Bulgaria loses between 2.4 and 4.9 billion USD of additional GDP per year due to discrimination against LGBTI+ people, as estimated in a report[1] by the Institute for Market Economics (IME). Bulgaria’s GDP could be 2.5% to 5% higher were there to be full acceptance and equality for LGBTI+ people, according to an estimate by IME based on the 2023 data.
In Poland, the word ‘family’ is tossed around by Law and Justice (PiS) politicians all the time. It has become their trademark, and a buzzword woven into every single political activity – both in areas of economy and cultural worldview.
It is a basic need for every human being to connect with others. Social psychology classifies the need for connection as one of the basic human motives, since humans are essentially social beings. Belonging somewhere has countless advantages. But what about when it’s not a partnership or a group, but a crowd?
When the international concept of human rights is seen as a threat to sovereignty and national values, such phenomena as antisemitism, islamophobia and xenophobia are politicized, and minorities are marginalized and excluded. In this situation, the main tool for creating attitudes of tolerance and inclusivity is education.
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.
The stereotype that Jewish people are rich and greedy, and that they corrupt non-Jewish people, is an important factor of far-left antisemitism. The Soviet Union had a long history of antisemitism, often masked as anti-Zionism or anti-cosmopolitanism.
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.
Poland has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, yet the government hopes to reduce healthcare provision for women even more by criminalizing abortions in cases of severe fetal abnormalities.
As of January 2020, 80 different declarations of “LGBT-free zones” were passed by various Polish cities and provinces in central and south-east parts of the country, including four voivedoships, the highest level of administrative subdivision in Poland.
In September 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted changes to the Law on Education that established Ukrainian language as the single language of school education. The Law aims to fight discrimination of national minorities in Ukraine creating the possibilities to study Ukrainian language at national minority schools.
