On Easter Monday, six days before national elections, András Fekete-Győr of Momentum announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy in Central Budapest in favour of Márta Naszályi of the Hungarian Socialist Party – Párbeszéd alliance (MSZP-P)–the strongest opposition candidate. Mr. Fekete-Győr followed in the footsteps of Péter Juhász of Együtt, who withdrew last week. Central Budapest, known in Hungarian as […]
A joint investigative journalism project by the Direkt36 website and by 444.hu reports that since 2012, people believed to be stooges for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have received Hungarian residency permits. In at least one of these cases, Hungary welcomed a Syrian man believed to be involved in the trafficking of weapons, drugs and people, as well as money laundering, while […]
This past weekend, Péter Juhász of the Együtt party did the right thing: he withdrew his candidacy in Central Budapest (the Belváros) in favour of the Hungarian Socialist Party – Párbeszéd candidate, Márta Naszályi (Mrs. Várady). This electoral district, like nearly each in Budapest, could be won by left-centre parties if the local Fidesz candidate faces a single left-centre or […]
The Faith Church (Hit Gyülekezete), a Budapest-based Pentecostal mega-church, which is said to have a congregation of over 30,000, endorsed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán this past Sunday. Specifically, the congregation’s leader, Sándor Németh, warned his followers during the Sunday service that a vote for the opposition on 8 April is a vote for allowing into Hungary 10,000 Muslims a year. […]
Péter Márki-Zay, the newly-minted Mayor of Hódmezővásárhely, formerly a Fidesz bastion, has launched a website entitled “Regime Change 2018.” The site’s main purpose is to encourage full coordination among the opposition candidates in all 106 electoral districts and to inform citizens as to which candidate to vote for in a given riding, if they wish to defeat the Orbán government. […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s decision to use his speech on a Hungarian national holiday to explicitly threaten legal and political revenge against his opponents has opposition politicians, journalists, academics and civil liberties activists wondering if the election on 8 April is, indeed, a “do or die” situation. The most recent Medián poll, released this week, shows that Fidesz is set […]
The political opponents of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and segments of civil society can expect political and legal retribution from the ruling Fidesz party after 8 April, provided that the regime wins the national elections, as is currently predicted by pollsters. Mr. Orbán spoke on the anniversary of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution and used his speech to indicate that there […]
The scandal and mystery around Fidesz Minister Lajos Kósa deepened on Wednesday, with Magyar Nemzet reporting that in a notarized document from September 2013, the minister’s mother was promised a “gift” of 2.6 million euros from the woman in the town of Csenger, called Mária Matkó (Mrs. Gábor Szabó), who claimed to be the beneficiary of an estate worth 4.35 […]
Lajos Simicska, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s former college roommate and best-friend-turned-worst-enemy, has decided to air the ruling party’s dirty laundry in the weeks ahead of the national elections in April. The Magyar Nemzet conservative daily newspaper produced what it says is a notarized document showing that someone (the name on the document is covered) entrusted Fidesz MP and Minister Lajos Kósa […]
Slovakia is in political turmoil after the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. Mr. Kuciak was investigating corruption within the government of Prime Minister Robert Fico and connections between those in power to the Calabrian Mafia. Remarkably, the seven suspects arrested in connection to the murder were all released without charges. Mr. Fico’s Hungarian coalition partner, the […]
