Many in the West still fail to understand that Fidesz is a significantly more extremist party than Jobbik. Some of the founders of Fidesz, most notably Zsolt Bayer, one of the country’s most popular columnists and a close friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, publishes the type of explicit hate speech and vitriol that almost nobody else dares to express, […]
We’ve just returned from a wonderful vacation in Hungary and, among other places, my wife and I visited Debrecen, my birthplace. Every year we see relatives there. I love this large, sleepy Eastern-Hungarian town – the “Calvinist Rome.” When I was a child the city’s open-air market was located on Rákóczi Street, always a colorful cavalcade of local sellers, called […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán became the first sitting leader of a European Union country to formally endorse Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. Speaking at a gathering of right-wing politicians, thinkers and youth, in the heart of the Hungarian-majority region of Romania called Székelyföld (or Szeklerland), Mr. Orbán declared: “Trump would be better for Europe and for Hungary.” He then referred […]
Our news site has never, up until now, reached out to Jobbik politicians directly with questions and there is certainly a strain within the Hungarian opposition, which continues to argue that the far-right party must remain in quarantine. When the opposition cable news network ATV changed its policy a few years ago and invited Jobbik politicians in for interviewers for the first […]
Eighty-seven year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel died peacefully after a long illness on July 2, 2016 in New York City. “My husband was a fighter. He fought for the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust,” his widow, Marion said in a statement. US President Barack Obama wrote “Elie Wiesel was one of the […]
Quite a political storm is brewing in Hungary, after Ronald S. Lauder of the World Jewish Congress named Hungary Europe’s most anti-Semitic country. Specifically, Mr. Lauder said the following: “The worst offender is Hungary. Because they now have a neo-Nazi party called Jobbik. They had started to put up statues of Admiral Horthy, who was a Nazi.” András Heisler, President of the […]
Antal Rogán, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, gave an interview Sunday morning to state-run Kossuth Radio. Speaking about the impact of the terrorist attack in Nice, he warned Hungarians about travelling to western European countries with significant immigrant populations, as he believes that the integration of immigrants has failed and therefore the risk of terrorism is high. “Europe […]
Authoritarian Turkish President Recep Erdoğan could have hardly asked for a better coup. Apparently launched by a faction within the military at night (an odd time to launch a putsch in a country where these have, in the past, usually happened in the morning and involved the arrest of political leaders), the coup was put down within about five hours; […]
The Hungarian government’s financial policies have failed miserably. After coming to power in 2010 Mr. Viktor Orbán’s primary policy objective was to reduce the public debt. His government emphasized the importance of the “debt freedom-fight” and the struggle to liberate Hungary from Western financial domination to “regain the country’s national sovereignty.” Orbán’s government inherited an almost catastrophic debt situation. Public […]
Political Capital, one of Hungary’s most prominent think tanks, reminds us this week that 42% of Hungarians believe that it is not the government in Budapest, with its near super majority in parliament, which controls events in the country, but rather some other, shadowy force. Among those who believe this to be true, 30% are convinced that Jews rule the world and […]
