Democracy in Western Europe has its own shortcomings, thus Central and Eastern European countries are better off sticking to their own versions of it, Hungarian daily Magyar Hírlap’s Brussels correspondent writes in a new commentary:
“Belgium is a country where no one gets the policy they voted for,” Bob de Brabandere, senator of the Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang), told Magyar Hírlap this summer. And he wasn’t joking either: Belgium still has no government after over a year and chances are that if it eventually does have one, it would be the result of very peculiar concept of democracy.
Just as a reminder: The general elections held last May were won by the right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) which received 16 percent of the votes, while the even more anti-immigrant Flemish Interest, placed second with 12 percent of the votes. The fact that any party can win the elections with 16 percent of the vote is itself an indication of the strangeness of Belgian politics, but the country is not only divided along the Flanders-Wallonia line.
Just last weekend, King Philippe of Belgium appointed Egbert Lachaert, the leader of the Flemish liberals (Open VDL), to form a government. Lachaert has initiated coalition talks with six other parties, none of which is the Flemish Interest or the N-VA. Should those talks succeed, they will still not have a majority to produce legislation.
In short, seven Belgian parties have come together to exclude the two biggest parties from government just because those parties have an anti-immigration stance.
Democracy is not the dysfunctional element in the West. Western media is not only becoming increasingly hostile to any conservative viewpoint but is also becoming increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few. In recent news, Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács recently condemned Finland’s largest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat for using a photograph of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in its article on the nature of dictatorships.
“The style the Finnish paper — which, incidentally, is on its way of swallowing the Finnish media market, thereby acquiring a quasi-monopoloy in the country — is simply outrageous,” Kovács wrote in a Facebook post.
The vast number of Western human rights activists, lobbyists, MEPs and other assorted characters should busy themselves with what is happening in countries like Belgium and its increasingly monopolized media landscape across the West. They don’t do it for two reasons. First, they still look down on Central and Eastern Europe and its nations which joined the European Union after 2004 and second, they think that any measure is justified as long as it is directed at right-wing parties and their voters.
Last week, a popular German podcast discussed at length the moral repercussions of voting for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Donald Trump. Many liberal intellectuals are convinced that their worldview is the only legitimate one and anything else should be the subject of scorn or ridicule at the very least. This mindset is why they have set hordes of human rights activists upon Hungary as if we were a third world country.
Thank you very much, but we don’t need this “democracy export”. We have our own democracy.
Title image: The historical building of the Curia (Hungary’s supreme court), which also houses the Attorney General’s office and the Budapest court. (source. Wikimedia Commons)
