767: Do Not Go Gentle
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A quick warning - there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Democracy! See, mate, it was doing so well there for a while. On the move, spreading hope around the world, but now, of course, more and more countries are moving in the other direction. There are strong man-leaders doing great in Poland, Turkey, Serbia, Brazil, lots of other places. Even in our own country, democracy is feeling shakier. What is it? A third of all Americans think the results of the last election weren't valid. Hungary had an election last week. Hungary used to be a function in democracy, but it's gotten less and less so. Once again, this time around, Viktor Orban was named Prime Minister, he's named Prime Minister there for the last 12 years, and there he gets four more. No term, woman's over there. And to give you a sense of just how stacked the deck was, in his favor, like how extreme it was, during the entire election, the amount of time Orban's opponents got on state television to make their case to voters, was exactly five minutes. I mean, like, for the whole election, you with me here? Tons of coverage for Orban, all of it positive, speeches, interviews, analysis, for months, for his opponents in just five minutes. And most of the other TV stations in Hungary followed suit. And five minutes of the opponents got, wasn't even during prime time. It was five minutes on a Wednesday morning for Orban's main opponent, this guy Peter Markizai, a newcomer, mayor from a small town. Basically, how it went is two weeks before the election, Markizai went into the TV studio of M1, the state-run news station, sat down at a roundtable, crossed from a TV presenter, hanging between them, was an enormous circular timer with a big five when I heard a stopwatch. Presenter barely finished introducing him before Markizai took a big breath, tilted to sat down like he was a bull, charging into the ring, and spoke. Thank you very much, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak for five minutes in four years, on behalf of the entire Hungarian opposition, representing some two and a half to three million people, he says, quickly. The rest of what he says is more kind of familiar, politician stuff. My opponent is a hypocrite, he's corrupt, he's lying about my record, I will keep my promises to you, I will curb inflation, I will pay more to teachers and police, it closes with the opposition slogan, upwards. Okay, I'm her pants back for Markizai's face, we see the timer click over to zero, times up for Markizai. For Markizai's five minutes, the station played an Orban speech from a couple of days earlier that it lasted an hour, after his five minutes was up, they replayed it. Giving exactly five minutes on television to the opposition, it's like, it preserves the appearance of democracy, after all, their opposition parties, they exist, they can say whatever they want, they appear on television, but of course, they don't get a real chance like they would in a real democracy. And one candidate pointed to the absurdity of all that, in his five minutes, there's a bunch of parties that ran in this election, and this candidate was from a satirical political party called the two-tailed dog party. During his five minutes, in the middle of his speech, he got a call, a cell phone.
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