Photo: Valya Egorshin via Flikr (CC-BY-2.0)

By banning ‘homosexual propaganda’, protecting ‘religious feeling’ and reining in ‘foreign agents’, Vladimir Putin is seeking to entrench Russian traditional values against Western liberalism.  LGBT activists may now need to rethink their tactics, writes Richard Mole.

 Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to tighten his political grip at the expense of the country’s nascent civil society is continuing apace. Following the bill last summer requiring NGOs which receive foreign funding and engage in ‘political activity’ to register as ‘foreign agents’, on 30 June Putin signed into law a bill banning the spreading of ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’.

 The bill, which passed in the Russian Duma by 436 votes to 0 (with one abstention), levies fines of 5,000 roubles (£100) on individuals who disseminate information about ‘non-traditional sexual orientations’ among minors or promote ‘the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional relationships’.

The fine is increased to 100,000 roubles (£2,000) if individuals discuss gay-related issues in a positive or neutral manner in the media or on the Internet, and rises to one million roubles (£20,000) for organisations. The inclusion of the phrase ‘among minors’ ensures that practically any public LGBT event will violate the law; just in case, anti-gay protestors at last month’s Gay Pride in St Petersburg were encouraged to bring their children with them to ensure that the law did indeed apply.

 Activists have argued that the ‘homosexual propaganda’ law legitimises discrimination and violence against LGBT individuals in Russia, citing the cases of two gay men murdered in separate incidents in May. Critics have sought to establish a causal link between the new anti-gay law and anti-gay feeling in Russia. However, this overestimates Putin’s ability to mould public opinion – his anti-Westernism has, after all, failed to dent Russians’ generally positive feelings towards the EU –  and underestimates the pre-existing intolerance towards lesbians and gay men left over from the Soviet period. (more…)

Photo: Bmw Spirit via Flikr CC-BY-2.0

Since 2011, few countries have been exempt from protests against traditional ways of doing politics. Guest contributor Ivalyo Iaydjiev examines how similar Bulgaria’s experience is to those countries that have recently seen mass protests and how it will cope.

The chances are, you are not aware that Bulgarians have spent over three weeks on the streets in what are the the biggest anti-government rallies since 1989. That’s hardly surprising, given that worldwide media attention has been fixated on the violent repression at Taksim square in Turkey, the mass protests in Brazil, or, most recently, anti-Morsi demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Yet as this hardly exhaustive list demonstrates, the sheer number of protest movements since 2011 makes it hard to believe that all is just coincidence.

One way to generalise meaningfully about this recent wave of protests is to follow Moises Naim’s idea that traditional power is actually ‘evaporating’, leaving many situations quasi-ungovernable.  Alternatively, we can look into what the World Economic Forum presciently named the key geopolitical risk of 2013, the ‘vulnerability of elites’. However, it is probably too early to draw large-scale conclusions about this period; instead, it is interesting to see how events in Eastern Europe resonate with other similar developments around the world. Indeed, Bulgaria is neither, as a famous graffiti put it, ‘in step with time’ as many protesters seem to think, but nor is it completely divorced from our times. (more…)

Photo: Burrows/Wikimedia commons

The EU must find a response to the increasingly aggressive nationalist turn of Hungary’s current government write Erin Marie Saltman and Lise Herman.

What does the European Union do about a member state that has recently been referred to as the ‘cancer in the middle of Europe’?

Hungary has come under increasing scrutiny from European Union bodies and international watchdogs since the 2010 national elections, when the Fidesz government won a two-thirds majority in parliament. Since then the right-wing government has installed large overhauls of the country’s foundational institutions, including a new constitution, fundamentally changing the functioning of the media, the judiciary, the Central Bank and the education system. Many of the government’s changes have mirrored propositions first put forth by Hungary’s radical right party, Jobbik.

These changes have been criticized by the European Union and international actors for reinstating undemocratic and authoritarian elements into Hungary’s governing foundations. While the Fidesz government has re-tailored some of their new legislation to appease international critics, they remain largely defensive of the new direction Hungary is taking. As a consequence, European institutions are having to confront the real challenge of defining their supranational power over members. (more…)

Photo: Christoph Waghubinger/Wikimedia Commons

Czech debates about the forced removal of the Sudeten Germans exercise a powerful fascination, but they are refracted unevenly in historical writing in English writes guest contributor  Martin D. Brown.

 Seasoned Czech Republic-watchers will be well aware of the paucity of coverage provided by English language sources. With some exceptions, on the sporadic occasions when the country does make an appearance it tends to be in stories about political corruption, natural disasters, or the Czechs’ fondness for beer.

 This is nothing new – see Neville Chamberlain’s comments, circa 1938 – and the obvious solution is to read Czech, although, even this approach is not always straightforward, as was revealed by a dispute that arose during the Czech Presidential elections in early 2013.

 The elections, a contest between foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg and former prime minister Miloš Zeman (who won), proved ill-tempered, and included a heated televised dispute over the legacy of the forced removal of around two and half million Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945. Intriguingly this just happens to be one subject that has garnered a fair amount of English language coverage in recent decades.

 Superficially this was a clash between opposing sides of the Czech political spectrum: Schwarzenberg, on the centre-right decried the ‘expulsions’ as illegal, unjust, against all the accepted norms of international law and argued they had contributed to the success of the communist coup in 1948; while to the left, Zeman defended the ‘transfers’ as a necessary response to the Sudetens’ collaboration with the Nazis, legal under international law and part of the constitutional   foundations of the modern Czech state. Particularly noteworthy was the way both candidates expressed their respective positions through the terms ‘expulsion’ (vyhnání) and ‘transfer’ (odsun)  to denote their approval or disapproval for the process.

 Anyone following this spat would have been left with little idea which position was the more accurate, and turning to Czech sources wouldn’t have offered any immediate answers. (more…)

Photo Guillaume Speurt CC-BY-SA 2.0

Licia Cianetti explains the broad appeal of Latvia’s traditionally Russophone Harmony Centre party in Riga– but argues that ‘post-ethnic politics’ may not be just around the corner.

 On 1st June the residents of Riga went to the polls to elect a new City Council. The election came after four years under mayor Nils Ušakovs, the first ethnic Russian to lead an administration in the capital. Ušakovs secured another victory for his moderate Russophone ethnic party, Harmony Centre, and kept his post for another term.

That Ušakovs won did not come as a surprise to anybody was politics in Riga; the main question before the elections was not whether Harmony Centre would win but by how much it would win.

 Ušakovs was elected mayor of Riga in 2009, when Harmony Centre won 34% of the vote and had entered a coalition with the mainstream Latvian party Latvia’s First Party/Latvian Way (LPP/LC). The unthinkable then became reality: Riga, where a great share of Latvia’s population and wealth is concentrated, came under the control of a Russophone party that – by virtue of being Russophone – had consistently been excluded from power at the national level.

 The 2013 municipal election did not mark the end of this ‘anomaly’, but instead entrenched Harmony Centre’s dominant position in Riga. Harmony Centre’s electoral bloc with the local political party Gods kalpot Rigai! (Pround to serve Riga, GKR) won an impressive 58% of the vote, giving them 39 seats of the 60 seats in Riga City Council. Only two other parties made it beyond the 5% threshold: the right-wing nationalist National Alliance (17.8%, 12 seats) and the centre-right Unity (14%, 9 seats), both currently in the Latvian government. Ušakovs’s success in Riga surely will force other parties to reconsider about what to do with Harmony Centre at the state level, whose ongoing exclusion from national power is looking a less and less tenable strategy. (more…)

Photo: David Sedlecký CC BY-SA 3.0

Last month, the Czech Republic’s prime minister Petr Nečas resigned after his chief of staff was charged with corruption. Following the collapse of the Nečas government,  President Miloš Zeman, appointed a technocratic caretaker administration over the heads of the country’s main parties.  Zeman’s move may pose a fundamental challenge to the parliamentary character of Czech democracy, writes Seán Hanley.

The collapse of the centre-right government of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas last month came as little surprise. His coalition had struggled on for more than a year without a parliamentary majority trying to push through an unpopular package of reforms and austerity measures that divided even its own MPs. Nor, in hindsight, was it surprising that Nečas was forced to resign in a corruption scandal. Although by reputation a geekish ‘Mr Clean’, Nečas’s efforts to root out corruption in his own Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and in wider political life proved patchy and ineffectual.

The main talking points were how close the arrests came to Nečas – the main accused is his former chef de cabinet Jana Nagyová – and why Czech police and prosecutors had only now got their act together after years of suspicious inaction. Commentators speculated that the anti-corruption probe could open out into a Central European version of Italy’s Clean Hands operation in the early 1990s that brought down the whole party-political establishment.

Most commentators assumed, however, that in the interim the coalition would limp on until scheduled elections in 2014 under the Civic Democrats’ stopgap leader Miroslava Němcová, or that the deadlock would be broken by a cross-party vote to dissolve parliament. Attention shifted to the familiar ritual of party delegations being called in for talks with the president, who constitutionally appoints the prime minister and informally plays a brokering role in government formation.

At this point, however, the country’s recently elected president Miloš Zeman tore up the political script. (more…)

József körút (Boulevard), c. 1935:
Pest as the centre of the press (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

From the golden age of Hungarian Jewish culture to inter-war anti-semitism, Budapest is constantly being rewritten, finds Gwen Jones.

Writing in 1910, a good decade before Al Capone and associates attained international notoriety, the Hungarian critic and arts patron Lajos Hatvany (1880-1961) introduced an imaginary Western European reader to the latest developments in his country’s culture and history. Tracing Hungary’s elevation following the 1867 Compromise with Austria, from ‘a rudimentary agricultural people to a higher rank’, into the era of economic growth and progress, he suggested that the country was not merely Europeanizing, it was Americanizing: ‘Budapest will become the Chicago of the Balkans’.

My book takes its title from Hatvany’s ironic remark, and discusses the ways in which Hungarian intellectuals viewed and wrote about their capital city from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War Two. Referring to the speed with which Budapest grew in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and contrasting this with a dusty ‘Balkan’ backwardness on the periphery, Hatvany placed the Hungarian capital within an absurd contradiction. In this, he was far from alone.

While compiling the book’s index, which was by far the most entertaining part of the entire writing process, I began by listing references to ‘Budapest is Hungarian’, and then for ‘Budapest is not Hungarian’. Next, I compiled various images writers had used to describe the city over this forty-year period. Budapest had been compared to, among other things, Babel, Babylon and Sodom. It was a ‘New Jerusalem’ built by Jews, and ‘Judapest’, the latter description attributed to Karl Lueger, who was mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. Budapest was the Hungarian Paris, a muse, a parvenu, a Potemkinopolis, a whore and a volcano. Moreover, the Buda side was stuffy and conservative, much like an elderly uncle, while Pest, the centre of commerce, journalism and cabaret, was a cocotte, a fashionable prostitute. In the words of Rezső Seress’s popular interwar chanson, Hiába van palotád Budán, ‘No point your having a villa in Buda, it’s Pest where you go for fun’. (more…)

Photo: Victorgrigas via Wikimedia Commons

With his regime running out of steam, Vladimir Putin is resorting to the rhetoric of the past and traditional values. Marie Mendras sees little future in it. 

The moment of truth for a non-democratic leader is when he needs to revive his fading authority and legitimacy. A snatched electoral victory over a year ago brought Vladimir Putin no new popularity, indeed quite the opposite.

Since his return to the Kremlin, his words and actions have reflected entirely negative emotions, such as fear of his own people, distrust of the elites around him, and a desire to avenge himself on those who have dared oppose him. Much of his energy goes on proving himself right and his critics wrong: he even accuses these of working for foreign powers and endangering national security. Putin has not recovered from the humiliation and scare of last year’s political contest, and is now facing tough economic and social challenges. The choice he has made is to try to restore his authority with a combination of targeted repression, doctrinaire ideology and an increase in control over institutions and companies. This is an unlikely recipe for success.

Weakened legitimacy

Vladimir Putin was re-elected on a controversial vote in March 2012. He could have won his new mandate more honestly, had he accepted the possibility of a second round runoff, but he was determined to win an absolute majority in the first round. He wanted to humiliate the other ‘authorised’ candidates by raising himself high above them, proving that he was the one and only – and a loyal Central Electoral Commission conferred on him a generous 63% of the vote. A year on, all the voters’ associations and NGOs that investigated election fraud are being harassed and some, like the Golos association, might have to close down. Key figures in the movement for free elections are also being prosecuted.

Putin’s election in 2000 and 2004, and Dmitry Medvedev’s election in 2008, were ‘managed’ ballots as well. This time, however, things turned out less manageable than usual. The widespread and vocal public protest of the winter of 2011-12, news of which flew around the country in a few keystrokes, exposed all of the regime’s rottenness and trickery. And the anger of a revitalized civil society was directed at the leader in person, under the ubiquitous slogan: ‘Putin, ukhodi!’ [Putin – out!]. His party fared badly in the parliamentary elections of December 2011, and in Moscow itself its performance was a complete disaster.

Throughout the 2000s, Vladimir Putin built his power and legitimacy on order, rising living standards and Russia’s growing global status. However, he will have more difficulty delivering in all three of these areas in the months and years to come, and he will be held to account for it. (more…)