Latest news with #ChristianConservative
Washington Post
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
No arrests after Budapest Pride defied Orban's ban, police say
Hungarian authorities have declined to detain or arrest the tens of thousands of participants who took part in Budapest's LGBTQ+ Pride parade last month, the city's police said in a statement Monday, despite looming fears of an after-the-fact crackdown. The annual parade and celebration, held since 1995, was in the crosshairs this year, a target of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Orban, a self-described 'illiberal' Christian conservative, led a push that resulted in the Hungarian parliament banning the public event in March and threatened to track participants with facial recognition technology after organizers pledged to forge ahead.
Euractiv
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Euractiv
New normal: Fight over controversial judge reflects new era in German politics
Germany's consensus-driven parliamentary system has entered a more rough-and-tumble period amid a rise of the political extremes Euractiv is part of the Trust Project Nick Alipour Euractiv Jul 11, 2025 18:49 4 min. read News Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. BERLIN – A row in the German coalition over a controversial high-court nominee has turned into a test of wills that reflects a new reality in the country's politics. The coalition government of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) was set to elect three new judges for the sixteen-member constitutional court in the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, on Friday. But discord over the nomination of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf – the SPD pick whose liberal views on abortion stirred opposition on the conservative benches – forced the partners to abandon the vote after several dozen Christian Conservative lawmakers threatened to oppose her. The failed vote is not just a blow to the cohesion of Germany's fledgling coalition, but to the authority of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Jens Spahn, the leader of the conservative parliamentary group, both of whom had signalled they would support Brosius-Gersdorf's nomination. More broadly, the dissension in the conservative ranks so early in the term signals that the fractious climate that characterised Germany's previous coalition – and ultimately precipitated its collapse – is not, as many voters hoped, over. The centrist alliance holds one of the narrowest majorities in postwar history as parties on both on the far right and left have gained ground. That reality has led factions within both the CDU and the SPD, the two parties that have dominated German politics since the war, to abandon more moderate terrain in an effort to claw back lost ground. This week's battle over the court nominee is only the latest example of this phenomenon, and unlikely the last, as the coalition is expected to tackle a number of hot-button partisan issues in the coming years, including conscription and migration. Conservative values Brosius-Gersdorf, a 54-year-old law professor, has advocated liberalising Germany's restrictive abortion law, which criminalises abortions in some circumstances, though without rigorous enforcement. As part of an expert committee on abortion law reform, she argued for a blanket decriminalisation of abortion last year. She has also argued in favour of allowing vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and publicly supported banning the far-right Alternative for Germany. Over the last days, right-wing actors had accused her of partiality. Conservative MPs – many of whom opposed liberalising abortion rules – have criticised her nomination, though mostly behind the scenes. Speaking anonymously, one lawmaker dubbed her "critical of life", another called her 'unelectable' and 'maximally unqualified' due to her vaccine position. Majority miscalculation Despite that opposition, both the chancellor and Spahn, the CDU's parliamentary leader, had insisted earlier this week that the Christian Democrats would back Brosius-Gersdorf. But on Thursday it gradually became clear they had underestimated the opposition within their ranks and would likely fail to produce the necessary two-thirds majority. After an impromptu meeting on Friday morning, the Christian Democrats officially asked to delay the vote on Brosius-Gersdorf, citing unsubstantiated accusations of plagiarism involving her doctoral thesis. The coalition then decided to postpone the vote, leaving SPD lawmakers fuming. The fate of the nominations is now in question. The SPD's chief whip, Dirk Wiese, said that he never would have thought that Germany could experience polarised debates about judge nominations like in the United States and Poland. 'The behaviour of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group today is in no way comprehensible to me,' said Macit Karaahmetoglu, a fellow SPD lawmaker and chair of the Bundestag's agenda committee. The opposition branded the failed Friday election a 'disaster' for the coalition, as Green parliamentary leader, Britta Haßelmann, put it. She blamed 'above all' Spahn and Merz for the impasse, adding that such an incident was unprecedented during judge elections. All eyes on Merz The evident split over abortion rights is putting a renewed spotlight on the stability of Merz's majority in parliament. Back in April, Merz did not garner enough support to be confirmed in a first round of voting – a t least 18 of his own MPs refused their support. He was still elected but only in an unprecedented second round. Support from the Social Democrats is also not a given. As a staunch conservative, Merz has long been somewhat unpopular with the SPD's leftist wing. This week's events are another indicator that social policy is increasingly becoming a bone of contention between the two governing camps. In recent weeks, the parliament's president, Julia Klöckner, triggered a controversy when she scrapped the parliament's official engagement in Berlin's annual pride parade – much to the dismay of SPD lawmakers. (vib, mk) Euractiv is part of the Trust Project Topics
ABC News
28-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Budapest LGBTQIA+ march swells into massive anti-government demonstration
Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through Hungary's capital as a banned LGBTQIA+ rights rally has swelled into a mass anti-government demonstration. In a major show of opposition to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, crowds set off across one of the main bridges, waving rainbow flags and with some people carrying signs mocking Mr Orban. Eszter Rein Bodi, one of the marchers, said: "This is about much more. Not just about homosexuality … This is the last moment to stand up for our rights." One sign read: "None of us are free until everyone is free." Mr Orban's government has gradually curtailed the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community in the past decade, with a law passed in March that allows for the ban of Pride marches, citing the need to protect children. Mr Orban's opponents see the move as part of a wider crackdown on democratic freedoms ahead of a national election next year when the veteran prime minister — whose party has dominated Hungary's political scene for 15 years — will face a strong opposition challenger. Small groups of far-right counter-protesters attempted to disrupt the peaceful march, but police separated them and diverted the route of the march to avoid any clashes. Mr Orban and his government, who promote a Christian-conservative agenda and have championed family values, have defended the restrictions, saying the need to protect children supersedes all other rights. The prime minister posted a photo with his grandchildren on the morning of the march, with the caption: "This is what I am proud of." Marchers included students, families and people from the countryside who said they had never attended a rally before. The Erzsébet Bridge, built to carry six lanes of traffic, was engulfed with people. Local media sites including and Magyar Hang estimated the crowd at 100,000, though Reuters could not confirm that figure. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony told the rally that the message was "clear"; that the government had "no power over us". March organisers said participants had arrived from 30 different countries, including 70 members of the European Parliament. More than 30 embassies expressed support for the march and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called on Hungarian authorities to let the parade go ahead. Budapest's mayor had tried to circumvent the law banning the march by organising Pride as a municipal event, which he said did not need a permit. Police however banned the event, arguing that it fell under the scope of the child protection law. Mr Orban provided some clues on Friday about what participants could expect when he warned of "legal consequences" for organising and attending the march. Earlier this week, Justice Minister Bence Tuzson warned in a letter sent to some foreign embassies in Budapest that organising a prohibited event was punishable by one year in jail, while attending counted as a misdemeanour. The law that allows for the ban of Pride lets police impose fines and use facial recognition cameras to identify people who attend. Mr Orban's attacks on Pride initially increased his support, political analyst Gabor Torok wrote on social media, but he said opinion shifted after the police ban and the legal debates surrounding the march. Mr Orban's dominance and ability to set the political agenda has faced increasing challenges from centre-right Opposition Leader Peter Magyar's Tisza Party, which had a 15-point lead over Mr Orban's Fidesz in a poll this month. Tisza, which has been avoiding taking a strong position on gay rights issues, did not specify, in response to Reuters questions, whether it believed the Pride march was lawful, but said those attending deserved the state's protection. Reuters
NDTV
05-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Is The US In A Constitutional Crisis?
Almost a month into Trump 2.0, with Trump's 'muzzle velocity' of Executive Orders (EOs) spreading more disquiet than even the worst-case scenarios had envisaged, the question increasingly looming among US watchers is whether the US is in a constitutional crisis. The US Constitution has stood out for its clear separation of powers among the three arms of the government: The executive (the elected President), the legislature (House and Senate), and the courts. But the trampling that the legislature has been subjected to by the Trump executive threatens to upend the constitutional system of checks and balances. Trump's flurry of EOs have targeted several offices and agencies established by Congress - USAID being the most prominent and well-known - and have terminated spending mandated by Congress, in executive overreach. Predictably, the many afflicted by the EOs have gone to court, and predictably again, the courts have stayed the execution of many of the EOs. Until now, the Trump administration has either abided by the court's restraints or submitted that it would like the court to review its order - in short, enter the process of thrashing the issue out in court. But Vice President JD Vance threw a 'curve ball' by tweeting that just as no court would try to tell a General how to run a war, courts do not have the right to curb the 'legitimate' powers of the executive. The Constitution's founders had not foreseen a situation where the polity would be so polarised that the Congress and Senate would lose sight of their constitutional salience. Rare is the legislator who has voted across party lines in recent years; under the vengeful Trump, rarer still. Hence the refrain: with Trump rampant, and the prospect very real that court orders could be disregarded or defied, how far is the US from a constitutional crisis? The Trump administration's mission is to restore the executive's powers which, it argues, were curbed post-Watergate by the weakened Nixon presidency. His two chief point men to effect this mission are Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. The OMB is the White House's gatekeeper, overseeing the actual spending of the programs passed by Congress. Vought is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Conservative who believes it is his Christian duty to re-establish the primacy of the executive. The congressional outlays, Vought argues, were meant to be a ceiling; instead, they have become a floor. Federal bureaucracy in line of fire Worse, the Federal bureaucracy, he charges, has become a 'fourth branch,' an unelected mass of 2.4 million Federal employees, who are out of control. They are unaccountable and they can't be fired. They have to be brought to heel. Vought was quoted as saying at a conference in 2023: 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work... We want to put them in trauma.' Understandably then, a recent article in The Atlantic on 'How Hitler Dismantled Democracy in 53 Days in Germany' by Timothy Ryback, a historian who has written several books on Hitler's Germany, stayed in the magazine's 'Most Read' list for weeks on end. And a reading of 'Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run The World' by the vastly experienced and knowledgeable Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum, was almost delicious in the many moments of irony it evoked. The playbook followed by MAGA devotees to demonise USAID followed exactly the playbook used by propagandists of Russia and China, as spelled out by Applebaum, in their repeated attacks on US democracy. In the USAID case, it all began at 9 am on February 5 when an independent journalist posted an unsubstantiated claim online that USAID had paid $8 million to Politico, a Washington-based online newspaper. Politico immediately clarified that USAID had paid it only $24,000 for subscriptions, which the journalist acknowledged 10 hours later was indeed the truth. However, by then the post had gone viral. In the next 36 hours, it accumulated 15,000 posts, including from a Republican Representative from the House and from Viktor Orban, Hungary's autocratic Prime Minister whom Trump admires. Conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, had seized upon the online storm to allege that Democrats had used USAID to fund a 'fake news empire.' Orban followed this up with an allegation on X that Politico had financed the 'entire left-wing media in Hungary,' notching 27 million views. Then President Trump jumped in on his Truth Social account to criticize government news subscriptions to the likes of Politico as 'pay-offs' for talking up Democrats. 'This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history,' he wrote in all caps. The White House press office hurriedly announced the cancellation of its Politico subscription. Ms. Applebaum is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins, a long-term observer of Russia, and an acknowledged historian of authoritarianism. Her book is a primer on how the growing tribe of autocrats in the post-Cold War world are banding together to expand their sphere of influence. In it, she details how autocrats use the media to sow doubt and confusion about democracy itself. One example she elaborates is eerily similar to the USAID slur campaign. In February 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, it alleged that secret US-funded bio labs in Ukraine were conducting experiments with bat viruses. The charge was immediately rubbished but not before conspiracy networks had spread the hashtag #biolab on Twitter, notching up nine million views. MAGA's favourite TV host, Tucker Carlson, played clips on Fox News of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesman discussing the allegation and demanded that the Biden administration should 'stop lying and tell us what's going on here.' The Chinese foreign ministry, Ms. Applebaum recounts, took the story further by declaring that the US controlled 26 bio-labs in Ukraine. Even as Xinhua ran headlines like 'US-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,' media outlets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with content-sharing agreements with Xinhua and other Chinese media entities amplified the charge. China's motive, Ms. Applebaum details, was clear: It wanted attention to be diverted from the charge that Covid-19 had spread from its labs in Wuhan. But the story also appealed to conspiracy sites in the US like the Q Anon network, who are virulently anti-vaccination. In an eerie chorus, even as Ukraine joined battle with Russia, the Russian, Chinese, and 'extremist American' interests all repeated the Russian accusations justifying the invasion and parroted that Ukrainians are 'Nazis' and that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA. So successful was the echo chamber effect that, according to one poll, Ms. Applebaum recounts, one out of four Americans believed that the biolab story was true! Conspiracy theories abound The story does not end there. In March 2022, Ms. Applebaum writes, the Russian state media ran a story that Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery weapon for bioweapons, first infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread diseases. Russia's ambassador to the UN followed up with a statement about the 'biobird scandal,' warning about 'the real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine.' What is the larger game plan of autocrats? Ms. Applebaum argues that 'autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics (in democracies). They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.' Propagandists also leverage one established social truth: Smear campaigns work. No matter how quick, effective, credible, and resounding the denial, some odium still sticks to the individual or entity smeared. A week ago, President Trump had notched up the highest approval ratings ever for him: 53%. How many would bet that the bulk of his followers will not believe the smear campaign against USAID? President Trump had repeatedly vowed in the election campaign to seek 'retribution' from his enemies. What will happen if the US Federal government uses all the instruments of the state - legal, judicial, and financial - to target one of President Trump's personal enemies? Trump's critics charge this has already begun in the Justice Department, which controls the FBI, with line personnel who had investigated the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection being targeted. Ms. Applebaum's book came out on the eve of the November election with Trump's return very much on the cards. In it, she had forewarned: 'If he (Trump) succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.' Her book's descriptions of the autocrat's playbook hold the promise of being a useful mirror to track the trajectory of Trump 2.0.
