Hungary’s parliament voted by a massive margin (163 yes votes, 11 abstentions and 2 opposed) to repeal a law enacted in March 2015, that shuttered the majority of retail stores and commercial establishments on Sundays. It took the governing Fidesz party less than 24 hours to announce its intention to repeal the highly unpopular piece of legislation, submit it to […]
It speaks volumes about what matters most to Hungarian citizens, when news of the Orbán government’s decision Monday morning to allow all stores and shopping malls to remain open on Sundays is considered to be groundbreaking, headline news–with flashing “breaking news” banners for added impact–on nearly all major Hungarian news sites. Last week, the courts gave the Hungarian Socialist Party […]
On Tuesday, HFP published a story on the president of the nascent Alliance of Conservative Students (Konzervatív Hallgatók Szövetsége – KHSZ), who happens to also be actively involved in the Nazi Pax Hungarica movement. This is an extremist group, previously called Blood and Honour, which bars all homosexuals, Jews, Roma and non-Caucasians from membership. As the controversy surrounding Balázs László’s […]
Balázs László is currently studying political science at Hungary’s Péter Pázmány Catholic University and he is also the president of the fledgling Alliance of Conservative Students (Konzervatív Hallgatók Szövetsége – KHSZ). The new organization and its leader have been given a surprising amount of national media attention in Hungary, despite having only organized two poorly attended lectures and having a […]
In 2008, Péter Árvai, Ádám Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy founded Prezi, an innovative software company in Budapest. They wanted to create a new type of presentation software that people could use to share and tell their stories in a memorable and engaging way. They succeeded, and today Prezi is a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint. Seven years ago* the Budapest-based company […]
Although Hungary is a NATO ally of the United States, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has never been invited to the White House. Two years ago in Berlin, President Barack Obama announced that the US would host the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, 2016, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. This Summit […]
Hungarian government propagandists have a new strategy – they plant fake, “feel-good” stories about the economy in the media. Recently articles appeared that Hungary’s debt upgrade is “imminent” and would be well-deserved. Keeping the country’s debt in “junk” is unfair. Portfolio.hu published an elaborate story about the government’s efforts to attract Tesla Motors, quoting Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs, […]
More than 45,000 took to the streets on March 15th, 2016, as part of a massive demonstration led by teachers, parents and students, but drawing on all demographics of Hungarians who are livid with an intellectually and morally bankrupt, and rhetorically exhausted autocratic regime that has built its power on dividing society against itself and capitalizing on the increased vulnerability […]
Gábor Kubatov, Fidesz’s party director and voter mobilization expert–who gained a degree of infamy for creating databases containing exhaustive amounts of personal voter data–is reportedly too busy to address the controversy surrounding the use of skinheads to physically block a Socialist MP from submitting a proposed referendum question on Sunday store closures to the National Election Office. Mr. Kubatov is […]
The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) badly needed a victory. The party has been in a cycle of stagnation and slow decline for over six years. It was bleeding some support to former Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition (DK), which has managed to hold its own in terms of its modest support, and with Socialist headquarters, offices and other […]
