Around 10,000 protesters have gathered in Hungary's capital to oppose a bill by the country's right-wing government that critics say targets free speech and independent media.

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A mass protest in Hungary on Sunday drew around 10,000 people in what some demonstrators called an act of resistance against recent actions by the right-wing populist government to restrict basic rights and crack down on independent media.

The protest, the latest in a recent wave of anti-government demonstrations, came days after a lawmaker from the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán submitted a bill that would allow the government to monitor, restrict, penalize and potentially ban media outlets and non-governmental organizations it deems a threat to the country’s sovereignty.

The bill, which has been compared to Russia’s “foreign agent” law, is expected to pass in the parliament where the ruling Fidesz party holds a two-thirds majority. It is seen by many of Orbán’s opponents as among the most repressive policies the long-serving leader has leveled at his critics in the last 15 years of his rule.

[…]

The bill introduced last week outlines a broad definition of what constitutes a threat to sovereignty. Organizations may be targeted if they oppose or portray in a negative light values such as Hungary’s democratic character, national unity, traditional family structures, or Christian culture — suggesting that even legitimate criticism of government policy could be treated as a national security threat.

Sunday’s demonstration came after two-and-a-half months of weekly protests against an anti-LGBTQ+ law passed in March that banned Pride events and allows authorities to use facial recognition software to identify individuals attending the festivities.

Hungary’s government has argued its policies on LGBTQ+ rights are necessary to protect children from it calls “gender madness.” But many critics believe the measures were designed to stir up animosity against sexual minorities and help Orbán mobilize his right-wing base ahead of next year’s elections.

  • einkorn@feddit.orgEnglish
    19·
    18 hours ago

    It’d be really interesting to know when and how Orbán flipped from a moderate progressive mindset to autocratic dictator.

    • Novocirab@feddit.orgEnglish
      13·
      18 hours ago

      Interesting question. This is what I found.

      What happened to the shaggy-haired freedom fighter, many asked [in 2015], and why has he taken a sharp right turn? But that is the wrong question, shaped by Western liberals’ erroneous expectations of post-communist central Europe. A better question is, why wouldn’t he?

      (…)

      He graduated [from law school] in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group, which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz. The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media. They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists. They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.

      In the early 1990s, Orban decided to reinvent the party as a conservative and moderately nationalist movement. Many of Fidesz’s original members left in disgust. Others stayed loyal and were rewarded with ministerial posts in the first Fidesz government from 1998 to 2002. That laid the groundwork for Orban’s later slide toward centralizing political and economic power. It was based, say those who know him, on two pillars: ideology and electoral mathematics.

      Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above. Nationalism, and increasingly, populism, provided the ideological underpinnings. The left of the country’s political spectrum was crowded with liberals and socialists of the post-communist variety. There was a large gap on the right, where, it is now clear, a majority of Hungarians naturally sympathize.

          • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.worldEnglish
            12·
            16 hours ago

            The linked text thats highlighted in OPs comment basically just says he did it bcz he could. That’s not a reason.

            • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.eeEnglish
              5·
              14 hours ago

              The mistake is assuming that Orban was ever anything but a populist. Orban never really changed, what changed was the state of populism in central Europe.

              Basically, in the 90’s liberal reform was popularized following the implosion of the Soviet Union. However, there was a conservative backlash following the “shock therapy” doctrine the IMF took when reforming the former Soviet block.

              Conservative backlash in this case being styled after late Soviet socialism. Which was conservative in social mores, and in nationalist intent, but left leaning in economically. The older more impoverished population wanted to go back to the days before the collapse and before the implementation of shock therapy.

              Orban has almost always riden the sentiment of populism whether that be liberalism or the sentiment of the Soviet era. The lone time he abandoned populism was in the early 00’s where he tried to align himself with the middle class, which cost him the election. Since then he has doubled down on his populist agenda.

            • Novocirab@feddit.orgEnglish
              4·
              16 hours ago

              The last paragraph does address his motive:

              Orban’s flirtation with Western-style liberalism was superficial. He naturally inclines to a power-based politics, imposed from above.