How Democracy Became the Enemy
Last edited Fri Jul 6, 2018, 02:11 AM - Edit history (1)
By Roger Cohen at the N.Y. Times
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/opinion/sunday/orban-hungary-kaczynski-poland.html
"SNIP.......
“The danger is threatening us from the West,” Orban, who has been in power for eight years and is seemingly headed for re-election Sunday, said in February. “This danger to us comes from politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris.”
To counter it, the Hungarian prime minister has established a template: Neutralize an independent judiciary. Subjugate much of the media. Demonize migrants. Create loyal new elites through crony capitalism. Energize a national narrative of victimhood and heroism through the manipulation of historical memory. Claim the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances.
And, lo, the new Promised Land: competitive authoritarianism, a form of European single-party rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it is likely to yield only one result.
There’s no totalitarian secret police. Nobody disappears in the night. Foreign capital is welcome. Hungary is not unfree but it’s not free either. It’s the new semi-closed hybrid of Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the shadowy leader of the conservative governing Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of whom fought as youths for the liberty the West embodied.
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