In 2019 Projekt: Polska with support of the Prague Office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom initiated a project called “Ed Net. Education for Human Rights and Diversity”. The project idea grew from hostile sentiment of populist Central European governments towards anti-discriminatory, anti-hate speech and sexual education and total lack of such education in other Eastern European countries.
Today, the European Commission will publish its annual Rule of Law Report. The new report could now intensify the conflict between the EU and the two Central European member states. Given the continued undermining of democratic principles in Poland and Hungary, one would expect not only a retrospective analysis, but also concrete recommendations for action against violations of the rule of law. However, this does not seem to be the case.
On Tuesday, the 15th of June, the Hungarian parliament passed a new law to protect children from pedophilia. However, the law also bans LGBT+ related content in schools, advertisement and TV. While the opposition boycotted the vote, 157 yes-votes and one dissenting vote enabled the new legislation to enter into force under the leadership of Viktor Orbán’s government.
Viktor Orban’s new legislative package equates homosexuality with paedophilia. For next year’s elections, Orban’s government needed another bogeyman against which it could mobilize populistically. But sexual identity is protected in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The European Commission must immediately initiate infringement proceedings against Hungary, demands Moritz Körner in an interview.
The life of a liberal in Poland is not a piece of cake. Quite frankly, liberals up to this day are really the subject of political torment, given the pitiful choices they are given every election.
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.
Hungary is the black sheep of the European Union. Its contrarian agenda offends the common opinion of other member states. Just recently, the Hungarian government not only threatened to veto the EU recovery budget but also voiced its opposition to the Gender Action Plan, a foreign policy initiative to buttress the rights of women, girls and LGBTQI worldwide. But don’t be fooled: behind this maverick political performance of the Orban government lies a shrewd and…
In what a few years ago would have seemed an unfathomable turn of events, the current Estonian government is set to hold a nonbinding referendum in the spring of 2021 to solidify the definition of marriage as being between a man and woman.
Dóra Dúró, deputy leader of the Our Home Movement (“Mi Hazánk Mozgalom” far-right, national-radical mini-party), tore up and then shredded the book “Meseország mindenkié” (Storyland is for everyone) at a press conference in September.
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.
