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I have explained this in several comments by now:

Liberalism in Eastern Europe stands for not being a bigot.

By saying you're against all form of liberalism in the context of an Eastern European election, it means you're essentially pro-MAGA.

I'm not even 100% sure if he's racist at this point. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Look, I'm just hopeful that life will improve for Hungarians and that Magyar goes through with his promises of electoral reform to undo some of Orban's changes.

Anyway, he's widely been quoted as saying that the Filipino employees at Samsung's factory have been eating cats and dogs and ducks or whatever. And as such he's been shown to be racist.

BUT his actual quote:

“All the employees at the Samsung plant in Göd live in a workers’ hostel in Budapest. They have been brought here from the Philippines without food or money. When hundreds of Filipino workers were brought here and allocated to these Budapest hostels without money or provisions, then the next day, a lot of ducks had disappeared from the Budapest Zoo. So have the goldfish.”

This to me sounds like he's against companies importing workers and keeping them in slavery-like conditions? This I could get behind.

He then continues,

“Because these people were starving, and that’s what they did. Don’t get me wrong, this is not about anti-foreigner prejudice; there is nothing wrong with these labourers. The problem is that it is not the citizens of our country who get to be prioritised when a company generously funded with our money, our taxes, does not employ Hungarians.”

This part does show that he'd clearly prefer for the plant to hire more Hungarians, but not that he necessarily hates the foreigners. If the Filipinos are low-skill laborers whose jobs could easily be done by Hungarians, I can quite understand his opinion - Samsung is cutting costs by importing workers. If these are highly specialized jobs and they couldn't find qualified Hungarians, then I'd be more inclined to disagree with him. But something tells me that a lot of Filipinos being kept in horrible conditions aren't super specialized engineers and this is just a gigacorporation trying to save a few bucks. After the Hungarian government gave them a bunch of money.

Also, he did say Lazar had crossed all lines when Lazar said the Roma should clean toilets on trains. But since they're political opponents, that doesn't necessarily mean much. There's articles saying he's promised to help Roma communities, but I couldn't find anything concrete right now.

So in my country, there's literally a "reform party", which are classical liberals in the economic sense. Their own members will, indeed, call themselves liberals and mean the economic ideology. But they were also one of the two main parties behind the Estonian "kooseluseadus" (literally translated: "co-living law" or "living together law"), which doesn't legalize gay marriage as such, but rather creates a new institution that's basically the same as marriage, with all the same rights and duties, and is gender neutral. That was highly controversial in 2014 and eventually led to rise of EKRE, basically our own MAGA.

Any time they're referred to as liberals now, it is NOT about their economic policies at all. The conservatives have completely changed the meaning of the term, and now it's liberalism vs traditionalism, and it's all about the "traditional family values" and such, you know, usual conservative bullshit, clashing against "liberal values".

But this is not unique to Estonia. We imported this from the US. Or rather, our conservatives did. Similar stuff in other Eastern European countries. The American right has, for a long time now, framed liberalism as what I've described many times in this thread: Not being a bigot. Economically, the Republicans ARE liberals, just like most of the Democrats are. And if you're far enough left, both of those parties ARE the same to you, and they ARE both liberals. But closer to the center, as well as very far to the right, the term is used completely differently, and has been for so long now that you just can't use it anymore.

Personally I propose either saying neoliberalism when talking about economic liberalism (even if not completely precise language), or straight up calling it capitalism. Or hell, let's invent a new term, call it marketism. Because the meaning of the word "liberal" has shifted so much, it's no longer correct.

And yes, my comment was being facetious. I DO know what all the people here mean when they say they hate liberalism. But that's quite literally not the liberalism the article is talking about, and it's not what liberalism means to most people nowadays.

Oh, also, a funny tidbit on how badly words get misused:

So the reform party, basically center-right, being classic liberals, want lower taxation and more privatization of important industries, including healthcare and education. Fuck those guys obviously - they're only really tolerated as a "lesser evil" compared to the outright nazi-adjacent folks since the left is unpopular for a myriad of reasons. Usually they'll form coalition with the slightly more left-wing party, the social democrats.

Our far right, literally hateful bigots, will call that party not just liberals, but also commies. After all, commie is still a dirty word, we're a post-soviet nation. Why is this funny? Because the far right party does NOT support lowering taxes and privatizing healthcare, meaning economically they're actually left of the people they hatefully call communists for... Mostly the gay "marriage".

I do hope they won't succeed in the rebranding of the words "communist" and "socialist". I know that American conservatives are doing the same, but it's not really catching on as much as it did with the word "liberal".

And yes, I'm a liberal. Just not economically. I'm more of a "social democracy for now, but let's gradually go further left" kinda guy. Let private industry innovate, find new markets for whatever they can dream of, but make sure everything important is available to every single person, and that every important industry is publicly owned, not privately. And rein in the private companies sooner rather than later.