The mayor of the Hungarian-dominated town of Beregszász (Berehove) gave a startling glimpse into what a year of war in Ukraine has meant for the western-most region of the country, which is home to over 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, as well as large numbers of Romanians, Roma and Slovaks, in addition to Ukrainians. Mayor Zoltán Babják remarked that the situation in […]
The occasional peak into Jobbik’s King Attila Academy (Attila Király Akadémia) may cause the uninitiated to chuckle or raise an eyebrow at some of their bizarre, esoteric and decidedly cult-like practices. But the Jobbik academy, which serves as a training and indoctrination program for young Hungarian men who wish to find employment in the party, or in towns where the […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave what was by all accounts a strongly defiant speech, in which he responded to his government’s massive defeat in a Veszprém by-election last Sunday by noting that the right just had to “fight” harder, in order to ensure that what he thinks is an international smear campaign against his regime does not have a impact […]
An unpublished Ipsos opinion poll commissioned two weeks before a critical by-election in a traditionally centre-right Veszprém riding suggested that Zoltán Kész–the independent candidate supported by most of the left-centre opposition–stood a semi-realistic chance of beating Fidesz in a constituency that it had long held. The leaked poll found that Fidesz’s candidate, Lajos Némedi, was ahead of Mr. Kész by […]
It’s been an absolutely astonishing day in the world of Hungarian politics; after all, it rarely happens, that the country’s wealthiest businessman and a close friend of nearly 35 years of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is humiliated in public, and then goes on a whirlwind expletive-laden media tour, in which he repeatedly calls Mr. Orbán a prick and claims that […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán didn’t have an exceptionally good day. He almost certainly could have avoided an embarrassing press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel if only he would have taken the more pragmatic route of distancing himself from comments made last summer in Transylvania, about the possibility of turning Hungary into an illiberal democracy. Mr. Orbán was answering a question […]
Hungarians in New York City are joining a series of protests against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian and socially unjust government, under the slogan “Spring is coming – Orbán is going.” The protest aims to draw attention to dissatisfaction with Mr. Orbán, ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s official visit to Budapest on Monday. The New York protest is being held […]
The Hungarian left is showing signs of breaking up into two quite distinct camps: on the one hand, we have two mainstream, establishment parties: namely, the Hungarian Socialist Party, which over the past 25 years has tried to be all things to all people, as well as former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition, which is a bizarre, hybrid concoction […]
While the radical left-wing Syriza was in the process of winning one seat shy of a majority in Greece’s national elections on Sunday, and as another fledgling, anti-establishment leftist party in Spain, called Podemos, is planning to do the same later this year, elderly conservative, liberal and a sprinkling of centre-left intellectuals sat down in Budapest for an academic and […]
In Hungary, political philosopher and public thinker Gáspár Miklós Tamás is the only prominent essayist to write quite flatteringly of Alexis Tsipras, the hard-left firebrand who will likely become Greece’s prime minister-elect this Sunday. On Thursday, Mr. Tamás demonstrated in Budapest, in front of Greece’s embassy, in support of Syriza, otherwise known as the “Coalition of the Radical Left.” “Hungary’s […]
