Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an \u201cilliberal state,\u201d citing Russia and Turkey as examples.<\/span>
<\/span>The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that \u201cliberal democratic states can\u2019t remain globally competitive,\u201d Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cI don\u2019t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,\u201d Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government\u2019s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of \u201csuccessful\u201d nations, \u201cnone of which is liberal and some of which aren\u2019t even democracies.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.<\/span>
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a \u201cworkfare\u201d state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from \u201cdebt slavery,\u201d and to protect Hungarians from becoming a \u201ccolony\u201d of the EU.<\/span>
<\/span>Orban said his \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d won\u2019t deny the \u201cfundamental values\u201d of liberalism, such as \u201cfreedom.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAm I the only one who think that Hungary in 2014 is looking a lot like Italy in 1924.<\/p>\n
Not good.<\/p>\n
When juxtaposed with the ECB working too hard at fighting imaginary inflation, though not to the extremes taken the German central bank in the 1930s, it’s not tough to imagine Europe at war again before I die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Fascism had as its philosophical basis the idea that liberal democracy had failed. Well, the current President of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is making exactly same argument: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an \u201cilliberal state,\u201d citing Russia and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[984,969,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-evil","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}