Although he no longer has a mandate or direct influence, Barack Obama has lost none of his taste for sermons. From London, where he gave a conference (ticket prices: from 120 to 1,000 dollars), the former American president found a role: giving lessons remotely. Through his foundation, he met with some former Polish and Hungarian scholarship holders to denounce the rise of a “authoritarian scourge” in central Europe. “Leaders target civil society, weaken press freedom and exploit justice”he denounced in a perfectly rehearsed number.
The problem is that this part of the continent has never had any chemistry with Obama. In Poland, he drags like a ball his repeated references to “Polish camps” to designate the Nazi extermination camps. A diplomatic error experienced as a national insult, never really forgiven. In Warsaw, his name evokes less the inspired defender of democracy than the distant president, indifferent to the concerns of Central Europe, preferring to look towards Asia and the Muslim world. This reappearance is not trivial. While the Democratic Party is amorphous and Joe Biden, seriously ill, is inaudible, the left in Washington is nervously observing the surge of Trumpism in the east. The surprise election of Karol Nawrocki, close to Donald Trump, in Poland, then the announced return of Andrej Babis to the Czech Republic sounds like a warning.
In the absence of a new speech, Obama recycles the old, admonishing Hungary and Poland as he would a Harvard lecture hall. From the British capital, obviously, he speaks to a region that he has never understood and which, today, hardly listens to him.
