ZOOM EVENT: Reclaiming Democracy
Panel discussion led by Ben Speggen
Longstanding, seemingly stable and moderate democratic systems including the U.S., U.K. Germany, and elsewhere in Europe have been threatened, even upended, by anti-system, ethnonationalist movements. Promising new democracies in former Soviet bloc states like Hungary and Poland have been hijacked by authoritarian nationalists doing their worst to undermine democracy.
But as recent events in Hungary demonstrate – where the public rallied to throw off Viktor Orban's kleptocratic and economically debilitating rule in favor of the pro-Europe, pro-democracy Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party – democracy can be reclaimed. Likewise, Poland with the election of Donald Tusk several years ago, reclaimed their country from the illiberal Law and Justice Party and now faces the challenging task of uprooting entrenched authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic institutions.
Meanwhile democracy defenders in the United States work to steer the mounting public backlash against the Trump Administrations authoritarian overreach and corruption to electoral victories. Constructivist political leaders in the U.K., France, Germany, and other European countries look for effective political tactics and strategies to sap the rise of nationalist and isolationist political movements peddling nostalgia, nativism and resentments—versus solutions to real problems.
Leading political and policy analysts from the U.S., U.K., Hungary, and Poland will share insights around how solution-minded political leaders can win over voters in Heartland regions who might otherwise be susceptible to anti-democratic populist leaders, win elections, and go about the challenging work of rebuilding democratic institutions and processes willfully undermined by right-wind populist leaders.
Featured discussants include:
Hungary: Bulcsú Hunyadi- leading Hungarian political analyst, Bulcsú Hunyadi, Head of Programmes at Political Capital
U.S.: Robin Johnson, Monmouth College, (Illinois); co-author of several reports about how Democrats win elections in rural, working class, and Trump districts in the Heartland and battleground states.
Poland: Maria Skóra Policy Fellow at the German Think Tank Das Progressive Zentrum and author of political analysis including Meanders of Democratic Renewal, What Can Hungary Learn from The Polish Experience, Review of Democracy
UK: Political analyst Rob Ford from the University of Manchester, on the electoral challenge of Reform UK and the populist radical right in Britain".
Session will be hosted and moderated by Ben Speggen, Vice President of the Jefferson Education Society, an Erie-Pennsylvania based nonpartisan think tank cultivating civic education and global citizen engagement a key Pennsylvania battleground county.
Join us for this important discussion around how democracy defenders can beat authoritarians.
The Heartlands Transformation Network is a transatlantic collaborative partnership dedicated towards closing geographic economic divides and reconnecting residents of rural and former industrial heartland communities to economic opportunity. The initiative works to return community pride and optimism about the future, and diminish the appeal of polarizing, resentment-driven, isolationist and ethnonationalist political movements that threaten our democracies.
The initiative, its learning exchanges, convenings, events, study tours, presentations, publications, and other learning products, are conducted with partners including the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, the Brookings Institution; the Georgetown University BMW Center for German and European Studies; the Jefferson Educational Society; the Ruhrkonferenz of North-Rhine Westphalia; Policy Manchester at the University of Manchester, U.K.; the University Allianz Ruhr; the German Consulate General in Chicago; the University of Michigan; the European Commission Directorate of Regional and Urban Policy; and the Committee of the Regions of the European Union, among others.
