How Washington controls its backyard

The ministry of American colonies

The re-election in March of Luís Almagro, the Organisation of American States’ secretary general, will prolong the cold war climate that has settled over Latin America these past few years. Since his rise to the top of the organisation in 2015, the former Uruguayan foreign minister has worked hard to rebuild American hegemony in the region.

by Guillaume Long

 

Thomas James Delbridge, ‘Lower Manhattan’, 1934.

Founded in 1948 during the standoff between the US and the USSR, the Organisation of American States (OAS) is one of the instruments through which Washington projects geopolitical power over Latin America and the Caribbean states, which one by one joined the organisation as they won independence between 1960 and 1980. Canada only joined the OAS in 1990 and is mostly happy with putting forward a moderate version of the White House line.

If, like Fidel Castro, the left sees the OAS as ‘the ministry of United States colonies’ (1), elites treat it as something approaching the sacred. A Latin American or Caribbean ambassador at the OAS is one of the most important diplomats in his country. As to the secretary general, he weighs heavy in the member states’ political debates, apart from in the United States where he is as unknown as the organisation itself, even among political elites.

If, like Fidel Castro, the left sees the OAS as ‘the ministry of United States colonies', elites treat it as something approaching the sacred.

Yet it is in an imposing marble building once given to the Pan-American Union (an ancestor of the OAS) by the great steel baron Andrew Carnegie and located several hundreds of metres from the White House that the permanent council of the OAS is based. At the end of the 1940s, the United States redrew the global multilateral system: the United Nations therefore headquartered itself in New York, the OAS in Washington. The United States wished to suggest a diffuse hegemony, but so diffuse as to abandon the headquarters to a peripheral country.

‘Don’t be stupid’

The OAS first played a secondary role, on the sidelines of security instruments true and blue, such as the Inter-American Defence Board (IADB) created in 1942, and the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (also known as the Rio Treaty) of 1947. The latter was a message to the Soviet Union: it established that any attack against a state on the continent would be considered an attack against all signatory countries.

Little by little, nevertheless, the focus became the deployment of ‘inter-American multilateralism’. The time had come to show the world the consensus between Washington and Latin American elites in their common rejection of communism. Cuba was expelled from the OAS in 1962 using a resolution that specified that ‘the adherence by any member (...) to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system’ (2). On the other hand, no Latin American military dictatorship was ever distanced from the organisation, despite the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)’s documentation of atrocities committed by several governments in the 1970s.

Even so, there have been times that Latin American and Caribbean countries have made up a majority of the permanent council and risen up against the United States’ positions — such as during maritime conflicts between the United States and Peru, or Ecuador at the end of the 1960s, during the Falklands war in 1982 or during the US invasion of Panama in 1989-1990. But even in these circumstances, the United States ignored the resolutions of the member states and acted unilaterally.

The end of the cold war plunged the OAS into existential crisis. The wave of democratisation in the 1980s freed the organisation from the obligation, imposed by US tutelage, to keep silent regarding dictatorships. As the Soviet bloc crumbled, the OAS devoted itself to defending the norms and values of liberal democracy. It reinvented itself to concentrate, among other things, on observing electoral processes to ensure their credibility. This mission, which it embarked upon in Costa Rica in 1962, became one of the pillars of the new institution. But this roadmap was not enough to place the OAS centre stage. At the time, Washington was mostly preoccupied with imposing its consensus and the resultant structural adjustment programmes. In this area, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) monopolised Latin Americans’ attention.

Nor was OAS able to establish itself as the arbiter of conflicts between countries in the region, notably concerning leftover postcolonial border rivalries. The OAS’s voice did not count during the resolution of the Beagle conflict between Chile and Argentina in 1984, or during the peace deal signed between Ecuador and Peru in 1998.

With the 2000s and the rise to power of the left in several Latin American countries, the US lost some of its grip on the inter-American system. In 2005, for the first time in the history of the organisation, a secretary general was elected, then re-elected in 2010, without Washington’s support. In 2009, a resolution from the general assembly of the ministry of foreign affairs declared Cuba’s exclusion null and void. Havana acknowledged the gesture, but refused to return to the organisation.

As the Soviet bloc crumbled, the OAS devoted itself to defending the norms and values of liberal democracy.

The same year, the coup against Honduran president of Manuel Zelaya was punished by the country’s suspension from the OAS — a first. Only an agreement ensuring Zalaya’s return to Tegucigalpa in 2011 allowed for Honduras to rejoin into the organisation. The progressive governments of Latin America made the most of their relative cohesion and freed themselves from certain aspects of the inter-American system. After Mexico denounced the Rio Treaty in 2001, it was followed by Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Keen to prevent the OAS remaining a tool of the United States in its struggle against anti-imperialist governments, the left in the region chose to cooperate with the Caribbean. In particular Venezuela lent its support by selling the Caribbean states cheap oil when prices flared up. Most of the votes of the fourteen countries in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) belonging to the OEA helped to counter attacks from the United States against Venezuela and the left-wing governments of Latin America.

But, despite these successes, suspicion of the OAS has never disappeared among Latin American progressives, who know that the shifts in the balance of power at the heart of the permanent council did cannot fundamentally change the organisation’s structure and subservience to Washington. Mostly funded by the United States, from which it retains up to 60% of its yearly budget — and the entire budget of some of its branches — the OAS’s bureaucrats are predominantly Latin American, though they live in Washington and show staunch loyalty toward the institution—which, for its part, rewards its employees by endowing them with professional prestige.

Left-wing governments therefore decided to encourage a new form of regionalism. This exceptional moment led to the founding of the Union of South American States (Unasur), in 2008. Unasur was a risky bet. It was based on cooperation along political, economic, and defence lines, among others, and its objectives went beyond those of other South American cooperation mechanisms, showing more ambition than the OAS’s mandate, especially — but not only — in its economic and developmental dimensions. Notably, Unasur intervened in interior political crises in 2008 in Bolivia, in 2010 in Ecuador, then in 2012 in Paraguay, as well as in international conflicts like that between Venezuela and Colombia in 2010. For its part, the OAS was excluded from all these mediations and interventions.

Under the leadership of Almagro, the OAS has once again become synonymous with the ‘Monroe Doctrine’.

Then came the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), ie the countries of the Western hemisphere including Cuba and excluding the United States and Canada. This forum, albeit less institutionalised than Unasur and lacking a constitutive treaty, was nevertheless dedicated to political cooperation between the region’s states, and to international discussions. Indeed, several Celac meetings took place — with the European Union, Celac-China, Celac-Russia, Celac-India, and so on.

In 2015, Luís Almagro, who was close to the Uruguayan president José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, a figure of the Latin American left, was elected to the role of secretary general of the OAS. Nominated by Mujica and supported by the region’s left-wing governments, the former Uruguayan foreign minister promised to pursue the path of independence set out by his predecessor José Miguel Insulza. But the progressive wave was running out of momentum. And Almagro adapted: he swiftly recast himself as the games master of a consolidating right and orchestrated the OAS’s return under the auspices of a United States soon to be led by a certain Donald Trump.

Amalgro quickly became interested in Venezuela. He provided military support to the opposition and was against every attempt at negotiation. When the former president of the Spanish government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero argued for a negotiated political solution in Venezuela, Almagro retorted, ‘Don’t be stupid’ (3). Almagro — like Washington — had decided that the only possible solution involved regime change. He praised the US’s coercive economic measures. As Donald Trump’s administration explained that ‘all options were on the table’, suggesting the possibility of a military option, Almagro backed the threat and brandished the argument of a humanitarian intervention, which caused concern even among of the Latin American governments of the Lima group, despite it being an alliance built with the aim of isolating Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Nevertheless the secretary general’s enthusiasm for the defence of ‘democracy’ does not extend all the way to Brazil. The impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff did not move him any more than the imprisonment, without evidence, of former president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, which removed him from the 2018 presidential campaign. The human rights violations committed by Jovenel Moïse’s government in Haïti, during the 2018-19 protests, did not evince a stronger reaction. When Almagro visited Ecuador at the end of October 2019, after the country’s largest protests in modern history and a wave of unprecedented repression, he congratulated president Lenín Moreno on the way he had managed the crisis, without mentioning the fact his repression had resulted in several deaths. In Almagro’s eyes, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera — himself the architect of violent repression against social movements — ‘efficiently defended public order, all the while taking special measures to guarantee human rights’ (4). As to Colombia, Almagro said nothing of the daily disappearances of trade unionists or the government’s abandonment of the peace process: he expressed concern about the violence of protesters who rejected the neoliberal policies of president Iván Duque.

Return to the 1950s

It was in Bolivia that Almagro performed his masterstroke. In October 2019, a general election was held. The incumbent president Evo Morales won the election in the first round, with 47.08% of the votes, against his main rival Carlos Mesa, who was behind by more than 10% of votes (36.51%). According to the Bolivian constitution, when a candidate wins more than 40% of votes in the first round with a majority of at least 10% over the candidate that comes second, they are elected in the first round. But the OAS’s electoral observation mission planted uncertainty right from the announcement of the first results, by mentioning an ‘explicable change in trend’ (5) in the vote count. As several statistical studies have since demonstrated, this ‘change in trend’ was in fact the result of the late count of several geographical regions favourable to Morales.

Still the mainstream media cried fraud; the opposition became radicalised; Morales went into exile under threat from the army. The OAS never managed to prove its accusations of fraud, as Washington’s Center of Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) (6), among others, revealed. Several weeks after these events, Jeanine Añez’s de facto government announced its support for the re-election of Almagro, a man who, according to the new minister of foreign affairs Karen Longarec, ‘played a fundamental role in the defence of democracy in the region’ (7).

The re-election of Almagro marks the unequivocal return to an OAS favourable to the United States. If the organisation was seeking to reinvent itself and win legitimacy as a defender of democracy, its bet failed. Under the leadership of Almagro, the OAS has once again become synonymous with the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ — a reference to president James Monroe at the beginning of the 19th century, according to whom Latin America constituted a ‘backyard’ where the United States would tolerate no foreign interference. This is the principle that US secretary of state Mike Pompeo celebrated, in January 2020, as ‘a return to the spirit of the OAS in the 1950s and 1960s’ (8).

Guillaume Long

Former foreign minister of Ecuador, and an analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC

Translated by Lucie Elven

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(1) Speech on 4 February 1962.

(2) Sixth resolution of the eighth consultation meeting of the foreign ministers of the OAS, in Punta del Este (Uruguay), 22-31 January, 1962.

(3) EFE, Washington, DC, 21 September 2018.

(4) EFE, Santiago de Chili, 9 January 2020

(5) Press release, 21 October 2019

(6) Jake Johnston and David Rosnick, ‘Observing the observers : The OAS in the 2019 Bolivian elections’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, 10 March 2020.

(7) Alejandra Arredondo, ‘Bolivia apoya reelección de Almagro en la OEA’, VOA Noticias, 23 January 2020.

(8) Speech to the permanent council of the OEA, 17 January 2020.

monday
5 october 2020

At his speech to the Conservative Party Conference, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak spoke of the nation’s ‘sacred responsibility’ to ‘balance the books’, adding that ‘hard choices’ would have to be made. (See our new ebook, ‘Public debt: embracing the new reality’.) Next April, Sunak plans to cut Universal Credit benefit payments back down to the level they were at before being increased because of Covid-19. This move will cost 6 million households £1040 a year. Ten years ago, the Marmot review warned that cutbacks to the welfare state would lead to a chasm in life expectancy between rich and poor. And that’s exactly what happened. (Also read ‘The road beyond Wigan Pier’.)

In Britain, life expectancy dropped in a decade

Austerity is the killer

Ten years ago the Marmot review warned that policies of public austerity after the 2008 financial crash would lead to a chasm in life expectancy between rich and poor. And that’s exactly what happened.

by Michael Marmot 

Growing poverty: more people in the UK are resorting to food banks

Ian Forsyth · Bloomberg · Getty

Even before the arrival of a pandemic to threaten Britain’s health and economy, the UK had lost a decade and the results were showing. Health, as measured by life expectancy, had improved annually for more than a century, but the rate of increase had slowed dramatically, and health inequalities were growing. Bad as the situation was in England, the damage to health in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was even worse.

If health has stopped improving, so has society. Global evidence shows that health is a good measure of social and economic progress. When a society flourishes, so does health; when a society has large social and economic inequalities, it has serious health inequalities.

People’s health is not just about how well the health service is funded and functions, important as that is, but about the conditions in which they are born, grow, live, work and age, and inequities in power, money and resources. Together, these are the social determinants of health.

UK life expectancy had improved since the end of the 19th century, but the rate of increase started slowing dramatically in 2011. In 1981-2010 it increased by about one year every five and a half years among women, and every four years among men. In 2011-18 it slowed to one year every 28 years among women, and every 15 years among men.

I contend that the real causes of the failure of health to improve are social; this is supported by growing inequalities in health according to deprivation and region

This slowing down is real, but the explanations have been disputed. We have considered more prosaic explanations: perhaps we have reached peak life expectancy and it has to slow? Other European countries with longer life expectancies than the UK have continued to increase; we have some way to go before we hit peak expectancy. Perhaps we had bad winters and bad flu outbreaks? Our analyses showed that improvements in mortality slowed in winter and non-winter months. At most, winter could account for between one sixth and one eighth of the slowdown.

Lower life expectancy

I contend the real causes of the failure of health to improve are social; this is supported by the growing inequalities in health according to deprivation and region. The more deprived the area, the lower the life expectancy. In 2016-18 men in the least deprived 10% of England had a life expectancy 9.5 years longer than men in the most deprived; for women the gap was 7.7 years. In 2010-12 the gap was 9.1 years for men and 6.8 years for women. In the most deprived 20% of areas there was no improvement at all for women, in sharp contrast to continued improvement for the most fortunate 20%.

There are well known regional differences in mortality and life expectancy: people in the north of England are sicker. Deprivation and geography come together in important ways. For people in the least deprived 10% of districts, there is little regional difference in life expectancy; it doesn’t much matter where you live, your subgroup will have improved its life expectancy. The more deprived your district, the greater the disadvantage of living in the north compared with London and the southeast.

The social gradient in healthy life expectancy is even steeper: years in poor health increased between 2009-11 and 2015-17, from 15.8 years to 16.2 in men and from 18.7 years to 19.4 years in women. There are no routine figures produced for life expectancy based on race or ethnicity, but those we have suggest half of minority ethnic groups — mostly black, Asian and mixed — have significantly lower disability-free life expectancy than white British men and women.

This damage to the nation’s health need not have happened. After 2008 both the Labour government under Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led coalition were concerned that health inequalities in England were too wide and I was commissioned to review what could be done to reduce them. With colleagues at what became the UCL Institute of Health Equity, I convened nine task groups of more than 80 experts to review the evidence and assembled a commission to deliberate on it.

The result was the Marmot review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, published in 2010 (1). Though commissioned by the Labour party, it was welcomed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in a public health white paper.

The poor get poorer

A report by the Royal Society for Public Health, based on a survey that asked experts and its members their views, classed it as a major 21st-century UK public health achievement, along with the ban on public smoking and the soft drinks industry levy. However, its central recommendation that ambitious public policies, targeting all age groups, could act on the social determinants of health to reduce inequalities was largely ignored.

The governments elected in Britain in 2010 and 2015 made austerity central to policy. Public expenditure was cut from 42% of GNP in 2009-10 to 35% in 2018-19, to restore the economy to growth by restricting public expenditure. By one measure, at least, it didn’t work: wage growth. International comparisons of this between 2007 and 2018 show that Britain, with minus 2%, was the third worst, above only Greece and Mexico, of 35 rich (OECD) countries.

This damage to the nation's health need not have happened. After 2008, both the Labour government under Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led coalition were concerned that health inequalities in England were too wide and I was commissioned to review what could be done to reduce them

The governments would probably have denied that the real purpose was to make the poor poorer and allow the top 1% to resume the trajectory, briefly interrupted by the global financial crisis, of garnering wealth. But that was the effect. Spending on family welfare was cut by 40%; local government expenditure by 31% for the most deprived 20%, compared with 16% for the least deprived 20%; and funding for sixth-form and further education by 12% per pupil (2).

If the architects of these policies imagined all that money had been wasted hitherto, the evidence indicates they were wrong. Our new report, Health Equity in England: the Marmot Review 10 Years On (3), examines impacts in five of the six areas of recommendations we made in 2010: give every child the best start in life; ensure access to education and lifelong learning; improve employment and working conditions; ensure people have enough money to lead a healthy life; promote sustainable places and communities. We show that austerity has taken a toll on almost all social determinants of health, worsening inequalities.

Yet we know early childhood is a crucial life stage, not just for health but for development — cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and behavioural. Good early child development predicts good school performance, which predicts better educational and occupational opportunities and living conditions in adulthood.

The signs are not good

The signs are not good. As a result of cuts to local government spending, 1,000 children’s centres involved in Sure Start (a government programme to support pre-school children and parents) are estimated to have had to close. The welcome support for childcare for older pre-school children does not make up for this.

A much-used measure of child poverty is how many children live in households with less than 60% of the median income. In 2009-12 the figure was 18%, rising to 20% in 2015-18. The cost of housing can drive people into poverty, and after housing costs are taken into account, the figure rose from 28% in 2009-12 to 31% in 2015-18.

The housing crisis has led to a rise in homelessness and increased costs: the proportion of people spending more than a third of their income on housing follows the social gradient, but has risen in all income groups. In the lowest 10% of income in 2016-7, 38% of families were spending more than a third of income on housing: the figure had been 28% a decade earlier.

More people do not have enough money and now resort to food banks. There are more left-behind communities living in poor conditions with little reason for hope of improvement.

All these factors are interrelated, so it is hard to say which affect health inequalities most. In 2010 we wrote, ‘Health inequalities are not inevitable and can be significantly reduced. They stem from avoidable inequalities in society.’ That hasn’t changed.

Michael Marmot

Michael Marmot is director of the University College London Institute of Health Equity. An earlier version of this article appeared in the British Medical Journal on 25 February 2020.

Original text in English

Workers and students pose strike challenge to Belarusian leader

By Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Factory workers chanted slogans, students and pensioners took to the streets, and police detained at least 235 people on Monday as the Belarusian opposition sought to intensify pressure on veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko with a nationwide strike.

Lukashenko defied an ultimatum to surrender power by midnight, challenging his opponents to carry out a threat to paralyse the country with strikes, nearly three months after his disputed election victory unleashed mass protests.

If sustained, the strikes could open a new phase in the crisis, testing whether the opposition has the mass support it needs to bring enterprises across the country of 9.5 million people to a halt. The opposition has mounted strikes at state-run factories previously, but they were not sustained.

Belarusian media reported groups of strikers at many major state-controlled enterprises. However, the prime minister’s spokeswoman said all the major industrial companies were working normally.

Many shops, cafes and restaurants were closed in central Minsk. Hundreds of university students took to the streets in the capital, clapping and chanting as passing cars tooted their horns in support.


A crowd of around 2,000-3,000 marched down a main street waving red and white flags and protest signs.

Elsewhere in Minsk, black-clad officers in masks poured out of vans, detaining people and dragging them away, footage from news website Tut.by showed.

By evening, small protests continued in a dozen districts of Minsk as protesters formed roadside human chains and stood in the road to block traffic. Unidentified men shot at human chains in two places with paintball guns, Tut.by reported.

The Vesna-96 rights group said police had detained 235 people across the country on Monday.

The KGB security service warned protesters that extremist actions may be treated as terrorism. The central bank said that a DDoS cyber attack knocked its website offline for two and a half hours.

Exiled opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has urged Belarusians to block roads, shut down workplaces, stop using government shops and services and withdraw all money from their bank accounts.

Lukashenko has scoffed, asking: “Who will feed the kids?”

Official media said Lukashenko was at work as normal on Monday and that he had a busy working week ahead of him.


Tsikhanouskaya praised workers and others for the strike action a day after police fired stun grenades and detained scores of people at nationwide protests by tens of thousands, the 11th straight weekend of rallies.

“The protest will only be over once we have achieved our goal. We stand together, we are many and we are ready to go until victory,” she said in a statement.

If strikes come close to paralysing the country, it could be a further test of Russian support for its ally Lukashenko.

Since the crisis began, Moscow has backed him with a $1.5 billion loan and increased security cooperation.

Official results showed Lukashenko won a landslide election victory on Aug. 9, but the opposition and Western countries say the vote was rigged, which he denies.

More than 15,000 people have since been arrested during a crackdown on mass demonstrations. Nearly all opposition leaders fled or were jailed

PHOTOS https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belarus-election/workers-and-students-pose-strike-challenge-to-belarusian-leader-idUSKBN27A116

Banners and prayers for Kamala Harris in her ancestral Indian village


A man drives past a banner of U.S. Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris at the entrance to the village of Thulasendrapuram, where Harris' maternal grandfather was born and grew up, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, India, October 25, 2020. REUTERS/Sudarshan Varadha

By Sudarshan Varadhan


THULASENDRAPURAM, India (Reuters) - A big banner of U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris welcomes visitors to Thulasendrapuram, a lush, green south Indian village that is praying for her Democratic Party’s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The village, located about 320 km (200 miles) south of the city of Chennai, is where Harris’s maternal grandfather was born more than a century ago.

Its residents beam with pride at what the first U.S. senator of South Asian descent has already achieved, and many are rooting for an election result that will make her the second-most powerful person in the world’s richest country.

“From Thulasendrapuram to America”, declares one of the nearly dozen banners from where Harris smiles out in the village.

“We, the people of Thulasendrapuram, wish for the electoral success of American vice president nominee Kamala Harris, whose ancestors were a native of Thulasendrapuram.”

Harris’s grandfather P.V. Gopalan and his family migrated to Chennai nearly 90 years ago, where he retired as a high-ranking government official.


Harris, who was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who both immigrated to the United States to study, visited Thulasendrapuram when she was just five and has repeatedly recalled her formative walks with her grandfather on the beaches of Chennai.

Gopalan’s childhood home in Thulasendrapuram does not exist anymore, villagers say, and cows and goats were seen grazing on empty plots of land where the house he grew up in once stood.

The banners, with messages written in Tamil, were put up on the directions of M. Gurunathan, the head of Thulasendrapuram’s village committee that oversees its more than 200 mostly farming families.

One banner at the village bus stop has Harris smiling with the White House in the background.

“We are really hoping she wins,” said Gurunathan, who is planning to hold a special prayer at the local temple on election day. “The village has received global fame because of her. She is our pride.”


Locals of neighbouring areas are also in touch with the temple to conduct an “abhishekam” - which sometimes involves pouring milk over the idol of a Hindu god - to pray for Harris’s victory.

Harris’s name is seen sculpted into a stone that lists public donations made to the temple, along with that of her grandfather who had donated decades ago. Her aunt offered 5,000 rupees ($67) in her name after she was appointed the attorney general of California, the temple’s caretaker, S.V. Ramanan, said.

“But I think she is not proud of her Hindu roots, she identifies herself as a Christian,” Ramanan said.

“Though she has reconnected with her Indian connection on the campaign trail, she has mostly played up her image as an American.”

Harris has been widely described as a church-goer and a person of Christian faith, and was raised in a household that was tolerant of both Hindu and Christian religious practices. The democratic vice-president nominee has previously acknowledged her Indian roots.

Over 20,000 Hungarian nurses reject being relocated amid pandemic

By Anita Komuves

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - More than 20,000 nurses had signed a petition by Monday against a law passed by Hungary’s parliament this month that allows public healthcare workers to be relocated to another hospital for up to two years.

Hungary, like other east European countries, is grappling with a shortage of medical workers during the coronavirus pandemic, just as new infections are rising. Many nurses and doctors have left Hungary to work abroad for higher salaries.

The law forces healthcare professionals to choose between working in the state-run or the private health sector. Those in the public system can now be relocated to another institution for up to two years, versus a maximum of 44 days previously.

Gergely Gulyas, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said the law was needed for pandemics and healthcare emergencies, and would not be used regularly “in peacetime”.

The law introduces a substantial wage hike for doctors, but the increase does not apply to nurses whose salaries have gradually been raised since 2019, based on a previous decree.

The petition was started last week by the Chamber of Hungarian Healthcare Professionals. In an online survey among its members in October, more than 31% of respondents said they might not sign their new contracts based on the law.


“More than 95% of nurses are women. They have families, many of them are