Former US President Barack Obama posted a video on the social media platform X on Saturday, 11 October, in which he introduces three people in the alumni network of his NGO, the Obama Foundation, from Poland and Hungary.
Sándor Léderer, founder of the government transparency watchdog group K-Monior in Hungary; Stefánia Kapronczay, a human rights activist in Hungary, and Former Deputy Justice Minister Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz of Poland appeared in the short video by President Obama. Oddly enough, the President happened to mispronounce both of his Hungarian guests’ first names—both ‘Sándor’ and ‘Stefánia’ start with an ‘sh’ sound, the voiceless postalveolar fricative, but President Obama pronounced the first consonant of both names with an ‘s’ sound, the voiceless alveolar fricative.
As for the political content, the former POTUS states at the beginning of his video that he has ‘become increasingly concerned with the rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe,’ which is why he decided to showcase three alumni of his foundation from Poland and Hungary, ‘two countries on the leading edge of confronting autocracy’, as he put it.
Although the video is about two Eastern European countries on the face of it, there is a strong possibility that President Obama has intended some undertones related to domestic politics in the US.
The video was posted the day after New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted by a grand jury in federal court. In the video, Obama does complain about autocracies around the globe ‘weaponizing the justice system’; and later he says: ‘even countries that thought they were immune from wholesale assaults on democracy now understand we’re all part of the struggle,’ where he might be referencing his home country.
However, it is important to note that he did not feel the need to put out such content in the four years of the Biden presidency, when a former President and leading presidential candidate Donald Trump was indicted in four separate cases, after Attorney General (and President Obama’s unsuccessful Supreme Court Justice nominee) Merrick Garland told Congress that he has people in his DOJ working around the clock on figuring out how to convict him.
Nor did President Obama use social media to speak up when Steve Bannon, one of the key figures in President Trump’s 2016 winning campaign, had to spend months in jail for something that President Obama’s own Attorney General Eric Holder and countless other people had done before him: defying a congressional subpoena.
President Obama himself has some experience with how to use the powers of the executive to attack opposition in his country. In 2013, it was revealed that the US tax authority IRS (Internal Revenue Service) targeted conservative non-profit groups for heightened scrutiny and frequent audits.
Evidently, Léderer and Kapronczay, the two Hungarian figures featured in President Obama’s video, are no fans of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government in Hungary. Léderer’s K-Monitor is a constant critic of the Fidesz government’s use of public funds, routinely accusing PM Orbán and members of his administration of wrongfully enriching themselves; while Kapronczay is closely tied to the liberal non-profit legal aid group TASZ in Hungary, which habitually provides free legal services to critics of the Orbán government.
The reaction to President Obama’s video has been mostly negative on X.
Paul A Szypula, a user with 364,000 followers, wrote: ‘Barack Obama is now targeting Hungary and Poland because they’re rejecting open borders. This guy really is a menace to all of humanity.’ His post received 130,000 likes—significantly more than Obama’s original video, which has garnered 73,000 likes.
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