Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has told his US-based diplomats that he wants an invitation to the White House. Let’s face it, the Hungarian strongman is a bit insecure. Orbán has ruled Hungary with an iron fist since 2010 yet he couldn’t secure a photo op with a sitting US president in the Oval Office. The Hungarian Prime Minister thinks that […]
Bálint Magyar gave a presentation at the University of California at Berkeley entitled: Parallel System Narratives: Polish and Hungarian Regime Formations Compared. The event took place in one of the older buildings at the Wildavsky Conference Room; the place was packed, standing room only. Mr. Magyar is a sociologist and a former Hungarian Minister of Education. (See invitation here.) In […]
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 […]
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 […]
Documents uncovered this week suggest that the Orbán government’s motivation for handing back to Azerbaijan Ramil Safarov, the Azeri axe murder convicted of killing an Armenian army lieutenant in Hungary, may have been financial gain. In 2012, Hungary earned global scorn for transferring the murderer to a country where he was welcomed as a hero. Here in Ottawa, Canada, the […]
The Hungarian government recently recalled its ambassador to the Netherlands after the Dutch Ambassador to Hungary, Gajus Scheltema, drew parallels between the government’s efforts to “create enemies” and those of the Islamic State group. In an interview Scheltema also criticized Hungary’s treatment of asylum-seekers and the government’s campaign against philanthropist George Soros. Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders distanced himself from his […]
Outgoing Dutch ambassador Gajus Scheltema’s suggestion that the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán creates enemies along the same lines as Islamic terrorists sparked a political firestorm in Hungary. Mr. Scheltema said, as part of a response to journalists from the 168 Óra weekly on the risk of terrorist attacks, particularly after Barcelona: “A car attack can occur anywhere in […]
The newly appointed Hungarian Ambassador, László Szabó, has put the blame squarely on the US State Department for the poor relations between the two countries. According to Ambassador Szabó the State Department has a major problem: “The vast majority of the staff members of the US State Department, where tens of thousands of people work, still have ties to the […]
Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister and a left-leaning politician not immune to populism, nationalism and euroscepticism, has distanced himself from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hard-line anti-EU and anti-western rhetoric. Most crucially: Mr. Fico confirmed that for him, cooperation and a close alliance with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Germany and President Emmanuel Macron’s France is more important than cooperation among the […]
There is a suspicion that the Orbán government played a role in building a “bridge” between Russian President Putin and President elect Trump. At this point, we don’t know whether this “bridge building” effort is significant enough to register on the radar screen of the ongoing US Congressional and Senate investigations in Washington DC. According to the European Council on […]
