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    US removes sanctions from Antal Rogán, aide to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán

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    The United States has removed sanctions on a close aide of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the state department said, adding that the punitive measures had been “inconsistent with US foreign policy interests”.Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, spoke on Tuesday with his Hungarian counterpart, the foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, and informed him of the move, state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.“The Secretary informed Foreign Minister Szijjarto of senior Hungarian official Antal Rogán’s removal from the US Department of the Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, noting that continued designation was inconsistent with US foreign policy interests,” Bruce said.The two also discussed strengthening US-Hungary alignment on critical issues and opportunities for economic cooperation, Bruce said.Orbán and his Fidesz party have been among Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters in Europe.Joe Biden’s administration imposed sanctions on Rogán on 7 January over alleged corruption, in a move that Budapest pledged to challenge once Trump returned to the White House on 20 January.Rogán is a close aide of Orbán and has run his cabinet office since 2015.“Throughout his tenure as a government official, Rogán has orchestrated Hungary’s system for distributing public contracts and resources to cronies loyal to himself and the Fidesz political party,” the US treasury department said at the time.Accusations of corruption and cronyism have dogged Orbán since he came to power in 2010, while Budapest’s relations with Washington became increasingly strained during Biden’s presidency, due in part to Budapest’s warm ties with Moscow despite the war in Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOrbán has repeatedly denied allegations of corruption.Rogán has been close to Orbán for decades, running his government’s media machine and helping orchestrate his election campaigns. More

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      Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

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      ‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

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      In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More

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      The Orbánisation of America: inside the 14 February Guardian Weekly

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      We’re just over three weeks into the second Donald Trump administration, and the pace of events both inside and outside the US has been dizzying and unprecedented.Many of us have been alarmed by Trump’s shocking pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war, trade tariffs and territorial claims on Greenland and Panama. But inside America, an equally startling transformation has been taking place.Aided by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has moved swiftly to fire critics, reward allies, punish media, gut the federal government and exploit presidential immunity. Yet much of the blueprint comes not from Trump’s own policy team, but from a power-consolidation playbook established over the past decade by the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.For the Guardian Weekly’s big story this week, our Washington bureau chief David Smith sets out the parallels between Orbán’s self-styled “petri dish for illiberalism” and Trump’s vision for America. Then columnist Moira Donegan argues that it is not the president but Musk who is actually running the US now.Get the Guardian Weekly delivered to your home addressFive essential reads in this week’s editionView image in fullscreenSpotlight | The families vowing to stay in GazaMalak A Tantesh and Emma Graham-Harrison speak to defiant Palestinians who reject Donald Trump’s resettlement plan after enduring 15 months of conflictScience | Why silence is goldenOur increasingly noisy world has been linked to numerous health complaints. But that’s not the only reason we need more peace and quiet in our lives, explains Sam PyrahFeature | An amazing/terrifying brain implantAn accident left Noland Arbaugh paralysed, but Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip allows him to control computers with his thoughts. Is it a life-changing innovation – or the start of a dystopia where a billionaire can access our thoughts? Jenny Kleeman reportsOpinion | The right are wrong on climate – why is the UK following their lead?Promoting green growth does not make you an ‘eco-nutter’. It’s the only way forward, argues Will HuttonCulture | The rise and fall of Emilia PérezLess than three weeks ago, the movie was flying high, with 13 Academy Award nods. Then came a social media scandal and a serious backlash. Steve Rose finds out whyWhat else we’ve been reading I enjoyed this picture essay about 1990s British nightlife in the hours after the clubs had shut. I particularly liked the photographer’s dedication to going to bed at 10pm to be up at 4.30am the next morning to shoot. I imagine he must have some excellent stories from tagging along with some of the groups captured in the images. Eimhin Behan, marketing executive I’m always looking for film recommendations so I was drawn to Rebecca Liu’s piece about the review site Rotten Tomatoes. While the “fresh” or “rotten” critics’ verdicts do lend themselves to a polarisation of opinion, Liu decided to explore the 40 worst-rated films to find if their hype (or tripe) was justified. Neil Willis, production editorOther highlights from the Guardian websiteView image in fullscreen Audio | Going bald in an increasingly hairy world – podcast Video | Artificial news: How to create an AI anchor Gallery | ‘A place with its own rules’: images of London’s Square MileGet in touchWe’d love to hear your thoughts on the magazine: for submissions to our letters page, please email weekly.letters@theguardian.com. For anything else, it’s editorial.feedback@theguardian.comFollow us Facebook InstagramGet the Guardian Weekly magazine delivered to your home address More

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      ‘In a real sense, US democracy has died’: how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán

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      A pitiless crackdown on on illegal immigration. A hardline approach to law and order. A purge of “gender ideology” and “wokeness” from the nation’s schools. Erosions of academic freedom, judicial independence and the free press. An alliance with Christian nationalism. An assault on democratic institutions.The “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has been long revered by Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement. Now admiration is turning into emulation. In the early weeks of Trump’s second term as US president, analysts say, there are alarming signs that the Orbánisation of America has begun.With the tech billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump has moved with astonishing velocity to fire critics, punish media, reward allies, gut the federal government, exploit presidential immunity and test the limits of his authority. Many of their actions have been unconstitutional and illegal. With Congress impotent, only the federal courts have slowed them down.“They are copying the path taken by other would-be dictators like Viktor Orbán,” said Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut. “You have a move towards state-controlled media. You have a judiciary and law enforcement that seems poised to prioritise the prosecution of political opponents. You have the executive seizure of spending power so the leader and only the leader gets to dictate who gets money.”Orbán, who came to power in 2010, was once described as “Trump before Trump” by the US president’s former adviser Steve Bannon. His long-term dismantling of institutions and control of media in Hungary serves as a cautionary tale about how seemingly incremental changes can pave the way for authoritarianism.Orbán has described his country as “a petri dish for illiberalism”. His party used its two-thirds majority to rewrite the constitution, capture institutions and change electoral law. He reconfigured the judiciary and public universities to ensure long-term party loyalty.View image in fullscreenThe prime minister created a system of rewards and punishments, giving control of money and media to allies. An estimated 85% of media outlets are controlled by the Hungarian government, allowing Orbán to shape public opinion and marginalise dissent. Orbán has been also masterful at weaponising “family values” and anti-immigration rhetoric to mobilise his base.Orbán’s fans in the US include Vice-President JD Vance, the media personality Tucker Carlson and Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation thinktank, who once said: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” The Heritage Foundation produced Project 2025, a far-right blueprint for Trump’s second term.Orbán has addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference and two months ago travelled to the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for talks with both Trump and Musk. He has claimed that “we have entered the policy writing system of President Donald Trump’s team” and “have deep involvement there”.But even Orbán might be taken aback – and somewhat envious – of the alacrity that Trump has shown since returning to power, attacking the foundations of democracy not with a chisel but a sledgehammer.On day one he pardoned about 1,500 people who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, including those who violently attacked US Capitol police in an effort to overturn his election defeat. Driven by vengeance, he dismissed federal prosecutors involved in Trump-related investigations and hinted at a further targeting of thousands of FBI agents who worked on January 6-related cases.Bill Kristol, director of the advocacy group Defending Democracy Together and a former official in the Ronald Reagan White House, said: “Flipping the narrative on January 6, becoming a pro-January 6 administration, then weaponising the justice department and talking at least of mass firings at the FBI – that’s further than the norm and very dangerous for obvious reasons.“If he could do that, he could do anything. Why can’t he order the justice department to investigate you and me and 50 other people? One assumes the lawyers at justice or the FBI agents wouldn’t do it, but if a couple of thousand have been cleared out and the rest are intimidated. I’m not hysterical but I do think the threat is much more real now than people anticipated it being a month ago.”Borrowing from Orbán’s playbook, Trump has mobilised the culture wars, issuing a series of executive orders and policy changes that target diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and education curricula. This week he signed an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports and directed the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to lead a taskforce on eradicating what he called anti-Christian bias within the federal government.View image in fullscreenHe is also seeking to marginalise the mainstream media and supplant it with a rightwing ecosystem that includes armies of influencers and podcasters. A “new media” seat has been added to the White House press briefing room while Silicon Valley billionaires were prominent at his inauguration. Musk’s X is a powerful mouthpiece, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has abandoned factchecking and the Chinese-owned TikTok could become part-owned by the US.Trump has sued news organisations over stories or even interview edits; some have settled the cases. The Pentagon said it would “rotate” four major news outlets from their workspace and replace them with more Trump-friendly media. Jim Acosta, a former White House correspondent who often sparred with Trump, quit CNN while Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, was hired to host a new weekend show on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the most dramatic change has been the way in which Trump has brought disruption to the federal government on an unprecedented scale, firing at least 17 inspectors general, dismantling longstanding programmes, sparking widespread public outcry and challenging the very role of Congress to create the nation’s laws and pay its bills.Government workers are being pushed to resign, entire agencies are being shuttered and federal funding to states and non-profits was temporarily frozen. The most sensitive treasury department information of countless Americans was opened to Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team in a breach of privacy and protocol, raising concerns about potential misuse of federal funds.Musk’s allies orchestrated a physical takeover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), locking out employees and vowing to shut it down, with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, stepping in as acting administrator. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X.Musk’s team has also heavily influenced the office of personnel management (OPM), offering federal workers a “buyout” and installing loyalists into key positions. It is also pushing for a 50% budget cut and implementing “zero-based budgeting” at the General Services Administration (GSA), which controls federal properties and massive contracts.View image in fullscreenMusk, a private citizen who has tens of billions of dollars in government contracts, is slashing and burning his way through Washington with little accountability and has significant potential conflicts of interest. An array of lawsuits is demanding interventions to stop him unilaterally gutting government. Protests are erupting outside government agencies and jamming congressional phone lines.But critics aiming to sound the alarm that a shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover face intimidation or punishment. Edward Martin, the interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, threatened legal action against anyone who “impedes” Doge’s work or “threatens” its people. Martin posted on X: “We are in contact with FBI and other law-enforcement partners to proceed rapidly. We also have our prosecutors preparing.”Murphy, the Democratic senator, said: “What’s most worrying to me right now is there’s a whole campaign under way to try to punish and suppress Trump and Musk’s political enemies. It started with the pardoning of the January 6 rioters; now everybody knows that they are at risk of having the shit beat out of them if they oppose Donald Trump.“It extended to the seizure of government funding. It’s clear now that Musk and Trump are going to fund entities and states and congressional districts that support them and will withhold funds from entities and states and congressional districts that don’t support them.”He added: “Now you have this lawyer who represented January 6 defendants, the new acting DC US attorney, trolling activists online, threatening them with federal prosecution. It’s dizzying campaign of political repression that looks more like Russia than the United States.”View image in fullscreenDemocrats such as Murphy are determined to fight back but, being in the minority, have few tools at their disposal. Republicans have mostly appeared content to cede their own power. The party’s fealty to Trump was demonstrated again this week when senators in committee voted to move forward with the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr as director of national intelligence and health secretary respectively – two mavericks whose selection would have been unthinkable just a year ago.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “There had been some lingering optimism that at least some Republican senators would draw the line at some of the more absurd Maga appointees but that hasn’t happened. That also demoralises any potential opposition.”He added: “What Elon Musk represents is basically a hostile takeover of the government and the complete indifference of the Republican Congress to the ways that it is being stripped of its core constitutional functions is demoralising. It is this mood that nothing can be done or will be done to stop them. You’re seeing that in the business community, in the political community, and it’s a fundamental loss of faith in the rule of law and in our system of checks and balances.”One guardrail is holding for now. Courts have temporarily blocked Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, cull the government workforce and freeze federal funding. Even so, commentators warn that the blatant disregard for congressional authority, erosion of civil service protections and concentration of power in the executive branch pose a grave threat.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “You’d have to have your eyes fully closed not to be deeply concerned and outraged about the vacuum that Donald Trump is operating in now. In a real sense, US democracy has died this month. It doesn’t mean it’s dead for the long term but at this moment the idea of an accountable representative system, as the framers of the constitution wrote it, is no longer present.” More

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      Second Trump reign could make life ‘a lot harder’ for EU’s far-right leaders

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      In the end Viktor Orbán didn’t, as he’d promised, celebrate Donald Trump’s win with “several bottles of champagne”. He was in Kyrgyzstan, he apologised, “where they have different traditions” – so it was vodka. But it was still a “fantastic result”.“History has accelerated,” Orbán crowed at an EU summit in Budapest last week. “The world is going to change, and change in a quicker way than before. Obviously, it’s a great chance for Hungary to be in a close partnership and alliance with the US.”Hungary’s illiberal prime minister – and the EU’s disrupter-in-chief, lauded by Trump as a “very great leader, a very strong man” – was not the only figure on Europe’s nationalist right to hail the president-elect’s larger-than-expected victory.Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand whose Freedom party finished first in last year’s elections and is the senior partner in the ruling coalition, also posted his congratulations, jubilantly urging Trump to “never stop, always keep fighting”.Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, commended a “historic friendship” which “will now grow even stronger”, while Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany (AfD) hailed a defeat for “woke Hollywood”, adding that Trump “is a model for us”.Europe’s fast-advancing far-right parties, in power in eight EU member states and knocking at the doors in more, have long seen in Trump a powerful ally who shares their populist, nation-first, conservative, Eurosceptic and immigration-hostile views.View image in fullscreenBut what can they actually expect to gain from Trump 2.0? For all their enthusiastic words, analysts and diplomats say, Europe’s mini-Trumps will probably not get much – and may even find themselves worse off. What’s more, some appear to realise it.Certainly, there may be some political upside to basking in reflected Trumpian glory. “The coming Trump presidency will most probably embolden Europe’s far right and illiberal actors,” concluded experts at the Centre for European Reform thinktank.“Trump will strengthen far-right parties not just by normalising and amplifying their ideas, but by boosting their electability.” His win legitimises their grievances and rubber-stamps their sovereigntist vision; history seems to be moving their way.Besides Orbán, Meloni, Wilders and Weidel, Europe’s longstanding Trump admirers include Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (RN), Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.They may well be joined after elections next year by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, and – with both France and Germany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, weakened by domestic political crises – their influence is plainly on the rise.Some experts argue selected European far-right leaders could be strengthened personally by Trump’s win: Meloni, for example, has put in the groundwork, praising his brand of politics as a model for Italy and regularly travelling to his rallies.Common views on issues ranging from immigration to abortion, and her flourishing rapport with Elon Musk, could see her become Trump’s “main interlocutor in Europe”, said Lorenzo Castellani of Rome’s Luiss University.Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, expressed much the same ambition for Orbán. “We can have a good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak form,” he said: Orbán and Trump have “similar thoughts”.But the dynamics are a lot more complicated than that. While Europe’s far-right leaders may align comfortably with Trump in their hostility to immigration and international institutions, there are also significant differences.View image in fullscreenMeloni’s staunch support for Nato and continued international aid to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, will not be greeted with enthusiasm by the more isolationist voices in the incoming US administration.Similarly, Orbán’s cosy “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, which Hungary has welcomed with open arms as a key economic partner and foreign investor, is a long way from Trump’s aggressively hardline approach to Beijing.As US Republican Mitch McConnell put it, “when Chinese state enterprise says jump, Hungarian officials ask how high”. Those words “caution against any guarantee of deeper [US-Hungary] collaboration”, foreign policy expert Zsuzsanna Szelényi said.Trump’s promised America first trade policies could also prove complicated to negotiate for Europe’s far-right parties. As members of the EU’s single market, they could not respond individually to US-imposed tariffs and a likely trade war.Le Pen’s lukewarm response to Trump’s second triumph – in marked contrast to her joy at his first in 2016, which she hailed even before he had officially won – reflects widespread concern over the consequences of Trump 2.0 for EU industry and jobs.“Americans have freely chosen their president,” Le Pen said. “This new political era should contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations and the pursuit of constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage.”Her protege, Jordan Bardella, even echoed French president Emmanuel Macron, saying that for “us French and Europeans, this US election should be a wake-up call … an opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy”.Far-right voters in Europe are far from uncritical of Trump’s brand of politics, polls suggest: a pre-election YouGov poll found, for example, that people who backed Le Pen would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Trump.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s attitude towards Europe … will be harmful to far-right parties’ core electorate – think inflation, de-industrialisation, job losses,” said Catherine Fieschi of the European University Institute. “Trump is bad news for them.”The idea that Trump himself “gives a damn about building relationships with these people strikes me as very very unlikely”, Fieschi added. “He will think about them on a case-by-case basis, and see whether he can extract something.”Faced with the concrete threats to the continent posed by a second Trump presidency that promises to be even more radical than the first, the EU that Europe’s far-right parties have so long reviled may start to look a little less unattractive.Orbán may be strong at home, said Szelényi, “but Hungary is small, deeply integrated in the EU, and its people like being Europeans. The country’s progress and success is far more dependent on the success of the EU than on anything else.”Like other far-right leaders, said Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University in Milan, Orbán has “tried to play both sides, be strategically ambiguous. The thing about Trump is, he’s not going to let you do that. He’ll force you to make a choice.”Europe’s populists will continue to “say Trumpian things, especially if they have an election coming up”, De Vries said. “But when push really comes to shove – Europe’s security in Trump’s hands, Nato not guaranteed – then maybe quite a few are going to say, maybe we need to work on this in Europe.”Far from uniting Europe’s far right in triumph, Trump’s return could actually deepen the conflicts between them. Ultimately, concluded Fieschi, Trump “is going to make the lives of Europe’s far-right leaders, as Eurosceptics, a lot harder. They’re going to be caught between staying Eurosceptic, lining up with Trump and hurting their base – or lining up with the EU, shedding their specificity and losing voters. They’ve been ‘out-populist-ed.’”Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More

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      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

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      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump’s love for Viktor Orbán hints at what another Trump term will look like | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as “the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats”.Orbán has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orbán; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orbán’s small European nation and the US, Orbán’s rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orbán – and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of “national conservatism” – Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.Lesson number one: if you want to control the country, you must completely control your own party. After losing two successive national elections at the beginning of this century, it looked like Orbán’s career might be finished. Instead, he managed to govern his Fidesz party with an iron grip. It is not an accident that far-right populist leaders everywhere treat their parties as personal vehicles, with no real internal debates, let alone dissent, tolerated.That has consequences for a political system as a whole: the leader faces no restraints from political heavyweights who are fellow partisans – and who would have credibility with followers – when acting on the national stage. By 2020, Trump had already been transforming the Republican party into a kind of personality cult; that’s one reason nobody stopped him on the road to January 6. Friday marked another step in the total subjugation of the party, as Trump installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair (creating a political family business on the side).Of course, only Trump says the quiet part out loud and declares his desires for dictatorship; he has been raving about Orbán’s credentials as a “strong man” and a real “boss”. Trump’s acolytes are more guarded. One area where they don’t hold back, however, is education – they keep gushing about “Orbán’s model”. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, has declared universities “the enemy” and advised that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”. Supposedly the lesson is not to “eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching”.What’s being previewed here? Hungary happens to be the only country in the European Union with a systematic and structural violation of academic freedom. There it’s the government which decides what counts as an academic subject and what doesn’t (gender studies does not, of course). Orbán has also forced one university to close its doors for evidently political reasons.The ideal is not only to assert control over education and culture but to make the state as such into a partisan instrument. Like other far-right populists, Orbán has replaced career civil servants with loyalists – a lesson US right-wingers are picking up eagerly. Before paying homage to the autocrat-in-exile in Palm Beach, Orbán spoke to the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank that has laid out with chilling precision a Trumpist plan for hijacking what should be a neutral bureaucracy in the name of destroying “the deep state”.Orbán has been Putin’s ally inside the EU, trying to block sanctions and withhold support for Ukraine whenever possible. On the surface, the affinity is ideological: both supposedly believe in “strong families” (never mind how Putin treats his own family, or possibly multiple families) and the assertion of “national sovereignty” in defending borders (never mind whether that involves invading other countries).Yet the relationship is ultimately transactional. Orbán will reach out to whichever power he can – including China and Iran – to bolster his regime at home. The “national conservatism” show, including its American Putin fanboys, is patently useful because it gets critics fixated on issues like same-sex marriage instead of corruption and the destruction of democracy. Trump’s transactional approach was evident during his time in office and, if re-elected, he’ll probably double down on it in a second term.Whether Trump has learned from his experience of the presidency is a hard question. What’s not hard is the question of whether Trump is eager for retribution. Orbán felt it a grave injustice that he lost the 2002 elections; when he returned to office in 2010, he did so with plenty of resentment and a strategy for never letting go of power again. It would be wrong to extrapolate too much from a country with a smaller population than Pennsylvania. But here the parallel between two politicians who Trump himself declared “twins” couldn’t be clearer.
      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

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      If Trump wins, US would look like Putin and Orbán’s ‘illiberal democracy’, Raskin says

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      If Donald Trump wins a second presidency, the US would resemble the authoritarian regimes of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a prominent Democratic congressman predicted Sunday.During an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, Jamie Raskin invoked the names of some of the globe’s most powerful strongmen political leaders to characterize the threat posed by Trump’s status as the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination despite the mound of legal problems with which he is grappling.“The role of the government in his view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his … enemies,” Raskin said of the former president and reality television show host. “So what would a second term look like?“It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin Russia. It would look a lot like Viktor Orbán in Hungary – illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights or liberties or respect for the due process system, the rule of law.”Raskin added: “Their position is that they don’t accept elections that don’t go their way. They refuse to disavow political violence – they embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power. And then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician, and that is Donald Trump in their book.”Raskin said another turn in the Oval Office for Trump would thrust the US “into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize as continuous with the past”, one that instead would feel more familiar in Xi Jingping’s China or in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil before the latter man was ousted from office last year and then barred by his country’s courts from running for re-election due to abuses of power.The Maryland congressman’s dramatic admonition to Psaki came days after Trump went on Univision and suggested he would use federal investigators and prosecutors to pursue his enemies if he scores a victory in next year’s presidential election.On Saturday, Trump promised in a speech to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin” in the US. Many commentators noted how the term “vermin” echoed antisemitic rhetoric that the Nazis frequently employed to dehumanize Jews as they murdered 6 million of them during the Holocaust.Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Saturday that Trump – who routinely speaks fawningly of Putin and other autocratic world leaders – is “planning an extreme expansion” of the immigration crackdown that the Republican oversaw during the presidential term he won in 2016.The plan reportedly envisions sweeping raids that round up undocumented people in the US before detaining them en masse in sprawling camps while they await deportation. Among other measures, it also calls for a revival of his first-term ban against travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.Raskin served on the US House committee which investigated the deadly Capitol attack staged by Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021, weeks after he lost the presidency to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.After a series of televised hearings last year, the committee recommended that the justice department file criminal charges against Trump. And since March, a combination of federal and state prosecutors have obtained more than 90 criminal charges in four separate, pending indictments against Trump accusing him of election subversion, retention of government secrets and illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor.He has also faced civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a rape allegation which a judge deemed “substantially true”.Trump has denied all wrongdoing and sought to portray himself as a victim of political persecution. Nonetheless, he has held commanding polling leads in the contest for the 2024 Republican White House nomination. And there is a consensus among experts that a rematch between him and Biden would be very close.The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, on Sunday said her organization is ready to support and embrace Trump as its candidate if he clinches the party’s nomination.“The voters are looking at this, and they think there is a two-tiered system of justice,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union. “They don’t believe a lot of the things that are coming out in this. And they’re making these decisions. And you’re seeing that reflected in the polls.” More