(本文篇幅不短，不習慣閱讀英文的朋友、鄉親與同志們請把英文文
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我們接著讀「倫敦金融時報」的一篇報導:
Orban speech sparks Hungary concerns(EU urged to monitor Hungary as Orban hits atliberal democracy)
By Kester Eddy in Budapest
The Financial Times
7/31/2014
A Hungarian opposition party is urging the EU to step up its monitoring of democracy in the country after prime minister Viktor Orban said he wanted to ditch liberal democracy in favour of building an illiberal state. The move comes after Mr Orban said in a speech at the weekend that the financial crisis had shown liberal democracies could not remain globally competitive” and praised models such as Russia, Turkey and China. .[匈牙利的反對黨正在呼籲歐盟要對匈牙利的民主政治加強監測
Together-PM, a small, centrist opposition alliance, is writing to the European Commission in response, asking it to take a stronger stance on issues such as media freedom, civil society and government reforms of the constitution in Hungary.
The prime minister has launched an attack against democracy as we understand it in Europe,” Viktor Szigetvari, the Together-PM co-chairman, told the Financial Times. We want the incoming European Commission to consider that if we were not already a member of the European Union, then Hungary as presented by the prime minister would not be ready to become a member.
Mr Orban s speech, delivered in Baile Tusnad in a Hungarian-speaking region of neighbouring Romania, is seen as the boldest exposition yet of his political philosophy one which opponents say puts him at odds with some fundamental EU principles. One prominent critic said Mr Orban had at last presented the road map for Hungary under his leadership.
Addressing an annual gathering of ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Mr Orban denounced a decadent and money-based west and outlined a future Hungarian state which would shun western European values to create a successful nation.
The hottest intellectual topic of today is understanding systems which are non-western, non-liberal, which are not liberal democracies, perhaps which are not even democracies, and they still make some nations successful, Mr Orban said. He added that Singapore, China, India, Russia and Turkey were stars in this respect.
Mr Orban s Fidesz party won a second successive two-thirds majority in parliament in elections in April, despite clashing with the EU several times during its first four-year term over moves seen as clamping down on media and democratic freedoms.
In the past four years, and looking towards the next four, Mr Orban said: We are making ourselves independent of and free from western European dogma and ideology.”
We are trying to create...a new Hungarian state, globally competitive...We want to create a work-based society which is admittedly of a non-liberal nature, he said.
Mr Orban began his political life as a self-declared liberal, anti-communist student dissident in the 1980s. But he warned on Saturday that non-governmental organisations in Hungary were employing subversive political activists paid for by foreigners a reference to an ongoing dispute over civic groups financed primarily by Norwegian state funds.
Although the prime minister declared that the new model state would not deny liberal values such as freedom, the address provoked a general outcry from Hungarian opposition parties.
Hungary is tending towards becoming a country ruled by a despot seeking to go back to before the peaceful regime change [from communism in 1989], said Jozsef Tobias, chairman of the opposition socialists. By abandoning liberal democracy Orban is breaking with the basic values of all democratic groupings socialists, liberals and conservatives as well.
Mr Orban has also caused alarm among ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries.[Mr Orban s] vision is in sharp contradiction to everything that we have been trying to accomplish for the past 25 years in Romania...a strong, centralised state, which is not in the interests of any single minority group, Bela Marko, an ethnic Hungarian leader in Romania, told a Budapest radio station on Tuesday.
Yet apart from the planned EU appeal, Hungary s weak and divided opposition parties have mustered little concrete action, and Mr Orban s speech has so far prompted little outcry from the public.
I must admit Fidesz is still popular, said Mr Szigetvari. “[But] long term, this policy cannot be successful. What Orban said against civil organisations and democracy, it s unacceptable. People did not vote for that: even Fidesz voters want to live in a western-style country.
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在「倫敦金融時報」發出警訊後，美國的「華爾街日報」也跟進，以
The Illiberal Idea Rises"
Hungary's leader issues a warning to a complacent West.
The Wall Street Journal
8/2/2014
One consequence of America s retreat from global leadership has been damage to the idea of political and economic liberty world-wide. Political scientists call this "democratic backsliding"the erosion of liberal institutions in states that had recently transitioned to democracy, though a better term might be authoritarian recidivism.
Consider the striking comments by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. I dont think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations," Mr. Orban said in a speech earlier this week. He went on to cite Russia, Turkey and China as successful models to emulate, "none of which is liberal and some of which aren t even democracies." [匈牙利的Orban總理在本週稍早前的一場演講中，提及俄羅斯
Mr. Orban entered politics as an anti-Communist in the 1980s and once identified as a liberal in the 19th-century sense of the word. Yet since returning to power in the country's constitutional checks and balances. He has packed courts and other independent institutions with loyalists from his ruling Fidesz party, politicized the central bank, nationalized private pensions, and barred the media from delivering unbalanced news coverage."
The same period has witnessed the rise in Hungary of Jobbik, an explicitly neo-Nazi party. Jobbik s leaders have called on the government to count the Jews in parliament, proposed to set up "criminal zones outside cities to segregate and surveil Roma residents, and erected a statue in Budapest honoring Miklos Horthy (1868-1957), the military leader who allied Hungary with Nazi Germany. Fidesz has often abetted and amplified, rather than confronted, Jobbik s ugly politics.
Many of these developments are attributable to Hungary s painful post-Communist transition. As elsewhere in Europe, slow growth, joblessness and economic mismanagement by parties of the center-left and center-right have been a boon to extremists and would-be authoritarians. "Liberal democracy can t remain globally competitive, Mr. Orban said.
Hungary s slow-motion transformation into a soft-authoritarian state may appear to Washington and Brussels as a provincial concern on Europe's periphery. Yet Mr. Orban looks with admiration to Vladimir Putin and harbors Putin-like aspirations. Hungary has in recent years granted citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states, and the goal of resurrecting a Greater Hungary stretching beyond the country s post-World War I borders is no fantasy for many nationalist elites.
More broadly, Mr. Orban s illiberal candor is a warning that free markets and free societies need more forceful defending. The West s victory in the Cold War led to a complacency that the liberal idea was triumphantthat it was "the end of history," in the fashionable phrase of the day. But authoritarians are always lurking to seize on democratic weakness.
Western Europe needs to set a better example of what freedom can achieve by reviving economic growth, and the American President who ostensibly still leads the free world ought to break his pattern and speak up on behalf of the liberal idea as if he believes it. If President Obama won t do it, then those who want to be his successor should.
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關於「華盛頓共識」與滑稽可笑的所謂「北京共識」，美國的政論家
台灣建州運動發起人周威霖
David C. Chou
Founder, Formosa Statehood Movement
(an organization devoted in current stage to making Taiwan a territorial commonwealth of the United States)
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