Thursday, October 27, 2022

A Progress Report

A reasonable question to ask is how conservatism is doing in other countries? Fortunately, Politico happens to have a current article which looks at that very question. 

Mind you, author Camila Vergara isn't in favor of what her survey of recent elections finds, but she reports it honestly enough. Here is the key paragraph which is one enormously long, run-on sentence. 

The far right is currently ruling in: Hungary with Viktor Orbán, who has come out against race mixing in Europe and was a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this summer; Poland with the Christian nationalist party, Law and Justice, which opposes gay marriage, abortion and immigration; India, the most populous representative democracy in the world, with Narendra Modi, who has pursued Hindu-nationalist policies against religious minorities; Turkey with the imposition of Islamic nationalism and the ethnic cleansing against Kurds by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; Brazil with Jair Bolsonaro, who has denounced “homosexual fundamentalists,” called indigenous peoples “parasites” and advanced agribusiness by promoting the burning of the Amazon basin; and more recently, Italy with Giorgia Meloni, heir to Mussolini’s fascist legacy, the new prime minister after her right-wing coalition achieved a majority in Parliament.
Vergara calls the movement represented by these governments "Christian nationalism" which seems odd.  One is clearly Hindu nationalism and another political Islam; perhaps "predominant religion nationalist" is too awkward to say or write. I suspect her "Christian nationalism" label reflects a Western bias.