Péter Heltai, the 26 year old Ambassador-at-Large of the government aid agency called Hungary Helps, posed for a photo with residents of a Nigerian village, tweeting: “Just went back a ‘few’ hundreds of years in time.” Perhaps it was his lack of experience in the field of international aid that is behind a tweet that comes across as tone-deaf and […]
Last summer Konrád Rigó, a 38-year-old ethnic Hungarian and the State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture in Slovakia, gave a speech on Slovakia’s National Day. Mr. Rigó, who is a member of the Most-Híd party spoke at Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely in Hungarian) explaining how sons of many nations fought with the partisans during World War II. In addition to […]
While the political leadership of the Hungarian community in Transylvania firmly rejected parallels between Catalonia’s drive for independence and the future status of Hungarian-majority Hargita and Kovászna counties in Romania, the Romanian-language media appears concerned. This is especially true since Catalonia’s dramatic unilateral declaration of independence on 27 October–which was followed by the Spanish central government’s swift move to suspend […]
Relations between Hungary and the United States have been bad for a long time and don’t seem to be improving. In a recent interview Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s young and feisty foreign minister, has openly attacked the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, because of the US Embassy’s response to a new educational law in Ukraine. (Read here in Hungarian.) Péter […]
Viktor Orbán is in Communist Vietnam on an official visit. He warmly greeted the country’s leaders and laid a wreath at the Hanoi War Memorial commemorating the Communist victory over the Americans and their South-Vietnamese allies. Orbán met with Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and signed “a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation between the two ruling parties and expressed […]
The story of how Moscow attempted to expand the Russia Today state television network to Hungary, by setting up a Hungarian-language affiliate, is both strange and murky. What we know is that Moscow was interested in establishing a state propaganda media arm in Hungary and the strongest and perhaps first high profile supporter of this initiative was István Lovas, a […]
Just five months ago Iran and Hungary signed an agreement to expand nuclear cooperation between the two countries. The deal was inked by Ali Akbar Salehi, the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and Zsolt Semjén, the Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister. Mr. Semjén, a former Catholic theologian, was very excited about the nuclear deal with the Islamic state […]
Ukraine’s parliament accepted a law this week, which has been widely condemned by political parties of all stripes in Hungary and by ethnic Hungarian community leaders in Ukraine. If Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signs into law the bill accepted by legislators, Hungarian children in western Ukraine will no longer be able to study in Hungarian beyond Grade 4. Ukraine’s Minister of […]
On August 28, at the invitation of Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin will visit Budapest to take part in the opening ceremony of the World Judo Championships. Bilateral meetings are also planned and the University of Debrecen will award Mr. Putin the title “Civis Honoris Causa” – Honorary Citizen of the University in […]
The University of Debrecen in eastern Hungary announced that it is awarding Russian President Vladimir Putin with the distinction of Civis Honoris Causa. Only two other people have been awarded the honour before Mr. Putin, namely György Habsburg, the former president of the Hungarian Red Cross and the son of Austria-Hungary’s last crown prince, Otto von Habsburg, and Rudolf Schuster, […]
