Four and a half thousand miles from the White House, the mere whiff of Donald Trump has brought down a Prime Minister who had first held the office 19 years before Trump's first Inauguration. But Péter Magyar is going to disappoint someone, whether the voters who had thought that he was Viktor Orbán without the Orbán, or the international backers who had thought that was just an act, or both.
Disappointment is normal. Ask María Corina Machado or Reza Pahlavi. All that Trump had wanted in Venezuela was to control where its oil went, and an even more hardline Chavista offered him that, so that was all the regime change that he wanted, needed, or would tolerate. And all that Trump has wanted in Iran has been to take a cut of the tolls that he would like to see levied on the Strait of Hormuz, plus any other available revenue, so if an even more hardline Khomeinist, the son of the previous Supreme Leader, offered him that, then that would be all the regime change that he wanted, needed, or would tolerate.
Venezuela remains a dictatorship, as will Iran. But the dictator in Caracas did not join Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address last February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Nor will the dictator in Tehran reimpose the SAVAK in his capacity as an absolute monarch from a dynasty that existed to make even the Mountbatten-Windsors look blue-blooded. And nor will the Iranian dictator be one of the already forgotten old Islamo-Marxist terrorist allies of Saddam Hussein in the PMOI/MEK.
But if Orbán's Hungary was a dictatorship, then how have the voters just removed him? It was not in Hungary that MPs voted a few hours ago to empower the Police to ban recurring protests, the only kind that had ever achieved anything. As ever, a Labour Whip cast the proxy vote of Dan Norris despite his not having the Labour whip. Norris was himself a Whip with Ivor Caplin and with Phil Woolas, to whose canonisation it was a wonder that Norris and Caplin did not turn up. In the front row was the Director of Public Prosecutions who had decided, in March 2011, that Woolas's having been banned from elected office had constituted "sufficient punishment" for his breach of the criminal law, so that there would be no charge. That DPP is now the Prime Minister who was banning protests based purely on their frequency or persistence in a particular area. There is no such ban in Hungary.
As for issues of media freedom there, Lisa Nandy has just exercised her quasi-judicial role to approve the takeover of the Telegraph by Axel Springer, because that is the law in Britain. You need the Government's permission to acquire a newspaper. It is all very well to say that your titles were editorially independent when you appointed the editors. Occasional disagreements are one thing, but when did an editor last go rogue? When did the Telegraph or the Mail endorse Labour? Rupert Murdoch's papers turned Labour when he did, and they turned Conservative again likewise. It was not that Murdoch exerted pressure. He employed editors who shared his outlook. Of course he did.
Axel Springer's outlook is unbridled global capitalism, extreme social liberalism, the European Union, its military alliance with the United States, and uncritical support for the State of Israel. That is a coherent ideology, and if you think that it would not be a good fit for the Daily Telegraph, then you have possibly never read it, and certainly never met almost any of its writers. Exactly the same is true of The Guardian. In my direct experience, it is quite the game in certain parlours to present seasoned journalists from other English-speaking countries with comment pieces from The Times, the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in blind tests, and to revel in their inability to tell which was which. The cues are essentially tribal, especially about class. If you do not pick up on those, then they could all be written by the same person.
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