I have written about Zsolt Bayer before in the HFP. Our readers may recall that he is a co-founder of the ruling Fidesz party and a prominent pro-Orbán publicist who recently asserted that the Syrian refugee crisis was a manufactured racial war, launched by “invisible hands,” in order to exterminate white people. I did not think that Mr. Bayer could […]
Péter Tarr is the deputy director of the right-leaning HírTV cable television news network, which was established in 2003 as Hungary’s first 24/7 news channel. Back in February, the station’s owner, Lajos Simicska, had a very public and profanity-laced falling out with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and after that happened, HírTV journalists and staff, once the media darlings of the […]
About 2 million of the 11 million diesel engines involved in the Volkswagen-Audi emissions scandal were manufactured at the Audi plant in Győr, in western Hungary. Mihály Varga, Hungary’s Minister of Economy, said that his government was already in talks with German car manufacturers to assess the potential impact on Hungary’s economy. (See the Reuters report here.) He has good […]
Zsolt Bayer, a co-founder of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, a long-time friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the right’s most prominent publicist, sees the current refugee crisis in Hungary and Europe as a racial war intended to annihilate white people. Mr. Bayer shared these thoughts at a rally in Budapest this past Sunday, attended by an estimated 1,500 people, […]
The ongoing refugee crisis has once again highlighted the mismatch between an ever-more-integrated union of 28 societies and a European political structure built primarily around the interests of sovereign states. In this political framework even an issue intimately linked to elementary human rights and European values is being transformed into a series of seemingly intractable distributive conflicts. The emergence of […]
Eleni Kounalakis, who was the US ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013, recently published a memoir about her service entitled – Madam Ambassador, Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties and Democracy in Budapest. The book contains critical remarks of the Orbán government. Now Ambassador Kounalakis has written an opinion piece in The New York Times calling Mr. Orbán a […]
If we listen to Klára Ungár, a liberal politician and economist, and over two decades ago, a much younger Viktor Orbán’s former colleague, the Hungarian prime minister has gone too far and can no longer save himself from his own downfall. “There is no longer anything that Orbán can do, in order to save himself. Whether he cooperates or digs […]
Hungary’s Fidesz government has long been an admirer of the Israeli right, and of the Likud party in specific. This is an open secret in Hungarian right-wing circles. Despite the Fidesz party’s occasional antisemitism — aimed to placate the more extreme elements of the Hungarian right –Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his inner circle is quite fond of the language, […]
The August 29th dedication of the new Chapel (Magyarok Nagyasszonya kápolna) at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC will start with a Solemn Mass celebrated by Cardinal Wuerl of Washington and Cardinal Erdő of Esztergom-Budapest. Readings and choral pieces will be both in English and in Hungarian. This could be a wonderful religious […]
Officials from Hungary’s Orbán government, including Minister of Human Resources Zoltán Balog, met with Jewish community leaders this week to discuss new efforts to improve Holocaust education in Hungarian schools and to alert Hungarian Jews to the fact that they too may be “impacted” by the continued wave of refugees, arriving primarily from war-torn Syria and Afghanistan. Based on the […]
