Political forces that extensively use hate speech in Latvia are not sizable, nor they receive the amount of support that their ideological counterparts in Western Europe do. Nevertheless, in recent years, those fringe ideas got a bit of momentum, with the creation of internet-based political movements.
The Law and Justice Party (PiS) has used three consecutive electoral victories in Poland to polarize society around the “gender ideology” issue, leading to the government’s unanimous opposition of every policy proposal that mentions “gender” or “gender equality”.
During one of his campaign speeches, the current president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, who runs for re-election, compared promoting “LGBT ideology” to something worse than communism. This statement has led to a spiral of hatred.
The fact that the Polish public TV is the biggest fake news factory in the country has been well known for some time. But the news about the Ministry of Justice becoming a national center of hate speech truly electrified Poland in July.
Poland, Latvia, and Estonia started their rainbow revolutions much later than the West – when Stonewell riots happened in NYC, all three countries were still deep in the communist regime with no hope for emancipation.
Reducing the problem of hate speech to nothing more than a conflict built around the issue of freedom of speech can be nowadays considered a somewhat archaic approach.
