Former US VP Joe Biden criticizes leaders of Romania, Hungary and Poland for their authoritarian impulses

Anca Alexe 26/06/2018 | 07:44

Former US Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in Copenhagen on the issue of “Democracy in an era of authoritarian revival”, in which he criticised the “demagogues and charlatans” who exploit people’s fears and always blame other people for their problems. He specifically referred to Romania, Hungary and Poland to illustrate his points about the rise of illiberal democracy and the use of authoritarian tactics.

Biden said: “When people see the system dominated by elites and rigged in favour of the powerful, they are much less likely to trust that democracy can deliver and address their problems. And in ways that evoke echoes of the 1930s, frustrated and disaffected voters may turn, instead, to strongmen.

Demagogues and charlatans step up to stroke people’s legitimate fears and push the blame always on the other. There always has to be a scapegoat. Now, it’s immigrants, outsiders, the others. This is a storyline we have seen before, it’s nothing new. Rather than some dramatic assault on democracy or [coup], our institutions of freedom are slowly but determinately sanded down, just little by little. Each small step is designed to curb institutional safeguards and concentrate power in the hands of individual leaders.

In Poland, the ruling party portrays checks and balances as impediments – impediments! – to achieving key national goals, and then uses that pretext to stack the courts with political appointees. Hungary’s leaders blame nefarious outside influences on the ills of Hungary’s society by holding up illiberal democracy as a model that best represents the interests of the common people in Hungary. The Romanian government portrays anti-corruption institutions as impediments to effective governance and argues the need to dismantle them to allow them to become more effective.

All around the world, repressive governments are borrowing from one another’s playbook. Deriding a critical free press as fake news, questioning and delegitimizing independent judiciaries in each and every one of these countries, hamstringing civil society with increasingly restrictive and repressive laws, as we saw with Russia’s so-called foreign agent law, which labels any civil society group that receives foreign funding a spy.

These are dangerous impulses for individual democracies, but taken together these trend lines threaten to erode democratic ideals and institutions that have been the foundation for the Western world, and that’s exactly what authoritarian leaders want.”

 

 

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Anca Alexe | 27/03/2024 | 17:32
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