By most standards, Austria’s democratic credentials are sufficient to warrant a position at the top of rankings. Regardless of whether you take Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), or Freedom House’s landmark report on Freedom in the World, Austria fares well.
In the summer, the US government sent to Hungary a good friend of President Trump as the new ambassador, David B. Cornstein. His self-proclaimed priority was to save CEU. He failed. Unfortunately, in the eyes of liberty-loving Hungarians, this is a failure of the United States and of America’s leadership.
Centralization, decentralization in Hungary. How to best approach the subject? How best to describe a country, which at the moment has no other long-term goal other than the consolidation and retention of power for the governing Fidesz party?
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.
On September 12, 2018, the European Parliament voted to initiate sanctions under Article 7 against Hungary. While the decision is definitely not a win for Viktor Orbán on a European level, it did boost his position at home.
Viktor Orbán gave his traditional annual speech, underling the need to strengthen Christianity, building Christian democracy in Hungary, while fighting liberalism. Christian Democrats surely cringe upon hearing this line of thought, leaving us all to wonder what an illiberal Christian democracy ought to look like.
When facing illiberal regimes, a stream of victories by populists and a seemingly unstoppable retreat of liberal democracy, should we also simply adept to the new reality and “make our peace”? I would argue that this is the strategy many people have been pursuing in Hungary.
The hatred towards the “other” constitutes a leading political platform of one of the two ruling Bulgarian parties – United Patriots. On the other hand, populism is finding gaps in the economic policy through statements on the fight against monopolies and a number of legal actions to curb business.
For twenty-three years, Bosnia and Herzegovina has managed to exist and in the last few years more and more authors and researchers acknowledge that its complexity and decentralization are the main reason why Bosnia and Herzegovina survives as a state, satisfying the needs of political elites.
Mazowiecki proved that the strategy of dialogue is really the one that enables achieving big goals. The recent decision of the two main opposition parties in Poland – Nowoczesna and Civic Platform – to emabrk on a closer cooperation in the forthcoming 2018 municipal elections is a step in this direction.
