Orbán, the friend of Trump and Putin, a figurehead of the European far-right, a Trojan horse in the European Union, has fallen resoundingly at the polls. Let his continental imitators and those who whitewash them and aspire to deal with him take note. Here the imitators are called Orriols and Abascal. Perhaps people are starting to be fed up with discourses of hate, division, and confrontation. With hopeless, enraged, and fatalistic shouting. With "everything is shit." With those who, instead of proposing viable solutions to very serious structural problems, look for enemies under every stone every day, magnify them, feed them. With those who fuel chaos, like Trump does.
Trump is largely to blame for Orbán's defeat. Europeans who had been carried away by the siren songs of the trumpist, illiberal authoritarian far-right –that is, destructive of liberal democracy– and anti-European –against the EU of social rights– are beginning to open their eyes. Including Meloni. With the forward flight to the Middle East, more and more people are having the scales fall from their eyes: the king is beginning to go naked. Pope Leo is helping with this.
Fear is changing sides. What we fear now is so much war, so much violent and inhuman rhetoric, so much brutality, so much contempt for basic rights and freedoms, so much insensitivity to the poverty of others. Parties and policies of hate –like those of Trump, Netanyahu, Orbán, Abascal, Orriols– make you distrust even your neighbor and your neighbor distrust you. They are artifacts of social disintegration, of civic breakdown. They crudely seek for us all to participate in a cultural, social, economic clash. They excite our dark side, bad vibes, anxiety. They find fuel in bad news, any spark serves them to create a fire: instead of running to put it out, they fan the flames on social media. They are professional arsonists. They enjoy finding culprits to impose punishments on. They feed on a sharp punitive spirit. They easily join the witch hunt as a method: if they came to power, how long would our far-right take to create forces in the style of Trump's ICE?
This whole gang feels no curiosity to approach other cultures and realities. Differences give them hives. That's why they reject the idea of a united Europe in diversity, a Europe of citizens. They cling to essential purity, without nuances, ahistorical. They ignore that identities are made and unmade, they evolve, just as we people change throughout life. They take identity to the absurd and turn it into a throwing weapon. They make it a still photo, a trench: so much so that they end up making the identity of welcome hateful to newcomers. Their vision of culture and history is an unscientific caricature, just as when they deny climate change or denied the pandemic.
Beyond police security, sectoral policies only interest them to distort the reality of social aid by proclaiming, through cuts, defense against a supposed army of freeloaders. Education? Healthcare? Housing? Mobility? Energy? Finances? Culture? Environment? In everything they practice the policy of the single culprit: immigrants, especially if they are Muslims. With this, they have more than enough to explain all the evils here and in the world. Of their small, limited, and victimized world.
All this ideological and psychological mess leads them to hatred and anger as sentiments of massive destruction. In their hands, all of us, absolutely all of us, would end up running in danger. Just as the world is now in danger in the hands of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu. Or that Hungary was in danger in the hands of Orbán. The appeal of these parties is to promise you a scapegoat on which to vent by projecting your phobias and frustrations. What they don't say is that their obsessive obsession provokes, as a reaction, that those who feel attacked also attack. Hatred against hatred. A country governed by Aliança or Vox would be a chaotic pitched battle. We are warned. The Hungarians have already understood.
