It is likely that most voters in Hungary will see Orbán’s argumentation as a distraction from his close political ties to Putin and a distraction from the close interconnection of Orbán’s oligarchic environment to Putin’s oligarchic environment.
The shocking and lawless actions in Washington, D.C., provided many people a wakeup call. They also reminded us all that no nation is uniquely exempt from the temptations of power or from the dangers of mob violence and populism.
The pandemic can rule the agenda, but it cannot rule the ideology. This is the main lesson of the past few days in Hungary. The government has introduced restrictions and a crisis management plan, while PM Viktor Orbán has began writing the new chapter of the Hungarian ideological-cultural war in the meantime.
I keep hearing news about yet another ambulance with COVID-19 patients driving around between hospitals looking for beds, the lack of a basic coordination system for allocating patients to hospitals, and I really have the impression that Poles live in some surreal, tragic reality.
Reflecting and reporting on the impact of the new coronavirus on the ages-old obsessive (in)equality academia, media and others are swinging between claims that SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 (the pathogen / the disease) is either a blindfolded leveler or, on the contrary, a balance destroyer.
70 years ago the Czechoslovakian democrat and women’s rights activist Milada Horáková was executed after a Stalinist show trial. Her political activities and her end are a memorial to the victims of totalitarianism of every kind.
