The national and regional authorities of the “radical right” have had a very serious attitude” in the cinemas, considers Cláudia Belchior, which questions even current democracies.
The leader of the largest network of publicly funded theaters in Europe denounced to Lusa the dismissals of artists due to the rise to power of the extreme right, which she described as a threat to creative freedom.
The president of the European Theater Convention (CTE), Cláudia Belchior, which brings together 63 theaters from 31 countries, including four from Portugal, said that the problem was felt in Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Austria and “it is beginning to growing up in Germany”.
On September 1, Thuringia, in the east of the country, became the first federal state where the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party, is the main parliamentary force.
Toward National and regional authorities of the “radical right” have had a very serious attitude” in cinemasEuropean art galleries and public museums, said the Portuguese Cláudia Belchior.
“We have a A significant number of associates are laid off.simply because they do not have the nationalist language that interests them at this moment,” lamented the artistic advisor of the Belém Cultural Center Foundation.
“There are theaters in which the repertoire was simply eliminated to create a repertoire with a single nationalist language, and this is very dangerous for our democracies,” Belchior warned.
The leader highlighted that, instead of simply closing cultural institutions, the extreme right has preferred to “remove people, almost by force, from their workplaces to be replaced by others, who have a cultural propaganda agenda.”
This is because these The movements “realize that culture is super important”Belchior explained.
On September 30, Austria became the first European country in which a far-right party – the Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), founded by former Nazis – received the most votes in a national election since World War II.
Belchior maintained that the phenomenon puts freedom of expression and artistic creation in Europe at risk and revealed that ETC, founded in 1988, has already conveyed its concerns to the European Commission.
“This has already been used in the past, it is nothing new, but we are reaching a very worrying point and “We were very asleep, a little with our eyes closed,” warned the president of the ETC.
Belchior recalled that, last year, the Italian Government, led by the far-right party of Giorgia Meloni, announced that the directors of museums and other cultural institutions should be Italian.
“Our Italian colleagues, unfortunately many of them, did not speak, they were afraid. There is a culture of fear: ‘I’m going to speak, I’m going to go out on the street,’” the leader warned.
Belchior spoke with Lusa in the semi-autonomous Chinese region of Hong Kong, where he is participating in the Hong Kong Performing Arts Expo, a conference for performing arts professionals, which ends this Friday.
Source: Observadora
