4Liberty: LGBTQ Community Became Viktor Orban’s Latest Scapegoat

In the second half of 2019, racism was the next topic to be tested, and the Hungarian Roma community became the focus point of Orbán’s hateful rhetoric. Orbán started with a harsh anti-Roma narrative, then denied financial compensation for Roma children who were forced to learn in segregated schools for years. Orbán portrayed the victims of segregated education as people who are “looking for free money”.[...]

In May 2020 Fidesz made a radical move: they completely banned legal gender recognition for Hungarian transgender and intersex people. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in Europe: legislators usually work towards a more equal society, not the other way around. This law ended a 20 year practise with which transgender people could (although, though a very long and malfunctioning, but still existing process) get the personal documents that provide their basic safety within the society. [...]

These cases show how Fidesz shifted from the “behind closed doors” narrative to the “pathologizing” narrative. And when Fidesz started talking about changing what LGBTQ people are doing in the privacy of their own home by sending them to conversion therapies or depriving them of their right to adopt, fundamental radical groups started to disrupt LGBTQ cultural indoor events.

read the article

4Liberty: Spring in Poland: Liberal View on Robert Biedron’s New Political Party

Robert Biedron’s project may be strategically significant if it leads to gaining the support of the entire leftist electorate before the forthcoming parliamentary elections. In this scenario, Robert Biedron would succeed in minimizing the loss of votes that may be otherwise issued in favor of the Razem or the Green parties, etc., but which would not be enough to land these parties any parliamentary seats.[...]

The launch of the Spring party has one crucial advantage: its leaders must now reveal the party platform. When analyzing the planks recently presented by Robert Biedron, a praise should be the starting point. It must be clearly stated that a bold party platform covering issues of ideology, gender equality, minority rights, secular state is very much needed and deserves a spokesperson in Poland.[...]

However, from he liberal perspective, the planks related to ideology are the only part worth praise. The presented socio-economic program is a combination of wishful thinking, social populism, and (oddly enough) ultra-liberalism mixed with lack of any serious financial analysis that would explain how the proposed changes shall be financed (and who should pay for them).[...]

Robert Biedron’s Spring has one more advantage. It is chiefly a party of a new generation and a group of thirty- and fourty-year-olds. Although I’m not a hard-core supporter of promoting only young politicians (I welcomed, for instance, the news that the European Coalition is created with participation of such seasoned politicians as Radosław Sikorski or Marek Belka), it is evident that Polish political scene suffers from a generation gap.

read the article

4Liberty: Does Poland Need the Left Wing?

The leaders of the left have no recipe for neither themselves, nor their parties. It seems that they have no clue who to address, what people consistute their target audience – whereas in order to create a viable political option, defining and gathering the core, loyal electorate are indispensible. And although it is not only a problem typical of only Polish parties, in our country it is manifested in a particularly radical form: the lack of any left-wing representation in the Parliament. In many places in “the West” we witness the weakening of socio-democratic and socialist parties and a significant increase in power of right-wing populists, who start to better (at least rhetorically) address the needs of the previously socialist electorate. [...]

Now, the main line dividing the society goes between those who desire openness, tolerance, cooperation, trade and those who wish to be separated from others by a fence and who seek safety in tradition and nation, while at the same time deeming trade as a threat. This divide starts to be more visible geaographically: the residents of big cities versus the inhabitants of the provinces. Meanwhile, the left – especially in Poland – positioned itself across this divide, in turn losing the popularity among both groups.

After the “moral revolution” in 1968, the left more actively used and still uses liberal slogans of the sexual revolution – the revolution which now reflects the prevailing way of thinking of the big-city middle class, but which in Poland is to a great extent foreign to the excluded groups or the inhabitants of provinces, who still remain very conservative. At the same time, the leaders of the new Polish left (Barbara Nowacka of the United Left party or Adrian Zandberg of the Together party), due to their cultural and social background, education, or simply their language and behavior, address their political offer to middle class and are credible in their eyes – this, however, does not work for the working-class electorate or the province’s electorate.

read the article