DATASET B — POLITICAL SPEECH EXCERPT

Eleven years. I sometimes try to remember what this country looked like eleven years ago and I find it — not painful, exactly, but sobering. The hospitals. The roads. The young people leaving. You know the numbers. I don't need to recite them tonight — you lived them. That's why you're here.

When we came to office, there were people who said: give them two years and they'll be just like the rest. There were journalists — well-known names, well-funded platforms — who published countdown clocks. Corruption timers. Two years, they said. Eighteen months. The international press agreed. We were populists, demagogues, a blip, an embarrassment. And then something happened that they did not predict and still have not fully absorbed. We governed. Not perfectly — I would not claim that, and you would not believe me if I did. But we governed. Roads were built. The birth rate turned. Hospital waiting times fell. Pension arrears were cleared for the first time in twenty years.

I say this not to boast. I say this because the question of who has the right to speak about this country's future cannot be separated from the question of who has actually tried to build it. And that distinction matters enormously when we look at where the opposition comes from today.

[applause]

Now — our friends in the constitutional court have been busy again this month. Three pieces of legislation, passed by this parliament with clear democratic majorities, have been suspended pending review. I want to be precise: suspended. Not struck down on legal grounds. Suspended, pending review, on the basis of procedural concerns raised by parties who lost the election three years ago and have not found a way to accept that fact. I am not a lawyer. But I know what democracy means. It means that when the people speak, through their elected representatives, that voice has primacy. It does not mean that nine unelected individuals, appointed under a previous government's emergency provisions, have an indefinite veto over legislation the public voted for. That is not constitutional democracy. That is something else.

I want to be fair to the other side. I understand the theory. Minority protections, checks and balances, the countermajoritarian function of courts — I have read the textbooks. Some of those arguments have merit in the abstract. But there is a gap between the abstract and the concrete, and in that gap you find the following situation: a country where the elected parliament cannot implement its manifesto because institutions designed under different conditions, by people with different priorities, continue to operate as if elections are inconvenient suggestions rather than sovereign decisions. We did not come this far to be governed by a constitution written for a different era by people who are no longer accountable to anyone.

[sustained applause]

On the question of the media — I will say only this. We have not closed a single outlet. Not one. Every newspaper that existed when we took office continues to publish. Every television station that was broadcasting is still broadcasting. What we have done is introduce transparency requirements. We have asked: who owns this platform, and where does the money come from? These are not radical questions. These are the questions any citizen in a democracy has the right to ask. The answer, in several cases, was: foreign capital, foreign foundations, foreign political interests. We made that visible. We required disclosure. And for this we are described, in those same outlets, as press freedom violators. You will understand if we find that characterisation somewhat ironic.

There are those who would have us be ashamed of what we believe. Ashamed of family. Ashamed of faith. Ashamed of wanting our children to grow up with a coherent sense of who they are and where they come from. We are told that attachment to one's own culture is provincial at best and dangerous at worst. We are told that the nation is an outdated concept, that borders are morally suspect, that the proper citizen of the future is one who holds no particular loyalty to any particular place. I have listened to this argument for many years. I understand its appeal to certain people in certain rooms. But it has no grip on the lives of the people in this hall, or in the towns and villages where this party was built. People live in places. They are from somewhere. They love particular things — a language, a landscape, a way of celebrating a season. These are not prejudices to be overcome. They are the substance of a life. And any politics that cannot make room for them is not a politics of liberation. It is a politics of contempt.

[applause]

We will face elections again. We will face them calmly, openly, with full international observation if our partners wish it. We ask only that those observers come without a conclusion already written. That they look at what has been built here, not just at what their briefing documents told them to expect. We believe the record speaks. And we believe the people — this people, this inconvenient, stubborn, particular people — will speak again.