Articles

Viktor Orbán has won a third successive landslide victory in Hungary. A refashioned electoral system helped him return to power, but a fragmented and incompetent opposition has paved his way for over eight years now, argues Réka Kinga Papp.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson has attracted fame and controversy with a series of YouTube lectures and interviews challenging what he calls ‘radical leftist ideological assumptions’ in the academy and elsewhere. Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič asks him what all the fuss is about.

Social cuts and a nationalist reorientation of cultural policy have been the major trademarks of Austria’s new right-leaning government in its first 100 days. Despite the demonstrative show of unity, cracks in the coalition are already showing, reports Raphaela Tiefenbacher.

Native Americans have long been beloved in Hungary, where ‘Indians’ stand for what is real, endangered and exceptional. Viktor Orbán has used the trope to channel demographic anxiety and bolster his anti-migrant rhetoric, but it could also spell trouble for his politics of fear.

Over a month since the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová in Slovakia, the investigation remains inconclusive. But the outpouring of grief and anger that the killings provoked has led to mass street protests, and contributed to the resignation of the prime minister and interior minister. Samuel Abrahám looks back on a month of tumult.

Disillusion with social media only stimulates the search for ever more refined techniques of manipulation. Detoxing won’t help, writes Geert Lovink: it is collective action, not will power, that can free us from the permanent state of distraction.

Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party looks well placed to sweep a third successive general election on 8 April. Why is its brand of right-wing populism – famously dubbed ‘illiberal democracy’ by Orbán himself – so successful in Hungary? Ferenc Laczó investigates.

Political theorist Michael Walzer, in conversation with Thomas Casadei of Eurozine partner journal ‘Il Mulino’, considers the noble aims and ignoble results of revolution – and in particular the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Intellectuals once mocked clumsy attempts to censor art on ‘moral’ grounds in late-Franco Spain and elsewhere. They’re not laughing now. The shift to identity in politics could give the morality police a new lease of life, argues philosopher José Luis Pardo.

Retrospectives of 1968 tend to dismiss its socialism and instead to see identity politics as its primary legacy. Rightly so? Claus Leggewie asks how far the New Left achieved its political goals and whether identity politics were necessarily incompatible with its anti-capitalist and social-revolutionary agenda.

Having turned the law into an instrument of state policy and private vendetta, and having turned the legislature into a caricature without power or independence, can Vladimir Putin afford to become an ex-president? As the Russian leader prepares to be re-anointed in an election on 18 March, Mark Galeotti explores Putin’s options.

Spanish and Catalan nationalisms are to a large extent mirror images, argues historian Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič; the clash between them represents a battle between competing ideas of sovereignty, and makes the Catalan dispute so important for wider European debates.

Islamic feminism critiques Islamic patriarchy by historicizing and reinterpreting sources of scriptural authority. Secular feminists, however, rule out any possible compatibility between feminism and Islam. Belgian social scientist Ghaliya Djelloul reviews the arguments and suggests a way past restrictive dichotomies.

A week after journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were found murdered in Slovakia, the investigation into their deaths risks being overshadowed by a growing political row in which the prime minister has suggested the president is under the influence of George Soros. His attack echoes populist tactics used by Viktor Orbán in neighbouring Hungary.

A marginal presence through 70 years of post-war Italian democracy, anti-partyism is now part of the political mainstream. The dilemma now facing the Five Star Movement is how to realize its ambition of creating direct, digital democracy without a formal party organization.

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ‘agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.