We may recently often hear that something is a “Putinesque measure”. However, in Hungary, the governing party Fidesz, lead by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is really using Putin’s solutions as its point of reference. Let’s see how similar Orbán’s and Putin’s methods are.
The Liberal movement in Russia is undergoing a serious crisis. There are three reasons for this. First, the Kremlin domestic policies under Putin’s 3rd term in power are designed in such a way that liberals are labelled foreign agents, called enemies of the state, and are being under constant pressure.
Fake news are like religion, you must believe them despite of all common sense and evidence to the contrary. Like any radical religion, it must be protected at all costs. And so, in the fifth volume, Dolores Umbridge made Harry write lines, etching them into his own skin, saying: “I must not tell lies”.
Having said farewell to the year 2016, I do not really know whether I should be happy or worried. Should I be glad that this disastrous year has ended? Or rather fear that 2017 may be even worse. Why? I’ll try to explain it in a nutshell.
With no independent media, no checks and balances, no civil oversight, one of the most corrupt governments in the EU can expand on its already immense powers and get even closer to Putin’s Russia. But it is not too late to act and save what remains of civil society in Hungary.
And that’s how Law and Justice will put the safety of our country on the plater and place it in the hands of Rex Tillerson, for whom keeping Warsaw in the American sphere of influence lost any appeal along with the failure of shale gas extraction on our territory. And Tillerson will pass the plater on to his friends in the East.
It might sound unrealistic with Eurosceptic populism on the rise but the only way to tackle lack of Union’s efficiency, both internally and externally, is to introduce more integration and coordination. In today’s globalised world, aiming for dissolution or weakening the Union is a key geopolitical threat to stability on the continent.
“Nations, just like women, experience brief moments of intoxication. But those moments pass soon enough.”. Adam Michnik talks to Leszek Jażdżewski, editor-in-chief of Polish liberal quarterly magazine Liberté!, about how a brief moment of European weakness will affect Russia in the end and what can go wrong in the meantime.
Merkel’s criticism of Orbán’s domestic politics came through clearly via independent media. The visit made it very clear how far Orbán is from the mainstream European opinion on issues of democracy and rule of law.
What will happen if there accidentally will be a change of government in Russia under the pressure of economic sanctions? This would be a success for European Union, but at the same time it would not solve the fact that Russian propaganda of nationalism has build anticipation in Russian society that a new leader will have to face, having in mind his own reputation.
