'Trump before Trump': Orban's illiberal model on show in Hungary
"No more public scoldings. No more moralising from podiums," the new charge d'affaires Robert Palladino told guests, including several Hungarian ministers, at this month's US Independence Day celebration.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wants the European nation to serve as a laboratory of far-right ideas and an inspiration for Trump, whom the nationalist describes as "a great friend", and is hoping for a US presidential visit.
Self-touted as a "Trump before Trump", Orban has transformed the national life of Hungary, an EU member and home to 9.5 million people, during his 15-year rule.
In his drive to build what he has called an "illiberal state", he has been accused of silencing critical voices from the judiciary, academia, media and civil society, and of restricting minority rights. Trump's predecessor Joe Biden once accused him of "looking for dictatorship."
'Open-air museum'
"Hungary is like an open-air museum, whose leader appears to have proved it is possible to bring back the so-called good old days," Zsolt Enyedi, a senior democracy researcher at Vienna-based Central European University, told AFP.
"Illiberal ideas have been institutionalised," he added.
Both Trump and Orban target minorities, including the LGBTQ community.
"Orban realised there was not a strong public resistance to incitation against vulnerable groups... so he leveraged these to campaign," the researcher said.
"Similarly, Trump deports people without going through due process as American conventions would dictate," Enyedi added.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
13 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
'Trump: Convicted Felon' headline goes viral
US President Donald Trump arrived in Scotland on Saturday for a five-day controversial visit to the UK and Europe, a Scottish local newspaper made global headlines with a daring front page carrying a message, "Convicted US Felon to Arrive in Scotland." The sensational cover calling 'Trump a convicted felon' instantly went viral on the internet.(X) The headline, now the subject of the massive controversy, was referring to Trump's conviction on 34 counts of forging business records in May 2024. The sensational cover instantly went viral on the internet, sparking both criticism and applause across political lines around the globe. In spite of the uproar, Trump is pushing ahead with his agenda. Also Read | Why is Trump in Scotland and why has his visit sparked backlash? Local paper's front-page viral While the viral front-page grabs global attention, the spotlight returns to Trump's indictments from May 2024. Here's a quick look at the charges facing the US president. New York Business Fraud Case In May 2024, Donald Trump was convicted on all charges in a New York case of business fraud. Prosecutors alleged that he had masked payments to his former lawyer Michael Cohen—who had used $130,000 in suspected hush money to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels—to appear as legal expenses, breaching state law. Trump had denied the tryst and said the payments were lawful. Florida Classified Documents Case Trump is charged with illegally storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion after leaving office. Prosecutors allege the documents were stored in unsecured locations such as a bathroom and ballroom, and that Trump attempted to hide their possession. He has denied everything. 2020 Election Interference (Federal Case) Trump is accused of attempting to reverse the 2020 election outcome by perpetrating false allegations of election fraud and working to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, actions prosecutors attribute to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Trump rejects any involvement in violence or conspiracy. Georgia Election Interference Case In Georgia, Trump and 18 others are accused under RICO charges of conspiring to reverse the results of the state's 2020 election. The case revolves around Trump's taped call asking officials to "find 11,780 votes." Trump denies the charges and says the call was rightful.
Indian Express
14 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Hulk Hogan embodied the American dream — and its many nightmares
Pro wrestling is an ostentatious, over-the-top spectacle of violence and showmanship, an endless soap opera whose characters dress in tights and perform mind-boggling stunts to entertain their legions of fans. The audience knows about kayfabe but doesn't care, allowing wrestling to straddle reality and fiction unlike any other performing art in the world. In many ways, pro wrestling is the perfect microcosm of Donald Trump's America, a country where the line between what is true and false has been catastrophically blurred, news is increasingly unmistakable from parody, politics is conducted and consumed like entertainment, and conflict underpins public life. Trump's own links to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Vince McMahon, the promotion's erstwhile owner who also played a cartoonishly evil, eponymous character, add further heft to this assessment. Hulk Hogan, pro wrestling's greatest ever superstar who died this week, is MAGA through and through. And he is the quintessential American, an ultimate embodiment of the great American Dream, with all its vast contradictions and ugliness. The son of a construction worker, Hogan was a relative unknown outside wrestling circles when he landed a cameo in Sylver Stallone's Rocky III in 1982. His performance caught the eye of the ambitious McMahon, who saw in Hogan's impressive 6'8' stature and 24-inch pythons (read biceps) the key to taking pro wrestling from grimy backrooms and local TV networks in small-town America to the pinnacle of mainstream pop culture. Indeed, WWE might never have been a billion-dollar company without Hulkamania. In the 1980s, Hogan was as big a celebrity as there has ever been — imagine Taylor Swift today, but on steroids (literally). Hogan's rise to superstardom exemplified the ideals of the American Dream: it was a story of what the average Joe could achieve in America through sheer hard work, uninhibited self-belief, and a healthy dose of patriotism. But behind the success of Hulkamania was a carefully crafted in-ring persona deliberately fashioned around these cherished American ideals. McMahon booked Hogan as the archetypal babyface: He would almost always take a pounding before suddenly turning the bout around, and finishing his opponent with an Atomic Leg Drop. This move, in anticipation of which audiences would go into a frenzy, did so much damage to Hogan's spine that he spent his last years on and off a wheelchair. Hogan, and many other fellow wrestlers, would call this his ultimate 'sacrifice' for wrestling. The moustachioed baldie, who would arrive at the ring to Rick Derringer's 'Real American', always reminded the fans to 'train hard, say your prayers and take your vitamins', although he himself would later admit to using anabolic steroids to hulk up. After a high-profile investigation on steroid use in the WWF in 1993-94, Hogan would quickly lose a noticeable amount of muscle — so much for the vitamins. Hogan's character also championed the classic 'cheer for me because I'm American and my opponent isn't' angle, with Hogan wearing his patriotism on his sleeve (often literally). His feuds with the likes Nikolai Volkoff, an ethnic Czech made to play the 'evil Russian' by McMahon, and the Iron Sheik (later called General Mustafa), a supposed Saddam Hussain sympathiser, were rife with not-so-subtle racist stereotyping. Hogan almost always emerged victorious, and in the process cemented America's supremacy. In recent years, a number of unsavoury details have come out about Hogan's private life and personality. He has often made both racist and homophobic statements: A leaked phone conversation in 2015 saw Hogan telling his son, who at the time was serving a brief prison sentence, 'I just hope we don't come back as a couple, I don't want to say it, blizz-ack gizz-uys, you know what I'm saying?' Hogan was also a prolific philanderer and a through-and-through company man who would snitch on his colleagues to curry favour with management. Charisma and wrestling chops aside, Hogan politicked his way to the top and politicked some more to stay there, famously ratting out Jesse Ventura to McMahon for trying to get wrestlers to unionise in the mid-1980s. Hogan thus leaves a complicated legacy for fans of being the quintessential American hero while also, by many accounts, being a somewhat dubious character. His emergence as one of the most vocal supporters of Donald Trump in recent years — Hogan famously called Trump his 'hero' at last year's Republican National Convention — has only made him more polarising. But while it might be 'woke' to hate Hogan today, he was but a product of the world he inhabited. He did what he did to succeed and survive in a cut-throat industry, said what he said because he knew what the audiences wanted. That America made him the superstar he was speaks more about Americans than Hogan himself.
Time of India
15 minutes ago
- Time of India
Qatar threatened to cut EU LNG supplies over sustainability law
Qatar has threatened to cut gas supplies to the European Union in response to the bloc's due diligence law on forced labour and environmental damage, a letter from Qatar to the Belgian government, seen by Reuters, showed. Qatar is the world's third-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), after the United States and Australia. It has provided between 12 per cent and 14 per cent of Europe's LNG since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In a letter to the Belgian government dated May 21, Qatari Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi said the country was reacting to the EU's corporate sustainability due diligence directive ( CSDDD ), which requires larger companies operating in the EU to find and fix human rights and environmental issues in their supply chains. "Put simply, if further changes are not made to CSDDD, the State of Qatar and QatarEnergy will have no choice but to seriously consider alternative markets outside of the EU for our LNG and other products, which offer a more stable and welcoming business environment," said the letter. A spokesperson for Belgium's representation to the EU declined to comment on the letter, which was first reported by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. The European Commission also received a letter from Qatar, dated May 13, a Commission spokesperson told Reuters, noting that EU lawmakers and countries are currently negotiating changes to the CSDDDD. "It is now for them to negotiate and adopt the substantive simplification changes proposed by the Commission," the spokesperson said. Brussels proposed changes to the CSDDD earlier this year to reduce its requirements - including by delaying its launch by a year, to mid-2028, and limiting the checks companies will have to make down their supply chains. Companies that fail to comply could face fines of up to 5 per cent of global turnover. Qatar said the EU's changes had not gone far enough. In the letter, Kaabi said Qatar was particularly concerned about the CSDDD's requirement for companies have a climate change transition plan aligned with preventing global warming exceeding 1.5 celsius - the goal of the Paris Agreement. "Neither the State of Qatar nor QatarEnergy have any plans to achieve net zero in the near future," said the letter, which said the CSDDD undermined countries' right to set their own national contributions towards the Paris Agreement goals. In an annex to the letter, also seen by Reuters, Qatar proposed removing the section of CSDDD which includes the requirement for climate transition plans. Kaabi is also chief executive of QatarEnergy. Qatar Energy gas has long-term supply contracts with major European companies, including Shell, TotalEnergies and ENI.
