THE
Daily Egyptian SERVING THE SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY SINCE 1916.
DAILYEGYPTIAN.COM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
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Blowing his own horn: Halbert Katzen feature
Mannie’s Fire Feast Review: Thai Taste
VOL. 106, ISSUE 6
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p. 14
Culture Column: Blonde, Gay, and Thin: The Lucky Ones
Soccer team gets that winning feeling
Opinion: Your vote matters — a global
lesson on why you should register now
Sophie Whitten | @sophiewhitten_ Daily Egyptian Editorial Board editor@dailyegyptian.com
Just a few days ago, something happened on far away shores that plays out like cautionary tale should a large number of eligible U.S. voters - you - do not bother going to the polls. Bear with the history lesson, it will make a scary sort of sense in just a few paragraphs. On September 15, the European Union parliament, in an 81% affirmative vote, agreed to declare Hungary “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.” This statement seems laughable on its face, as Viktor Orban, the
current president of the nation, just won his fourth consecutive election to office a few short months ago. How can an ostensibly democratic nation be labeled an autocracy, the same label applied to Russia’s Vladimir Putin or their ally Belarus’s
Alexander Lukashenko? Simply put, it involves processes that may seem prescient to our own current circumstances. Hungary has a long and storied history of conquest and integration into larger empires, most notably
as a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire which was a catalyst for the First World War. After an economic depression and a brief stint as an Axis power in the Second World War, Hungary was occupied as a member of the Warsaw Pact,
Notable changes included criminalizing gay marriage and guaranteeing fetuses legal protection from conception, effectively criminalizing abortion.
remaining under the control of the Soviet Union until just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991. After its post-communist first elections, held in 1990, and the death of the country’s first Prime Minister in 1993, the privatization of Hungarian markets led to the corrupt ex-communist bureaucrats making huge amounts of money selling off government assets to private industries, creating a new monied elite within the relatively poor (by European standards) country.
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