politics in vienna

so, on my first day in vienna, i went to one protest in solidarity with striking teachers in mexico, and one public meeting about iran. there were about 100 people at the demo, and we marched to the Mexican Consulate. As you can see from the pictures, there was an autonomist flavour to the rally, but it was cross-partisan mostly. From what I have heard, autonomist politics have declined in popularity since their renaissance following the anti-capitalist demonstrations in 2000. here are some pics:







i don't know who organised the iran meeting, but the speaker (there was only one) was Bahman Nirumand, and Iranian academic from Germany. From what i could understand he was making good arguments about the political situation surrounding iran, and the US strategy in the middle east in general, but it was a fairly 'mainstream-left' public meeting - i know that it was not organised by the far left. And there was a big fight in the discussion time because the Zionist lobby was there en masse. i was there with two comrades from Linkswende, the IST group here in Austria. from what they were saying, it has been good to see the Zionists suffer a few defeats (they definitely lost at this meeting), because for a while there they were winning people over. the comrades say that the Lebanon-Hizbollah debacle has really boosted this shift. yay.



other first impressions of vienna:
it is so strange how different it is to be in a country that was never communist, having just been to china, russia, estonia, poland and hungary. it feels familiar, it is expensive, and coming from my experience of growing up in the west, not half as interesting. the entire city of vienna is a bit of a mozart museum, very much on the cheesy side. but there are definitely some hip and happening things here. i think i'd need to stay a bit longer to become really interested though. perhaps i will pass back through later on in my travels...


more on budapest

here are some links to footage of the Fidesz rally i took with my little snappy-snap camera (meaning the footage isn't top quality, but it's there if anyone is interested in watching middle-class conservatives stroll down the street with candles...)... i'm putting this here mainly so i can delete these files off my memory card!!



til next time,
kd.

(and i promise i will write and upload photos about the other topics (st petersburg, poland etc) when i can access the photos i took there)

goodbye budapest

well, i'm about to leave budapest in about an hour. this city has been so beautiful - in some ways it reminds me of hobart, especially when looking across the river from the pest side to see buda on the other. there is something similar in the landscape - red roofs over undulating hills, interspersed with green, gold, orange and red trees.

first, to report on yesterday's events.

the protests ended up being quite subdued - i think the position adopted by most of the protesters, even the far far right, was that it would be inappropriate to go rioting on a day of national mourning. from a right-wing nationalist and anti-socialist/communist perspective, it would have been the height of disrespect to do so. in the end, there were pockets of demonstrations around the city. here's a picture of the rally the extreme right had in "Freedom Square", in front of the now desecrated communist memorial obelisk. As you can see, there were only about 2 or 3 hundred people there, showing that they are a tiny minority.





these smaller demonstrations seemed to be all but ignored by most people - the only other people in freedom square were journalists and a handful of police, and not even many passers by or tourists were present. so they were small and insignificant.

however it was the 500,000 strong candle-lit march that was possibly more noticeable and noticed by the rest of the population. this was the Fidesz party's organised demonstration.



the march had two aspects - one was a requiem for the victims of the crushing of the 1956 uprising, and the other more prescient aspect was a protest against the police brutality that occurred on the 23rd october, two weeks ago.

(this photo is a little blurry but you can get a sense of the candle-lit atmosphere and the number of people - it was massive.



i went through the crowd doing a vox pops on why people were there - most cited the reason of opposing police violence ("this should not happen in a democracy") but despite the attempts of some to portray it as simply an anti-state repression manifestation, the overwhelming majority of people i spoke to, when questioned further, admitted that probably 90% of the march, if not more, were also Fidesz supporters and voters. and when i asked what the class-composition of the rally was, it was overwhelmingly admitted to be pretty much entirely middle class. this is not to say that many people there really were passionately opposed to police violence of all kinds, and i believe that many of them would have marched in a rally called by the left against police violence also. however it seemed clear that the anti-socialism had blurred with support for Fidesz and also with condemnation of the Socialist Party's police force. i asked a few people about the working class - where were they in all of the events of the past two months. they have more or less been absent - partly this is due to the absence of effective and well-established class organisation. since the fall of the Soviet period, it has according to some people i spoke to, not been long enough for truly strong and independent trade unions to become established well enough to participate in public politics. i'm going to investigate this stuff further though.

i don't have much time to write more now, but you will be able to read more about the politics of what has happened in budapest in my forthcoming piece in Solidarity Magazine (how's that for a seamless plug!!!!)...

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while in budapest, i've been staying with a great group of people who are all foreign students at the university here doing masters in sociology and political science, Jen, Steven, Wyatt and Marko. 3 of them are from the US, and Marko from Croatia. they are all mad as cut snakes, but super lovely, and the main decorative feature in their loungeroom are the lebanese and palestinian flags hanging on the wall.



i feel like i'm at home for the first time in 6 weeks! they had a halloween party on my second night here complete with a jack-o-lantern steven made, which was full of their fellow students too - from Romania, Croatia, Belarus and many other places, so it was really cool to talk to all these people from countries that we don't get to learn about very often. They are all doing a one year masters degree at the university. I spoke to a really interesting woman who is going to write her thesis on something to do with the effects of the Romanian Communist regime on the Roma.

anyway, i really have to go right now, but budapest is super beautiful, and i also got to see some of the underground night life with a friend of the woman i stayed with in krakow (i'll write about krakow in a few days time - my memory card has been playing up and may not actually work until i get my own computer back in berlin, so everyone will have to wait for more photos.

in upcoming editions, expect to read about the following topics:

st petersburg - the giant doll's house
dinner with dykes in st petersburg
estonia... not much to say really...
poland: reactionary catholicism
krakow, so pretty
sunrise over slovakia
general reflections #1: when is a keffiye NOT a sign of solidarity with the palestinian struggle?

and more...

but now, off to Vienna.
x kd

protests in budapest tomorrow

these police officers were today preparing for the protest action tomorrow - there are reportedly between 20 and 40 groups planning protests, to coincide (to put it mildly) with the last of the commemorative events of the 1956 uprising. they are in front of the television building.



this is them yesterday in front of the parliament building.



contrary to what some may believe, these protests are NOT left wing. what began back in september as a broad-based public response to the prime minister's admission that he was telling lies, has now become overshadowed by the efforts of what are essentially fascists or neo-nazis, who are given platforms by the conservative party Fidesz. From people i have been talking to, one of the main visual features of the protests has been the presence of red and white striped flags - these flags gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s as a symbol of the Hungarian brand of Nazism, and this is definitely what most people associate them with today.

tomorrow is the commemoration of the crushing of the 1956 uprising - the day the soviet tanks rolled into budapest. there are several official ceremonies planned, but in addition, the leader of the conservative Fidesz party (strongly supported by several extreme right wing nationalist groups) has called a mass demonstration by candlelight in the afternoon (it's getting dark at around 4.30 now). but many of the protests are scheduled to begin earlier in the day. there are various gathering points, and i heard one woman in a bar tonight predict as many as hundreds of thousands of people protesting (across a varied political spectrum) tomorrow. we will see. it will also be interesting to see what the response of the police is, as there is a rapidly developing consensus that many of their responses to the earlier protests were beyond brutal, which is becoming a further topic of public outcry. the politics of what is going on are difficult to grasp from the outside, especially because i don't speak hungarian! but i'm slowly starting to make sense of the situation.

i've got to go right now but i'll write an update tomorrow - and hopefully i'll have some photos of the demonstrations... provided i'm not locked in a hungarian gaol for being a bystander... but seriously, i'm actually hoping to be getting a ride around all the major spots with some friends, one of whom is a journalist for one of the budapest newspapers (ooohhh, embedded!!).