Could she find a better title for her text? Coming. Like the one she and the thousands of high school students who have been taking to the streets of Hungary for weeks against the nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban dream of embodying. “Whether you believe it or not/I am and we are the present/As well as this fucking future”, chants Lili Pankotai, 18, in the slam that made her famous after being declaimed from the podium of one of the most imposing demonstrations of the movement which is currently shaking the country to demand more freedom in the education system.
It was in Budapest, on October 23, on the occasion of the commemoration of the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956, transformed that day into a vast protest in order to support teachers brutally dismissed by the government for having gone on strike. Spoken with determination, these few verses read on his mobile phone sum up all the excesses of the Prime Minister who has ruled Hungary with an iron fist since 2010: “Twelve years of friendship with Putin could go to waste / But energy prices are more important than Europe”; “It pains me to see that today’s young people/Who fight for themselves and their teachers/To be said to be fucking liberals”; “You think/That you can erase the thought/My ass”…
This now cult text, she wrote it ” within one hour “, one evening last March, under the influence of rage, on returning from high school, she says at the beginning of December, in a café in Budapest. After the reaction of the head of her establishment in southern Hungary, where she was an intern, she indeed preferred to move to the capital. The day after the speech, the headmaster publicly distanced himself from his student. “We reject in the strongest terms all content of [ce slam] which is incompatible with Christian values,” posted on Facebook the principal of this private Catholic high school. Feeling “pushed away”, the teenager with long blond hair is now enrolled in a more progressive institution.
Target of multiple attacks
In her text, Lili certainly scratched this high school “conservative christian” “dad is a man, mom is a woman”, who sought to faithfully instill in him the homophobic messages of power. But what has visibly ulcerated the system the most is that a young woman dares to attack Viktor Orban by using raw familiarity, in accordance with the codes of slam, this art of declaimed and committed poetry. “Child soldier of the left”, “Hungarian Greta Thunberg” [ce n’est pas un compliment chez les Magyars]who “deserves two big slaps”… the many media in the hands of power have been unleashed against this young girl who does not even have her baccalaureate yet.
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