Today we live between wars and threats, setbacks and disasters, a situation that can certainly reinforce our desire to escape to an interior garden or to limit our activity to the most parochial and family contacts.
This desire is not entirely illegitimate: if we focus on the terror of the world, we end up losing any attention to the beauty of the world.
And the conscious and lucid attitude of those who do not want to stop being attentive cannot become an unhealthy fixation on the mortal dementia that the would-be owners of the world drag us into, forgetting about life “seeing it unravel its thread, which is also called life, seeing the factory that it stubbornly makes itself”, as João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote. Our duty is to stand uncompromisingly on the side of life that continues, against all the harbingers of death that occupy our space and time.
Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in Hungary is good news amid the misfortunes we are faced with every day. Peter Magyar is a politician from the conservative cultural area to which Fidesz belongs, of which he was a member until recently. But the vote he obtained, in which left and right, countryside and city, and an impressive majority of young people converged, shows a desire for change, which his Tisza party will not be able to ignore and which the 2/3 majority it obtained allows it to carry out, as a government.
The networks of interests created and the legal and constitutional clauses created to make true alternation difficult must be Peter Magyar’s first objectives. “We liberate Hungary” was his first proclamation.
In relation to the European Union, there is the same desire for change and Trump and Putin suffered a clear defeat. But in foreign policy the weight of realities counts more and perhaps the positions of the new Hungarian government regarding Russia, on which Hungary still depends in terms of energy, and Ukraine, with which disputes persist from history (the situation of the Hungarian minority in the former Carpathian Ruthenia), will reveal some greater moderation in a policy that will now be focused primarily on dismantling the system of internal power set up by Orbán.
But it is clear that the attitude towards the European Union will change and ease. And much more recent than the disputes with Ukraine, the sad memory of Soviet domination and the 1956 invasion was deeply wounded with the public disclosure of the vows of eternal friendship exchanged between Putin and Orbán and the role of Russian agent played by the Hungarian minister who reported to Moscow all the confidential discussions in which he participated in European meetings.
Putin’s defeat and no less defeat for Trump, who gave his full support to Orbán, sending Vice President Vance to Budapest to participate in the rally in support of FIDESZ, with a personal telephone message from him to the participants of that demonstration.
We have reasons to feel more confident in the strength of democracy today.
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