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How two angry protests sum up Europe’s politics .. By Ishaan Tharoor

— 18 décembre 2018 add comment

The mass demonstrations that rocked two European capitals on Sunday told a continental story — an illustrative arc that begins with populist ire and anti-migrant sentiment and ends with disillusionment with an increasingly authoritarian status quo.

In Brussels, 5,000 right-wing demonstrators opposed the government’s decision to sign a U.N.-brokered migration pact. There were scenes of violence: Police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse protesters who were throwing rocks and paving stones, including a group that attempted to storm the offices of the European Commission. Nearly 100 people were arrested.

 

In Budapest, an estimated 15,000 people braved the bracing cold to protest new laws enacted by the illiberal government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. One was the creation of a parallel court that effectively gives the executive control over the country’s judiciary. The other was a bill that allows employers to demand up to 400 hours in overtime from their employees each year to boost productivity. Critics dub it the “slave law.” Anti-government protests continued in the Hungarian capital on Monday, with demonstrations targeting the country’s public broadcaster, which is seen as a mouthpiece for the ruling party.

In one instance, you see the nationalist rage that has come to tinge so much of European politics. In the other, you see the gathering disquiet over a deeply nationalist government — one that has used populist rhetoric to justify policies that have steadily undermined Hungarian democracy. In the West, the former has received a great deal of attention in recent years. But it’s the latter that may reflect a truer political battle brewing on the continent.

The unrest in Belgium began after Prime Minister Charles Michel, who led a center-right ruling coalition, traveled to the Moroccan city of Marrakesh to sign the U.N.’s migration compact alongside more than 150 other countries. The pact is an innocuous document aimed at encouraging greater international cooperation on migration. It sets out 23 objectives structured so that the world can better manage the flow of tens of millions of migrants.

It’s not a formal treaty, and it’s wholly nonbinding. The United Nations is not about to impose migration policies on countries around the world. Yet that is precisely how anti-immigrant parties in Europe — not to mention the White House — have tried to frame the measure. The Trump administration signaled earlier in the year that it had no interest in joining the compact; a number of other European governments, including Hungary and the populist coalition in Italy, followed suit.

In Belgium, a right-wing Flemish party in Michel’s fragile coalition quit the government last week. Michel will probably limp along in a minority until elections next year. Analysts suggest that the decision by Michel’s partners to quit was a cynical calculation, a bid to gin up support for the far right ahead of a new vote.

It may prove effective. On Saturday, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen joined erstwhile Trump whisperer Steve Bannon — who is trying to marshal support for the continent’s nationalists ahead of next year’s European elections — at an event in Brussels hosted by Vlaams Belang, an ultranationalist Flemish party. “The country that signs the pact obviously signs a pact with the devil,” Le Pen said.

But if the scenes in Brussels showed the potency of anti-migrant feeling in corners of Europe, what’s happening in Budapest reinforces the sense that most Europeans have more pressing problems on their mind.

No European leader has seized anti-immigrant fervor as vociferously as Hungary’s Orban, a man hailed by Bannon and others in the European far right. Orban has been prime minister for nearly a decade and is seen as the figure at the head of the pack of ascendant nationalists in Eastern and Central Europe. As my colleague Griff Witte wrote in an extensive expose, he has steadily tightened his grip on the levers of power, ushering in what critics describe as a creeping authoritarianism. All the while, he has waged a virulent culture war, demonizing migrants and lambasting Europe’s liberals.

“Supposedly independent institutions — including courts and prosecutor’s offices — have become instruments of political control,” Witte wrote. “Newspapers and television stations are bought up by friendly business executives and dutifully preach the government’s line. Elections still take place, but they are used as justification for the majority to impose its will rather than a chance for the minority to have its say.”

The mounting anti-government protests over the past week are a sign that the frustrated, embittered opposition can still puncture Orban’s nationalist balloon. On Sunday, working-class protesters expressed their economic anxiety with a majoritarian government that is believed by critics to be nurturing a kleptocracy. “They don’t negotiate with anyone. They just do whatever they want. They steal everything. It’s intolerable. It cannot go on,” a transport worker identified as Zoli told Agence France-Presse on Sunday.

“We feel it is the last chance to stop the dictatorship,” Marton Bartha, 28, a protester outside the state media headquarters on Sunday night, told the New York Times. “Maybe dictatorship is a strong word. But our freedom is being shrunk.”

Of course, Orban’s government tried to brush off the protests by returning to a common theme. A spokesman from Fidesz, the ruling party, labeled the protesters as stooges from “the pro-immigration Soros network,” a reference to the Jewish American financier whom Orban has made into a convenient scapegoat for his demagoguery.

But they may not be able to casually dismiss the opposition forever. “How long will this go on for, we really don’t know,” Peter Kreko, a political analyst in Budapest, told the New York Times about the protests. “But it’s a significant mass — in the sense that it seems there is a committed opposition against the government, and I do think it can be the starting point of a broader movement.”

It’s unclear what happens next. Next year’s European election will be seen as a litmus test for a whole host of issues — from immigration to satisfaction with a supranational project like the European Union to public concerns over the erosion of the rule of law. Orban and the West’s right-wing populists view the E.U. and the U.N. as remote citadels of unelected bureaucrats, bent on undermining the sovereignty of nation-states.

But we may be seeing the limits of what such populist hectoring can achieve politically. For Orban, a prime minister convinced that migration is a problem, the irony is that it actually could be part of a solution for his country. The Hungarian labor reform that has sparked such fury is a reaction to a larger demographic crisis: Hungary’s workforce, hit by emigration to wealthier nations in Europe, is stagnating and too small. There’s an obvious remedy to that, but it probably won’t be taken by the anti-migrant demagogue in power.

The turgid wrangling over Brexit continues. My colleague Karla Adam reports:

“After a failed bid to secure further concessions from European leaders on Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May returned to Parliament on Monday with little to offer beyond a new date for a vote on the deal outlining how Britain will withdraw from the European Union.

“May said parliamentary debate on the deal would resume Jan. 7, with a vote held the following week.

“That didn’t satisfy her critics. Opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a largely symbolic motion of no confidence in the prime minister, ‘due to her failure to allow the House of Commons to have a meaningful vote straightaway.’

“The motion, directed at May personally, might be embarrassing for her but could not bring down her government. It also doesn’t require the government to allot time to debate it. On Monday it was unclear when or if such a debate would happen.”

• High-level talks between the Afghan Taliban and the United States have been taking place in the United Arab Emirates as Washington steps up its efforts to chart a path out from Afghanistan’s wars. From my colleague Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul:

“Saudi, Pakistani and UAE officials also were participating in the meeting, one of several held between U.S. diplomats and representatives of the Afghan insurgent group in recent months, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement emailed to reporters.

“Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE were the only nations that recognized the Taliban’s radical Islamist government when it ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until its ouster in late 2001.

“There was no official confirmation from the presidential palace in Kabul of whether any government official participated in the meeting. But Afghanistan’s national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, said in a tweet that he met Sunday in the UAE with officials from the three countries and the United States….

“The Taliban has repeatedly refused to deal directly with [President Ashraf] Ghani’s government, which the group considers a U.S. puppet that is inefficient and racked by internal divisions.”

• There was other good news for Europe’s liberals. Poland’s nationalist government reversed its purge of the country’s Supreme Court, backing away from a showdown with the European Union as the Polish president signed a law on Monday officially reinstating the judges who had been forced out of their jobs.

More from the New York Times:

“It was a remarkable turnaround after months of Poland’s top officials saying they would resist pressure to stop the overhaul of the judiciary. The ruling party, Law and Justice, had put tightening its grip on the courts at the center of its agenda, claiming that it was vital to rid the courts of corrupt judges and Communist-era vestiges.

“The European Union sees the changes Poland has made to its judiciary in the last three years as a violation of the bloc’s core values, a threat to the rule of law and the end of judges acting as a check on political power. Last year, the union chastised Poland and took the first steps toward stripping the country of its voting rights in Brussels — a penalty that has never been used against a member nation.

“Poland’s concession on the Supreme Court is by no means the end of that conflict between the right-wing, nationalist Polish government and Brussels, but it represented a striking change in tone.

“It came ahead of a campaign season that could be a defining test for Law and Justice, with elections to the European Parliament in May, and Polish national elections expected later in the year. The party has sought time and again to appeal to voters by casting Poland’s fight as a battle between bureaucrats in Brussels and patriots at home.”

• The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote a long story on President Trump’s feud with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Most of NATO’s members fail to meet the goal of spending two percent of their GDP on defense. But during an encounter at a July NATO summit, Trump zoomed in on Germany, attacking Merkel personally. Glasser writes:

“With the room cleared of staff, the NATO leaders sat stunned by what one called the ‘bizarre spectacle’ of Trump’s harangue. It fell to another woman, Dalia Grybauskaitė, the President of Lithuania, to defend Merkel. Germany had sent troops to protect Lithuania from Russia, Grybauskaitė pointed out, and Merkel was committed to spending more on NATO’s common defense. The Danish and the Norwegian Prime Ministers also pushed back. In the corner of the room, Merkel strategized with other Europeans about how to stop Trump. Eventually, Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, offered the President what he appeared to want most: a way to claim victory. Rutte noted that, since Trump took office, the NATO allies had collectively raised their defense budgets by some seventy billion dollars. Take the win, he urged the President. Trump did just that.

“And yet, when he emerged from the meeting and spoke with reporters, Trump lied, claiming not only that his allies had capitulated to him but also that they would consider his demand to raise their annual military spending to four per cent of G.D.P., an assertion so politically impossible that Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, immediately issued a public rebuttal. Trump, of course, went on behaving in his erratic, inexplicable manner. As he left the summit, he interrupted the Chancellor while she was addressing her fellow NATO leaders, and kissed her. ‘I love this woman,’ he said. ‘Isn’t she great?’ A senior German official who told me about that particular Trumpian flourish resisted any attempt at full understanding. ‘It’s up to psychologists and historians what to make of that,’ he said.”

Worth the work?

North Korea’s economy — and its construction industry, in particular — is built on slave labor. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are dragooned for decades into dolgyeokdae, literally “storm­trooper,” work crews for little or no pay, barely fed and often forced to sleep in makeshift housing they built themselves.

Today, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is talking boldly of building road and railway links inside North Korea as a first step toward European Union-style regional economic integration. But human rights activists are asking: Could Moon’s ambitious plans help undermine North Korea’s entrenched system of forced labor? Or will they inadvertently fuel and encourage that system?

The brigades’ work is often extolled in state propaganda, and there are few signs that Kim’s regime is willing to dismantle the dolgyeokdae system amid the detente. In fact, Kim is accelerating a construction campaign in North Korea, experts say, in apparent anticipation of possible tourists and foreign investment. Kim has made highly publicized visits to tourism projects such as the Wonsan-Kalma coastal resort and thanked dolgyeokdae workers for their efforts.

The Washington Post interviewed three North Korean defectors who had worked in the dolgyeokdae, including one who worked last year building railway lines and one who had worked as a supervisor for a decade and said a major part of his work was to capture workers trying to escape. All described horrendous conditions, with workers often malnourished, sleeping at night in their work clothes in flimsy temporary housing, even in North Korea’s severe winter, and working with makeshift tools or their bare hands. 

It’s not clear whether Moon is willing to tackle these problems. The South Korean president appears to be focused on building engagement with the North and avoiding sensitive topics, such as human rights, that could derail his efforts. During his September visit, Moon beamed and waved at the crowds in Pyongyang that had been ordered out to welcome him.

Activists, however, are pushing for change. Earlier this year, 200 nongovernmental groups signed a letter to the government in Seoul urging that Moon put human rights on the agenda at his first summit with Kim said Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director general of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

“Why are we always lowering our standards and international standards to North Korean standards?” Hosaniak asked. — Simon Denyer and Min Joo Kim

It’s a man’s world

Since 2006, the World Economic Forum has put out its annual gender gap report, summarizing how women are doing in the spheres of economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment and health and survival. Unsurprisingly, according to the 2018 report released Tuesday, we still have a lot of work to do.

While the overall global gender gap narrowed a bit from last year, women are still participating in the workforce and in politics at much lower rates than men. And women suffered setbacks in access to health and education.

Things probably won’t get better any time soon. According to a statement by the organization, at the current rate of change, “it will take 108 years to close the overall gender gap and 202 years to bring about parity in the workplace.”

Regionally, Iceland leads the world in gender parity, having closed more than 85.8 percent of its overall gender gap. Also topping the charts are Norway, Sweden, Finland, Nicaragua and Rwanda. For this first time, Namibia made the top 10 too, in large part due to its significant increase of women in parliamentary seats.

The countries that performed the worst were Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Chad.

The report also found that one major threat to gender equality in the workforce is also its newest: artificial intelligence. There is a “glaring gender gap that is developing among AI professionals, where women represent only 22 percent of the AI workforce. This gap is three times larger than in other industry talent pools,” WEF writes. And the women who do work in AI are less likely than men to gain positions in senior, more lucrative roles.

The World Economic Forum says self-awareness in the industry can help counteract the problem.

“Industries must proactively hardwire gender parity in the future of work through effective training, reskilling and upskilling interventions and tangible job transition pathways, which will be key to narrowing these emerging gender gaps and reversing the trends we are seeing today. It’s in their long-term interest because diverse businesses perform better,” said Saadia Zahidi, a member of the organizations managing board, in a statement. — Ruby Mellen

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