populism

With a presidential election looming next year, the prospect of Tusk taking a one-man stand against the well-organised machine of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) had come to seem risky, especially with all the lies pumped out by state TV depicting him as a puppet of Germany.

“How Do Democracies Win?” was the main theme of this year\'s edition of Freedom Games, an annual prestigious forum of ideas organized in Lodz, Poland. Needless to say, the title of the forum is a question uneasy to answer. I would also not dare to provide a straight-forward answer to it.

The Hungarian government is not anti-Semitic. It is populist. Playing right into the fears of people is a typical populist strategy. It builds on the same fears as anti-Semitic campaigns do, true, but despite the same foundations, the end results are somewhart different.

The ruling politicians are unfortunately going in the opposite direction. While a person working for a minimum wage in 2015 paid 29% in taxes and levies, with the planned minimum wage, they will pay more than 40% next year.

Swedish think-tank Timbro presented the subsequent edition of the Authoritarian Populism Index. The aim of the index is chiefly to determine to what extent populist parties can pose a real threat to liberal democracy in the European Union and five other countries on the continent.

In 2017, the Cambridge Dictionary proclaimed “populism” the word of the year. There are many definitions of the term, still, it always evokes strong emotions. One of the definitions of populism in politics was proposed by the Swedish think tank Timbro.

Unsurprisingly, among the countries with the most substantial deteriorations in freedom in recent years are Turkey and Poland, both experiencing evident weakening of the rule of law, contracting religious freedom, and attacks on freedom of expression.

Our progress is already big – for example, you can work almost anywhere in Europe. But we have reached the wall – because we don\'t know what foundation, what system we should have. When we do not have solutions, demons wake up.

The last couple of years have seen the citizens of several CEE countries witness the erosion of hard-earned liberalism, while privately and publicly weighing on how to prevent populists in power from further trampling citizen’s freedoms and rights.

Since the beginning of 2015 Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist Fidesz government has produced one hate campaign after another, targeting migrants, the EU (or rather, “Brussels”), American financier George Soros and institutions connected to him, and even the UN.