Football as a political battlefield
November 26th, 2022A pro-government columnist accuses the Left of promoting a progressive LGBTQ agenda at the Qatar World Cup, while his left-wing counterpart suspects that by lambasting the German national team, the Right wants to divert attention from Hungary’s pressing economic problems.
In Magyar Nemzet, Bence Apáti accuses ‘neo-Marxist liberals’ of using football as a battlefield in the culture wars. As the conservative columnist sees it, progressives are trying to promote their LGBTQ agenda at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, and silence or exclude those who do not agree with their agenda. Conservatives, Apáti notes, made it clear at the time of the 2015 immigration crisis that they do not share the ‘misogynistic and homophobic ideas’ dominant in the Middle East, but, unlike the Left, they do not want to force Western values on those countries either. Apáti concludes by suggesting that Germany was defeated by Japan because the players of the national eleven were so preoccupied with promoting their LGBTQ agenda, they could not focus on the game.
Hírlklikk’s Péter S. Föld dismisses as absurd the suggestion widespread on the Hungarian Right that the German squad lost to Japan because of their political agenda. The left-wing columnist accuses the Right of seeing politics everywhere and using Germany’s defeat to divert attention from Hungary’s deep problems including galloping inflation, high energy prices, the depreciating Forint and Hungary’s increasing geopolitical isolation.