Post Tagged with: "Hungarian Left"

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

Hungary’s new left and the Greek referendum: Today Athens, tomorrow Budapest!

Greek voters rejected the dictates of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in much larger numbers than initially anticipated. The decision was reasonable, understandable and, given the circumstances, it can certainly be appreciated. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government received a remarkable mandate to continue the country’s economic and humanitarian war of independence. The results of the referendum […]

by · July 6, 2015 · Focus
Balpárt activists György Várnai and Ádám Galba-Deák show a sign of solidarity, along with a Greek tourist who happen to be visiting Hungary, in front of Greece's embassy in Budapest. Photo: Balpárt.

Young Hungarian left-wingers express solidarity with Syriza

There seems to be somewhat of a generational divide on the Hungarian left, when it comes to austerity and the debt crisis in Greece. While the mainstream left-centre opposition parties have remained largely mum about the increasingly dramatic stand-off between the Troika and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government in Athens, and while some older, “big guns” of prior Hungarian […]

by · July 4, 2015 · East
From Balpárt's Facebook page.

Hungarian radical left supports Greece’s Tsipras government

As Greece teeters on the brink of both default and a disorderly exit from the euro zone, the only political party in Hungary that has lent its support behind the anti-austerity government of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is the Balpárt (Left Party). The Balpárt translated Mr. Tsipras’s televised speech into Hungarian, in which he called a snap referendum for […]

by · June 28, 2015 · East
The Veritas Institute organizes a conference on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of parliamentary democracy in Hungary and the change in regime...without inviting key, liberal and left-wing participants in this history. Photo: Viktor Orbán's Facebook page.

Celebrating 25 years of Hungary’s parliament without the opposition

I am still sometimes surprised by the true extent of the Orbán government’s small-mindedness, its pettiness and the remarkably arrogant, self-serving use of public funds. It has been 25 years since the formation of Hungary’s first democratically elected parliament in May 1990. The government-funded Veritas Research Institute, led by historian Sándor Szakály–who callously called the deportation of Jews during the […]

by · May 6, 2015 · Politics
Hungarian Red Army monument in Újpest. Fidesz and Jobbik have partnered to have it demolished.

History wars: Hungarian radical leftist writes to college classmate, Gábor Vona

Hungary is a small country and early twentieth century author Frigyes Karinthy’s theory on the six degrees of separation isn’t really applicable to a society of this size. As it turns out, during his university days, the chairman of the Left Party (Balpárt), Szilárd Kalmár, lived in the same dorms as Gábor Vona, the leader of the far-right Jobbik party. […]

by · April 22, 2015 · Focus
Zoltán Kész during a visit to Montreal in 2014. A sports enthusiast, Mr. Kész was watching a hockey game at the Bell Centre.

Opposition win in key Veszprém by-election much larger than anticipated

An unpublished Ipsos opinion poll commissioned two weeks before a critical by-election in a traditionally centre-right Veszprém riding suggested that Zoltán Kész–the independent candidate supported by most of the left-centre opposition–stood a semi-realistic chance of beating Fidesz in a constituency that it had long held. The leaked poll found that Fidesz’s candidate, Lajos Némedi, was ahead of Mr. Kész by […]

by · February 22, 2015 · Politics
Mr. Orbán and Ms. Merkel in Budapest on Monday. Photo: Parliament of Hungary

Merkel came and saw, while a giddy opposition waited with bated breath

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán didn’t have an exceptionally good day. He almost certainly could have avoided an embarrassing press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel if only he would have taken the more pragmatic route of distancing himself from comments made last summer in Transylvania, about the possibility of turning Hungary into an illiberal democracy. Mr. Orbán was answering a question […]

by · February 3, 2015 · Politics
Founders of Hungary's Balpárt.

The radicalization of the Hungarian left

The Hungarian left is showing signs of breaking up into two quite distinct camps: on the one hand, we have two mainstream, establishment parties: namely, the Hungarian Socialist Party, which over the past 25 years has tried to be all things to all people, as well as former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition, which is a bizarre, hybrid concoction […]

by · February 1, 2015 · Focus
DEKA's Sunday meeting in Budapest, with founders Zsuzsa Ferge and Rev. Gábor Iványi (Photo: Facebook)

Tea time in Budapest: Hungarian opposition sits down for more day dreaming

While the radical left-wing Syriza was in the process of winning one seat shy of a majority in Greece’s national elections on Sunday, and as another fledgling, anti-establishment leftist party in Spain, called Podemos, is planning to do the same later this year, elderly conservative, liberal and a sprinkling of centre-left intellectuals sat down in Budapest for an academic and […]

by · January 26, 2015 · Focus
An entire computer goes flying through the window at Fidesz party headquarters. Photo: Tamás Botos.

Attack on Fidesz headquarters: Is the use of force acceptable in protest?

On Sunday night, over 10,000 Hungarians from many walks of political life protested in Budapest, ostensibly against a new circa $0.75CDN/GB Internet tax, but on a more latent level also against the growing diplomatic row between the oligarchic Orbán government and Washington. At one point in this protest, a group of demonstrators attacked Fidesz party headquarters, located just across from […]

by · October 27, 2014 · Politics
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