Raimund Löw is a veteran Austrian journalist and longtime foreign correspondent for ORF, Austria’s public broadcaster. He has reported from Beijing, Moscow, and Washington — the cities where global power is made and contested — giving him a rare outsider’s view of American politics and its consequences for the rest of the world.
Welcome to you all, friends, on a cold and cosy afternoon in Vienna. I just checked the temperature in Minneapolis, and they have minus 10 celsius including the wind chill. Still they expect many thousands of people at the No Kings event today.
It is great to be here and to see you all at this event in solidarity with millions who will be in the streets today in the United States.
The No Kings movement is one of the most important events of our time. Why?
Because America still is not only the world’s superpower, but also its trendsetter. The direction America goes has consequences for all of us.
And here you have the peculiar situation: the United States is a democratic country. Many democratic achievements have been gained through popular fights over decades. But now the US has a fascist or semi-fascist leadership — however you want to label Trumpism. I would suggest you check out the checklist of political scientist Jonathan Rauch, who came to the conclusion: America is not a fascist country, but it does have a fascist leadership.
The big question is who is going to prevail?
In America there is a strong civil society, a strong free press, and many bastions of liberal democracy. But the leadership wants to draw the country in the opposite direction.
There is another reason for us Europeans to be here:
We have many clones in Europe of the pseudo-king our friends in America are demonstrating against. There are too many of them, actually. Our neighbours in Hungary hopefully will end the reign of Victor Orban, Trump’s best friend in Europe, in two weeks. But many other authoritarian and nationalist politicians are waiting in the wings. Your fight to prevent Trumpism to win is also our fight to keep our democracy and our freedom.
What is shocking now in the second Trump Administration is the speed of events. How fast things had been moving in one year. With the attacks of the human rights of migrants. And now, with illegal wars in Latin America and in the Middle East.
I remember the time of my youth, the sixties and seventies of the last century. An irresponsible American leadership dragged the country into a war, the war in Vietnam. With lies coming out of the Pentagon every day and a fantasy world full of victories from the White House. We are today close to a similar situation with the war against Iran.
What helped to end the war in Indochina was the anti-war movement in the United States. I remember this very well. Every six months, the people from the anti-war coalition under the slogan “Out Now” organized huge demonstrations all over the country. They approached us in Europe to organise our demonstrations on the same days in solidarity with the Vietnamese and with our American friends. And we did. The war in Vietnam ended thanks to the mobilisations against the war in the United States and the support in Europe and other parts of the world.
This is exactly what we are doing today in solidarity with the No Kings movement.
The strength of American democracy has always been its capacity of self-correction when the country goes in the wrong direction. The self-correction was possible thanks to mobilisations of young people and adults in the universities, on the streets and in the neighborhoods. This capacity for self-correction is very much in demand now. Your No Kings movement is a central part of it. The Americans are better in correcting a wrong turn of their leadership than we Europeans had been quite often in the past. They will prevail also this time.
Our slogan of the day should be: Create two, three, many points of strong No Kings protests, on both sides of the Atlantic. I wish you all the best here in Vienna as well as in America!