Hungarian diplomats in both Canada and the United States have engaged in a concerted effort to silence Hungarian Canadians and Hungarian Americans critical of the Orbán government and to have them removed from local Hungarian communities or ensure that they are otherwise isolated. The most recent incident comes from Los Angeles, where Hungary’s Consul General, Tamás Széles, demanded that the […]
Árpád Szakács has just published the twelfth installment of a series of articles in the Magyar Idők government daily entitled “Whose cultural dictatorship?”. His series aims to highlight how Hungarian public institutions and agencies are still often willing to fund cultural projects that are spearheaded by artists, authors or thinkers not associated with the ruling party or those who are […]
The Orbán regime introduced legislation to shut down accredited gender studies programs offered by universities in Hungary. Academics now have 24 hours to respond to the government’s plan. The ban will primarily impact students at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (ELTE)–the only institution in Hungary, other than Central European University, to offer gender studies at the graduate level, and the […]
If István Tarlós, the 70 year old mayor of Budapest, decides not to run for a third term in the 2019 municipal elections, Fidesz is likely to eliminate the position of lord mayor (főpolgármester) altogether, rather than face the risk of losing the Budapest mayoralty to an opposition candidate. According to sources quoted by the HVG weekly, Fidesz believes that […]
It seems that an annual summer trip to Hungary has become something of a ritual for me. Initially, now well over a decade ago, I would travel back for archival research–first for my MA thesis, then for my PhD dissertation, or for the odd conference presentation. Then as I became more involved in the country’s public discourse over the past […]
Jobbik is right where Fidesz want it to be: effectively bankrupt, with almost no paid staff and with the insurgent far right movement of László Toroczkai siphoning away parts of the party base. This week RTL discovered that Jobbik has only 604,000 forints (circa C$3000) remaining in its bank account and has just three paid full-time employees. The party will […]
Thirty-five year old Valér Palkovits has been named Hungary’s new Consul General in Toronto, replacing Stefánia Szabó this summer. (Yesterday, we reported that Ferenc Kumin will become Hungary’s new ambassador in Ottawa.) Mr. Palkovits previously served as Deputy Head of Mission at Hungary’s embassy in Riga (Latvia) and prior to this, in 2007, he worked for the State Secretary for […]
Forty-three year old Ferenc Kumin, currently Consul General in New York, will become Hungary’s new ambassador in Ottawa. The Index news site reported on this, based on both government and opposition sources. We also learned that Hungary’s former spy chief, István Pásztor, will replace Mr. Kumin in New York, as the new Consul General. Mr. Pásztor, until recently, headed the […]
Seventy-seven percent of the residents of Józsefváros, otherwise known as Budapest’s 8th District, decided that it did not matter to them who would occupy the mayor’s office or that as voters, they have no power to remove Fidesz from power anyway. Two morsels of opposition wisdom can be questioned after the results in Józsefváros, which saw Botond Sára (Fidesz) garner […]
Starting Monday, Bertalan Tóth faces a most unenviable task, following his election as leader of the Hungarian Socialist Party, winning 54% of the ballots cast at the MSZP congress on Sunday. The 42 year old politician has less than a year to salvage the Hungarian Socialist Party–the dominant political formation in Hungary for two decades following the transition to democracy […]
