- Judge and jury… - 26th April 2024
- From Russia without love… - 25th April 2024
- Big brother part two - 24th April 2024
During 40 years in journalism, politics has always featured strongly for our Editor Phil Parry, so he looks on with mounting horror as new figures show that far-right figures have control, or may be about to takeover, a slew of European Union (EU) countries.
Earlier he described how he was assisted in breaking into the South Wales Echo office car when he was a cub reporter, recalled his early career as a journalist, the importance of experience in the job, and made clear that the ‘calls’ to emergency services as well as court cases are central to any media operation.
He has also explored how poorly paid most journalism is when trainee reporters had to live in squalid flats, the vital role of expenses, and about one of his most important stories on the now-scrapped 53 year-old BBC Wales TV Current Affairs series, Week In Week Out (WIWO), which won an award even after it was axed, long after his career really took off.
Phil has explained too how crucial it is actually to speak to people, the virtue of speed as well as accuracy, why knowledge of ‘history’ is vital, how certain material was removed from TV Current Affairs programmes when secret cameras had to be used, and some of those he has interviewed.
He has disclosed as well why investigative journalism is needed now more than ever although others have different opinions, how the coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown played havoc with media schedules, and the importance of the hugely lower average age of some political leaders compared with when he started reporting.
It wasn’t meant to be this way.
The European Union (EU) was supposed to bring together countries in a spirit of liberal democracy believing in an independent judiciary.
But now there is growing evidence that the opposite is the case, and extreme right wing nationalist parties have either seized control of countries in the EU, feature ever more strongly in polls, or could be about to be voted into office.
Elections in June to the EU parliament make this particularly pertinent.
Advertisement
Elsewhere, hard-right parties are securing more parliamentary seats and regional offices. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, already under surveillance for suspected far-right extremism, now outpolls Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and has scored a watershed district election win — an alarming moment for a country conscious of its Nazi past.
The AfD has support in the army, police as well as the electorate at large. But it’s not just them.
The right wing Values Union (VU) (WerteUnion) was founded last month by transforming a 7-year-old registered association with the same name, and in 2022 it had around 4,000 members.
In early 2024, the VU positioned itself in the “conservative-liberal” middle ground between the CDU/CSU and AfD.
In Portugal the situation looks just as bad.
After an election last month, the populist party Chega led by André Ventura, took 18 per cent of the vote, securing at least 48 deputies in the 230 seat National Assembly.
They stood on a platform of bashing immigrants and Roma people.
For far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (whose ‘Brothers of Italy’ party has a background in Neo-Fascism, and espouses Euroscepticism) these are historic times, as fellow right-wingers sweep the boards.
In the last year there has been a series of eye-catching results for right-wingers, and more could be on the horizon.
In France (one of the founders of the EU), the picture is especially worrying as the latest polls indicate nationalist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) at an all-time high.
Some surveys today show that she may even win in this large EU country.
The political scientist and director of IFOP polling institute Jérôme Fourquet has said that the possibility of Ms Le Pen, at the time president of RN, being elected President of the Republic could not be ruled out.
Mr Fourquet has observed that the “momentum of (Ms Le Pen’s party) is growing with each poll” and he now believes that the scenario of a victory for the nationalist Right “has never been so plausible in view of the figures”.
In Slovakia a right-wing government has used its ‘momentum’, and been elected.
The Prime Minister there, Robert Fico, has raised alarm among critics since taking power last October with strong criticism of Europe’s military aid to Ukraine.
Then there is Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orbán. His tenure has seen Hungary’s government shift towards what he has called “illiberal democracy”, while simultaneously promoting Euroscepticism.
Apart from opposing liberal democracy, he also wants the establishment of closer ties with China and Russia.
Mr Orbán’s Fidesz party has launched strong assaults on judicial checks and balances, and Csaba Vasvári, a senior judge at the Budapest metropolitan court, has declared that he and his colleagues on the bench “have been witnessing external and internal influence attempts” for several years.
Mr Vasvári, who has worked as a judge for 18 years, is a spokesperson for the National Judicial Council (NJC), a self-governing body that has been battling to defend judges’ independence for more than a decade.
This phenomenon has been noted by The Times which declared earlier this month: “Across Europe, the old parties are being rejected in favour of populists exhorting a new nationalism”.
It seems that despite the battle referred to by Mr Vasvári, the rise of the extreme Right is unstoppable.
Unfortunately…
The memories of Phil’s extraordinary decades long award-winning career in journalism (when political stories were all-important) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now
Another book, though, has not been published because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – how during his long career, for Phil humour has rarely been far from the surface, and this is now underlined by the huge number of jokes on the internet about Vladimir Putin’s ‘election’ where he supposedly ‘won’ 87 per cent of the vote.
