is a prime example. The push by the Johnson government to make the presentation of voter ID mandatory can look reasonable on paper: nobody is against the prevention of voter fraud. Northern Ireland already has such measures in place, as do countries on the continent. But, as we should have appreciated by now, legal measures can be deployed to, in effect, shrink the demos, the political body, for partisan purposes: minorities, the unemployed and especially the poor – lacking drivers’ licences and passports for travel abroad – are most likely not to have the time and resources to secure the required forms of ID. We have also learned the hard way that the staffing of election commissions is not some bureaucratic trifle (as Tom Stoppard observed long ago, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting”), but can make the difference between keeping and losing democracy.‘We the people’: the battle to define populismRead moreWhy do populists so often get away with these kinds of measures? We have not grasped the extent to which they have succeeded in imposing their distorted understanding of basic democratic practices. The vast majority of those identifying as Republicans regard voting as a “privilege” tied to responsibilities, while Democrats respect it as an unconditional right.It is not true that masses of people are longing for strongmen and are turning away from democracy. But it has become easier to fake democracy. That is partly because defenders of democracy have not argued for its basic principles well, and partly because they keep underestimating their adversaries.TopicsPolitics booksUS politicsViktor OrbánCoronavirusPolandHungaryBrazilfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Populist Leaders in Eastern Europe Run Into a Little Problem: Unpopularity

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      The leaders of Slovenia, Hungary and Poland, who rode to power on waves of anti-elitism anger, face rising opposition over their pandemic responses and heavy-handed policies.LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — A right-wing populist wave in Eastern Europe, lifted by Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, has not crashed as a result of his defeat last November. But it has collided with a serious obstacle: Its leaders are not very popular.After winning elections by railing against widely disliked elites, right-wing populists on Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank, it turns out, are themselves not much liked. That is due in large part to unpopular coronavirus lockdowns, and, like other leaders no matter their political complexion, their stumbling responses to the health crisis. But they are also under pressure from growing fatigue with their divisive tactics.In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being countered by an uncharacteristically united opposition. In Poland, the deeply conservative government has made an abrupt shift to the left in economic policy to win back support. And in Slovenia, the hard-right governing party of the Trump-loving prime minister is slumping disastrously in the polls.Slovenia’s leader, Janez Jansa, who made international headlines by congratulating Mr. Trump on his “victory” in November and is a self-declared scourge of liberal, or what he calls communist, elites, is perhaps the most at risk of the region’s unpopular populists.Propelled by nationalist promises to bar asylum seekers from the Middle East and “ensure the survival of the Slovenian nation,” Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party won the most votes in a 2018 election. Last year, a new coalition government led by the party had an approval rating of 65 percent.Prime Minister Janez Jansa of Slovenia, left, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary in Kidricevo, Slovenia, last year.Jure Makovec/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis has since plunged to 26 percent and Mr. Jansa is so unpopular that allies are jumping ship. Street protests against him have attracted as many as tens of thousands of people, huge turnouts in a normally placid Alpine nation with a population of just two million.Mr. Jansa has staggered on, narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in Parliament and a recent impeachment attempt by opposition legislators and defectors from his coalition.But he has been so weakened “he does not have the power to do anything” other than curse foes on Twitter, said Ziga Turk, a university professor and cabinet minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Jansa, who quit the governing party in 2019.An admirer of Hungary’s Mr. Orban, Mr. Jansa has sought to bring the news media to heel, as nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have largely succeeded in doing, at least with television.But the only television station that consistently supports him, a bombastic and partly Hungarian-funded outfit called Nova24TV, has so few viewers — less than one percent of the television audience on most days — that it does not even figure in ratings charts.Slavoj Zizek, a celebrity philosopher and self-declared “moderately conservative Marxist” — one of the few Slovenians well-known outside the country, along with Melania Trump — said it was too early to write off leaders like Mr. Jansa, Mr. Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, whose three countries he described as a “new axis of evil.”Nationalist populists, he said, have rarely won popularity contests. Their most important asset, he said, has been the disarray of their opponents, many of whom the philosopher sees as too focused on “excessive moralism” and issues that do not interest most voters instead of addressing economic concerns.“The impotence of the left is terrifying,” Mr. Zizek said.Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, says it is too early to write off the leaders of Slovenia, Hungary and Poland.Manca Juvan for The New York TimesThat nationalist populism remains a force is demonstrated by Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader. Her party fared poorly in regional elections over the weekend but opinion polls indicate she could still be a strong contender in France’s presidential election next year. She has done this by softening her image as a populist firebrand, ditching overt race-baiting and her previous and very unpopular opposition to the European Union and its common currency, the euro.Having never held high office, Ms. Le Pen has also avoided the pitfalls encountered by populists in East and Central Europe who have been running governments during the pandemic.Hungary, Europe’s self-proclaimed standard-bearer of “illiberal democracy” under Mr. Orban, has had the world’s highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 after Peru.Poland and Slovenia have fared better but their right-wing governing parties, Law and Justice and Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, have both faced public anger over their handling of the pandemic.The biggest danger to leaders like Mr. Jansa and Mr. Orban, however, are signs that their quarrelsome opponents are finally getting their act together. In Hungary, a diverse and previously feuding array of opposition parties has united to compete against Mr. Orban’s ruling Fidesz party in elections next year. If they stick together, according to opinion polls, they could well win.In Slovenia, Mr. Jansa has rallied a loyal base of around 25 percent of the electorate but has been “even more successful at mobilizing his many opponents,” said Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic, a Slovenian historian and a disenchanted former supporter. “His base supports him but lots of people really hate him.”This includes the speaker of Parliament, Igor Zorcic, who recently bailed from Mr. Jansa’s coalition. “I do not want my country to follow the model from Hungary,” he said.Mr. Gabrijelcic said he quit Mr. Jansa’s party because it “turned too nasty,” moving away from what he had viewed as a healthy response to stale center-left orthodoxy to become a haven for paranoiacs and nationalist hatemongers.Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader whose party fared poorly in regional elections last weekend, in May. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAcross the region, he added, “The whole wave has lost its momentum.”Mr. Trump’s defeat has added to its malaise, along with the recent toppling of Israel’s longtime leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose pugnacious tactics have long been admired by nationalist leaders in Europe, despite the anti-Semitism that infects parts of their base.Mr. Trump’s presidency was never the trigger for Europe’s populist surge, whose leaders had been around and winning votes for years before the New York real estate developer announced his candidacy.But Mr. Trump did give cover and confidence to like-minded politicians in Europe, justifying their verbal excesses and placing their struggles in small, inward-looking countries into what seemed an irresistible global movement.The danger now that Mr. Trump has gone, said Ivan Krastev, an expert on East and Central Europe at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, is that the once “confident populism” of leaders like Mr. Jansa and Mr. Orban morphs into a more dangerous “apocalyptic populism” of the kind that has gripped segments of the right in the United States.But America’s political convulsions, he added, are less relevant to Eastern Europe than the fall of Mr. Netanyahu in Israel, a country that he described as the “true dream of European nationalists” — an “ethnic democracy” with a strong economy, capable military and an ability to resist outside pressure. The “negative coalition against Netanyahu,” he said, deeply shocked Europe’s right-wing populist leaders “because Israel was their model.”Mr. Turk, the former Slovenian minister, said liberals had exaggerated the menace posed by Europe’s nationalist tilt but that the polarization is very real. “The hatred is even more extreme than in the United States,” he lamented.Eager to present an image of calm respectability for Europe’s cantankerous illiberal movement, Mr. Orban in April hosted a meeting in Budapest of like-minded leaders committed to creating a “European renaissance based on Christian values.”Only two people showed up: Matteo Salvini, a fading far-right star in Italy who crashed out of government in 2019, and Poland’s beleaguered prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.Intended to signal the strength of Europe’s right-wing populist insurgency, the Budapest conclave “was more a desperate step to hide that they are in decline,” said Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital, a Budapest research group.Faced with the prospect of losing next year’s election, Mr. Orban has focused on revving up his base with issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights and migration, just as the Law and Justice party did in Poland last year during its successful presidential election campaign.A gay pride parade in Warsaw in June. Poland’s government has taken aim at L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the past, and Hungary’s leader seems to be following suit.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Poland, the Law and Justice party has since taken another tack, apparently deciding that it needs more than divisive cultural and historical issues to win future elections.In May it embraced measures traditionally associated with the left like higher taxes on the rich and lower levies on the less well-off, and support for home buyers. That came after its popularity ratings fell from around 55 percent last summer to just over 30 percent in May, due in part to the pandemic but also because of anger, particularly in large towns, over the tightening of already strict laws against abortion.When it comes to alienating voters, however, nobody rivals Mr. Jansa of Slovenia, who has made scant efforts to reach beyond his most loyal supporters, casting critics as communists and stirring up enmities that date back to World War II.Damir Crncec, the former head of Slovenia’s intelligence agency and once a vocal supporter, said he was mystified by Mr. Jansa’s penchant for unpopularity. “Everyone here is looking for a rationale: How can you win in politics if you are constantly fighting with everyone?” he asked. More

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      Hungary Adopts Child Sex Abuse Law That Also Targets LGBT Community

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      Legislation increasing sentences for pedophiles was changed to include restrictions on portrayals of homosexuality and transgender people that young people might see.BUDAPEST — Hungary’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to adopt legislation that would increase sentences for sex crimes against children, but critics say the law is being used to target the country’s L.G.B.T. community ahead of crunch elections for Prime Minister Viktor Orban next year.Last-minute changes to the bill, which was prompted by public outrage after a series of sex scandals involving governing party and government officials, included restrictions against showing or “popularizing” homosexuality and content that promotes a gender that diverges from the one assigned at birth.Mr. Orban’s critics say the changes were made to target the country’s L.G.B.T. community in an effort to rally support from his conservative base and shift the focus away from the failures of his administration ahead of elections in 2022.The new rules, unexpectedly added to the bill by government-aligned lawmakers last week, require the labeling of all content that might fall into that category of “not recommended for those under 18 years of age.” Such content would be restricted for media like television to the hours between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. The restrictions extend to advertisements and even sexual education, which the law would restrict to teachers and organizations approved by the government. The bill would also create a public database of sex offenders.Mr. Orban has increasingly presented himself as a protector of traditional Christian values, although that image has been undermined somewhat by the sex scandals involving officials and allies of his Fidesz party over the past few years.Last year, a Hungarian diplomat in Peru was convicted of possession of child pornography and handed an $1,800 fine and a suspended prison sentence after being brought home and charged in Hungary. That case, which sparked the public pressure on the legislature to enact stricter sentencing for pedophilia crimes, was just one in a series of scandals that has undermined public faith in Mr. Orban’s government.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, center, at a Parliament session in Budapest last year.Tibor Illyes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBefore Hungary’s 2019 municipal elections, a series of video clips released online by an anonymous source showed a prominent Fidesz mayor participating in an orgy on a yacht.The following year a Fidesz lawmaker in Brussels was detained after trying to escape out of a window and down a drainpipe when the police raided a party being held in violation of Covid restrictions that Belgian news media described as an all-male orgy.The last-minute additions to the legislation were criticized by human rights groups, including the Foundation for Rainbow Families, which promotes legal equality for all Hungarian families with children.“Fidesz does this to take the public conversation away from major happenings in the country,” said Krisztian Rozsa, a psychologist and board member with the foundation, citing corruption and the government’s responses to the pedophilia scandal and the coronavirus pandemic.Content providers such as RTL Klub, Hungary’s largest commercial television station, and the Hungarian Advertising Association have come out against the new law, saying the rules restrict them from depicting the diversity of society.“Children don’t need protection from exposure to diversity,” said Lydia Gall, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “On the contrary, L.G.B.T. children and families need protection from discrimination and violence.”Linking the L.G.B.T. community to pedophilia is a tactic that may score Mr. Orban and his party points with conservative rural voters, many of whom, spurred on by a steady stream of government propaganda, see the government as a bulwark against the cosmopolitan liberalism symbolized by opposition political figures in the capital.Last year, the Fidesz-controlled Parliament enacted legislation that effectively bars gay couples from adopting children in Hungary through a narrow definition of the family as having to include a man as the father and a woman as the mother.Shaken by a bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, a foreign policy pivot toward China and Russia that has angered his partners within the European Union, and increasing international isolation, Mr. Orban is facing a tough election campaign against a six-party opposition alliance.Balint Ruff, a political strategist, said the move to target the L.G.B.T. community was a “cynical and evil trap.” He added: “It’s a method used in authoritarian regimes to turn their citizens against each other for their own political gain.”It is not uncommon for someone who has spent their whole life in rural Hungary to have never met an openly gay person, Mr. Ruff said, adding that by inundating rural voters with conspiracies about gay propaganda taking over the world, Mr. Orban has found an effective tool for mobilizing voters.“The theme of the campaign will be liberal homosexual Budapest versus the normal people,” he said.By not supporting the new law, the opposition would be branded supporters of pedophilia for the duration of the campaign, Mr. Ruff said. But supporting the bill would betray more liberal voters who find linking pedophilia and the L.G.B.T. community deplorable.For those whose families are directly impacted by such laws, the effects hit closer to home.Mr. Rozsa, from the Foundation for Rainbow Families, said he was worried that bullying and exclusion among Hungarian teenagers would increase against those not seen as heterosexual — and also feared the implications of the governing party’s move for the children of same-sex couples who attend public schools.“Our kids are also going to be targeted,” Mr. Rozsa said. “Our kids have same-sex parents.” More

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      Hungary Adopts Child Sex Abuse Law That Also Targets L.G.B.T. Community

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      Legislation increasing sentences for pedophiles was changed to include restrictions on portrayals of homosexuality and transgender people that young people might see.BUDAPEST — Hungary’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to adopt legislation that would increase sentences for sex crimes against children, but critics say the law is being used to target the country’s L.G.B.T. community ahead of crunch elections for Prime Minister Viktor Orban next year.Last-minute changes to the bill, which was prompted by public outrage after a series of sex scandals involving governing party and government officials, included restrictions against showing or “popularizing” homosexuality and content that promotes a gender that diverges from the one assigned at birth.Mr. Orban’s critics say the changes were made to target the country’s L.G.B.T. community in an effort to rally support from his conservative base and shift the focus away from the failures of his administration ahead of elections in 2022.The new rules, unexpectedly added to the bill by government-aligned lawmakers last week, require the labeling of all content that might fall into that category of “not recommended for those under 18 years of age.” Such content would be restricted for media like television to the hours between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. The restrictions extend to advertisements and even sexual education, which the law would restrict to teachers and organizations approved by the government. The bill would also create a public database of sex offenders.Mr. Orban has increasingly presented himself as a protector of traditional Christian values, although that image has been undermined somewhat by the sex scandals involving officials and allies of his Fidesz party over the past few years.Last year, a Hungarian diplomat in Peru was convicted of possession of child pornography and handed an $1,800 fine and a suspended prison sentence after being brought home and charged in Hungary. That case, which sparked the public pressure on the legislature to enact stricter sentencing for pedophilia crimes, was just one in a series of scandals that has undermined public faith in Mr. Orban’s government.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, center, at a Parliament session in Budapest last year.Tibor Illyes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBefore Hungary’s 2019 municipal elections, a series of video clips released online by an anonymous source showed a prominent Fidesz mayor participating in an orgy on a yacht.The following year a Fidesz lawmaker in Brussels was detained after trying to escape out of a window and down a drainpipe when the police raided a party being held in violation of Covid restrictions that Belgian news media described as an all-male orgy.The last-minute additions to the legislation were criticized by human rights groups, including Foundation for Rainbow Families, which promotes legal equality for all Hungarian families with children.“Fidesz does this to take the public conversation away from major happenings in the country,” said Krisztian Rozsa, a psychologist and board member with the foundation, citing corruption and the government’s responses to the pedophilia scandal and the coronavirus pandemic.Content providers such as RTL Klub, Hungary’s largest commercial television station, and the Hungarian Advertising Association have come out against the new law, saying the rules restrict them from depicting the diversity of society.“Children don’t need protection from exposure to diversity,” said Lydia Gall, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “On the contrary, L.G.B.T. children and families need protection from discrimination and violence.”Linking the L.G.B.T. community to pedophilia is a tactic that may score Mr. Orban and his party points with conservative rural voters, many of whom, spurred on by a steady stream of government propaganda, see the government as a bulwark against the cosmopolitan liberalism symbolized by opposition political figures in the capital.Last year, the Fidesz-controlled Parliament enacted legislation that effectively bars gay couples from adopting children in Hungary through a narrow definition of the family as having to include a man as the father and a woman as the mother.Shaken by a bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, a foreign policy pivot toward China and Russia that has angered his partners within the European Union, and increasing international isolation, Mr. Orban is facing a tough election campaign against a six-party opposition alliance.Balint Ruff, a political strategist, said the move to target the L.G.B.T. community was a “cynical and evil trap.” He added: “It’s a method used in authoritarian regimes to turn their citizens against each other for their own political gain.”It is not uncommon for someone who has spent their whole life in rural Hungary to have never met an openly gay person, Mr. Ruff said, adding that by inundating rural voters with conspiracies about gay propaganda taking over the world, Mr. Orban has found an effective tool for mobilizing voters.“The theme of the campaign will be liberal homosexual Budapest versus the normal people,” he said.By not supporting the new law, the opposition would be branded supporters of pedophilia for the duration of the campaign, Mr. Ruff said. But supporting the bill would betray more liberal voters who find linking pedophilia and the L.G.B.T. community deplorable.For those whose families are directly impacted by such laws, the effects hit closer to home.Mr. Rozsa, from the Foundation for Rainbow Families, said he was worried that bullying and exclusion among Hungarian teenagers would increase against those not seen as heterosexual — and also feared the implications of the governing party’s move for the children of same-sex couples who attend public schools.“Our kids are also going to be targeted,” Mr. Rozsa said. “Our kids have same-sex parents.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on liberal Christians: is this their moment? | Editorial

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      “No one is saved alone,” writes Pope Francis in Let Us Dream, a short book of Covid-related reflections published last month. Those words carry an obvious Christian resonance. But the meaning that the pope intends to convey is primarily secular. The pandemic, he believes, has underlined our shared vulnerability and mutual dependency. By shocking us out of everyday indifference and egotism, our present troubles can open up the space for a new spirit of fraternity. A fresh emphasis on looking out for each other, claims the pope, can become the theme of a more generous and caring post-pandemic politics.Let Us Dream is a pastoral, spiritual book that aspires to address a lay audience as well as a religious one. In its emphasis on civic solidarity, tolerance, concern for the poor and the environment, it is also the latest attempt by Pope Francis to shift the dial of 21st-century Christianity away from the culture wars that have consumed it.There is an obvious temptation to respond wryly: “Good luck with that.” In a number of high-profile ways, 2020 was another depressing year for liberal-minded Christians. The Polish Catholic church worked hand in glove with the state in an attempt to effectively ban abortion and trample over LGBTQ+ rights. The strong disapproval of a majority of Poles, who have no wish to live in a theocracy, cut no ice. In neighbouring Hungary, the Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic churches kept stumm as Viktor Orbán’s government continued to bully minorities in the name of “illiberal Christianity”. During the lead-up to November’s US presidential election, Donald Trump’s cynical weaponisation of the abortion debate helped ensure strong Christian backing for the most profane, religiously illiterate president in the country’s history. And this week, Pope Francis himself indicated his disapproval of the legalisation of abortion in his native Argentina.But this stark summary of the church at odds with the liberal world does not tell the whole story. In Britain, as elsewhere, Christian churches, alongside mosques and synagogues, played a frontline role in the community activism that kept people and families afloat during months of acute uncertainty and hardship. It is from that wellspring of fellow feeling and altruism, the importance of which is suddenly front and centre in our lives, that Let Us Dream believes a “new humanism” can emerge. For those who share that aspiration, whether secular or religious, there are genuine grounds for hope in 2021.A liberal CatholicThe election to the White House of Joe Biden, a Democrat who is also a practising Catholic, is the best news liberal Christians have had for a long time. In a book published last month, the conservative Australian cardinal George Pell said Mr Trump was “a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he’s ‘our’ (Christian) barbarian”. The end of that cynically transactional relationship between Mr Trump’s White House and the religious right signals new possibilities. In his victory speech, Mr Biden quoted from Ecclesiastes, saying that for a divided America, “it was a time to heal”. When he has discussed his faith, the president-elect has tended to talk about altruism, decency and personal integrity, steering clear of provocative dividing lines.Mr Biden has backed access to abortion and same-sex marriage. He will, as a result, be relentlessly targeted by conservative Catholic critics and evangelicals. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, José Gomez, has convened a working group to address the “difficult and complex” situation of dealing with a liberal Catholic in the White House. But the Catholic vote was split evenly between Mr Biden and Mr Trump. And, crucially, Pope Francis is likely to have the new president’s back.This relationship could constitute an important new axis of liberal influence in the west. After a recent phone call between the two, a statement from Mr Biden’s transition team said the president-elect “expressed his desire to work together on the basis of a shared belief in the dignity and equality of all humankind, on issues such as caring for the marginalised and the poor, addressing the crisis of climate change and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities”. This was to more or less tick off the list of priorities the pope has attempted to set, while under constant assault from religious conservatives. The disruption of the recent alliance between Christianity and rightwing populism carries significant implications not only for America, but for the battle against global poverty, the climate emergency and the migration crisis.Fraternity as the new frontierMr Biden’s election is not the only hopeful sign for Christians who long for their leaders to look beyond the narrow preoccupation with reproductive rights and sexuality. Last year was marked by two significant theological documents, one from the eastern church and one from the west. Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, published during Lent, is a radical clarion call for Orthodox Christians to engage with deepening inequalities in developed societies, and to confront wealthy nations with their moral obligations to refugees. The tone is set by the opening words of the text: “Our spiritual lives … cannot fail to be social lives.” Endorsed by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the Orthodox church, the document recalls that “[the] early and Byzantine church had a bold voice on social justice”. This, it states, must be revived and renewed. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), was written in the same spirit. Ideas of fraternity and friendship are developed as a necessary complement to the familiar political categories of liberty and equality. The argument is summed up in Let Us Dream, where the pope writes: “Without the ‘we’ of a people, of a family, of institutions, of a society that transcends the ‘I’ of individual interests, life … becomes a battle for supremacy between factions and interests.”Intriguingly, variations on this theme have been explored in a string of recent publications, both secular and religious. In his valedictory work Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, the late chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, criticises the modern priority of “I” over “we”. Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s The Upswing and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit both attempt to map out a civic territory that avoids the twin dangers of selfish individualism and illiberal populism.In recent years, Christian leaders have too often been silent, complicit or cravenly proactive, as the Bible has been deployed as a weapon in conservative culture wars. The image of Trump marching through teargassed streets to brandish a bible outside a Washington church encapsulated a kind of capitulation. But in the new year, liberal Christians have grounds for cautious optimism. In the necessary project of carving out a new space for a less polarised, more fraternal public square, they have a vital role to play. More

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      in Elections

      End of Trump era deals heavy blow to rightwing populist leaders worldwide

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      As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, many world leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. But Trump’s ideological kindred spirits – rightwing populists in office in Brazil, Hungary, Slovenia and elsewhere – are instead taking a sharp breath.The end of the Trump presidency may not mean the beginning of their demise, but it certainly strips them of a powerful motivational factor, and also alters the global political atmosphere, which in recent years had seemed to be slowly tilting in their favour, at least until the onset of coronavirus. The momentous US election result is further evidence that the much-talked-about “populist wave” of recent years may be subsiding.For Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory, Trump’s dismissal struck close to home. “He was really banking on a Trump victory … Bolsonaro knows that part of his project depends on Trump,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.As the reality of a Trump-free future sunk in last Thursday, Bolsonaro reportedly sought to lighten the mood in the presidential palace, telling ministers he now had little choice but to hurl his pro-Trump foreign policy guru, Filipe Martins, from the building’s third-floor window.The election result represented a blow to Bolsonarismo, a far-right political project modelled closely on Trumpism that may now lose some of its shine. And on the world stage the result means Brazil has lost a key ally, even if critics say the relationship brought few tangible benefits. It brings an end to what Eliane Cantanhêde, a prominent political commentator, called Bolsonaro’s “megalomaniacal pipedream” of spearheading an international rightwing crusade. More