On Monday we learned that the opposition finally did what it should have done before April’s national election: it is rallying behind a single mayoral candidate in the central Budapest district of Józsefváros, in the hope of reclaiming it from Fidesz in a local election to be held on 8 July. With outgoing Józsefváros mayor Máté Kocsis moving to national […]
Milán Constantinovits is a columnist whose work often appears on the conservative Mandiner news site and he is also a linguist and an author. This week, he published a type of “wish list” of areas that he would like the third Orbán government to engage in as a matter of priority. I thought about referring to these as demands. Yet […]
Former Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy, who governed Hungary from 2002 to 2004 and led a Socialist-Free Democrat coalition government, felt it was appropriate to issue an effusive congratulatory letter to Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan. Mr. Aliyev won 86% of the popular vote in an election that the OSCE determined had involved widespread ballot box stuffing. This did not seem to concern […]
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its Press Freedom Index for 2018 and it lists the state of media freedom in Hungary as being “problematic.” Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are deemed to have a healthier free press than Hungary. Out of 180 countries, Hungary is number 73–falling back two place since last year in its global score. RSF writes: […]
Sándor Szenczy is a Baptist pastor and President of Hungarian Baptist Aid. This week we learned that a high-ranking official from North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that Pastor Szenczy build a Baptist House of Prayer in Pyongyang. On a recent trip to North Korea, the pastor was given the opportunity to speak in one of only two Protestant […]
Immediately after being re-elected in April, Viktor Orbán indicated that addressing demographic issues would form a central plank in his government’s program. The decline in Hungary’s population has been a reality for more than three decades, after peaking at 10.7 million in 1981. In 2017 alone, the country’s population decreased by 40,000, with the number of births falling by 2.9% […]
After investing $400 million in Hungary since 1994, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros have announced that they are closing their offices in Budapest and are relocating to Berlin. The decision comes on the heels of a relentless anti-Soros campaign on the part of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government, the highly controversial publication of a list of so-called Hungarian […]
The Orbán government had high hopes that the election of Donald Trump as president would lead to improved bilateral relations between Hungary and the United States–relations that had very much deteriorated since 2010, after Fidesz took power. The Orbán government had been paying Washington lobbyist Connie Mack around $112,000 per month, primarily to secure a much coveted Oval Office visit […]
After more than a decade and a half in Hungarian politics, Viktor Szigetvári is leaving the political arena and potentially even Hungary. He gave a self-reflective, candid and elegant interview on ATV in the days after the election. It was devoid of any political spin. Mr. Szigetvári launched his career not as a front-line politician, but as a political strategist. […]
An estimated 100,000 Hungarians–mostly young adults–filled Kossuth Square and spilled over into Alkotmány utca on Saturday to issue two overarching demands. First, they are demanding new elections–based on a fully free and fair electoral system. Second, they scolded the opposition for their inability to field a single candidate against Fidesz in every electoral district and demanded full cooperation against the […]
