Orbán Victorious
Kyle Shybunko
On 3 April 2022, Hungarian voters went to the polls and awarded Viktor Orbán a fourth consecutive mandate to govern. Orbán’s Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) will return to the National Assembly with 135 out of 199 seats, after winning a record 53.13% of the popular vote. The main opposition coalition, United for Hungary (EM), was expected to win at least 40%, but instead picked up a paltry 35% and 56 seats. In the concurrent referendum on the government’s so-called ‘Child Protection Act’, appeals from LGBTQ groups for voters to spoil their ballots evidently succeeded, and the number of valid votes failed to clear the required 50% threshold.
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Sharp Edges
Lorna Scott Fox
Beware of books with ‘paradise’ in the title. Fernanda Melchor’s third novel, about the living hell and unconscious death wish of two boys in the tropics, voices the furious emptiness that defines lives without prospects in today’s stalled Mexico, where inequality, social decomposition (especially in the countryside, drained of adult males following the destruction of communal land tenure in the 1990s), political corruption and the abdication of institutions have turned a once centralized country into a patchwork of narco-regions. These conditions are especially acute in Melchor’s home state of Veracruz, where her work is set.
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Metabolizing Nostalgia
Alex Kong
When Joan Micklin Silver died in 2020, she was justly celebrated as a pioneering figure in American cinema. Born in 1935 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Silver was one of a number of female directors – among them Elaine May, Claudia Weill and Barbara Loden – who worked contemporaneously with the vaunted New Hollywood movement, but never enjoyed the studio largesse of their male peers. They received a different kind of bequest: the lacunae that blight their filmographies. After the early-career triumphs of Girlfriends (1978) and Wanda (1970), Weill and Loden were unable to break into Hollywood; May was driven from the industry following the box office disaster of Ishtar (1987); and Silver, too, found her career unceremoniously truncated after Crossing Delancey (1988).
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