Communication must truly be everything and reality is perhaps little more than a fleeting and malleable perception. The first public opinion poll conducted after the anti-migrant referendum, which failed to reach the minimum turnout threshold to be considered valid, shows major gains for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party and a marked drop in support for Jobbik–a party that […]
In a series of tense exchanges in Parliament on Monday, after the government’s referendum opposing EU-wide “migrant quotas” was declared invalid, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán went on the offensive. His main target was Gábor Vona, President of the far-right Jobbik party, who had called for the prime minister’s resignation following the failed vote. Mr. Vona had cautioned the prime minister […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced after his anti-migrant referendum was declared invalid by the National Election Office that he intends to disregard the result and will bring forward a proposal to amend Hungary’s constitution. Mr. Orbán’s proposed constitutional amendment is “borrowed” directly and explicitly from Jobbik’s platform. The far-right party and its leader spent the entire referendum campaign criticising Fidesz […]
The U.S. ambassador to Romania, Hans Klemm, recently visited the Romanian town of Sfântu Gheorghe (in Hungarian Sepsiszentgyörgy), which has a majority ethnic-Hungarian population. Mayor Árpád Antal, an ethnic Hungarian himself, asked him to stand behind a flag to make a photo. The flag is the so-called Szekler flag which is controversial in Romania; it is illegal to fly on […]
The Living Memorial, a grassroots monument in Budapest’s Liberty Square, in memory to the 600,000 victims of the Holocaust in Hungary, was vandalised this weekend, shortly after the neo-Nazi Kuruc.info website published an article threatening to destroy the monument. Photographs displayed at the site were torn and other items of remembrance added to the Living Memorial by survivors and descendants […]
A far-right extremist, whose group sadistically assaulted and nearly killed a media personality, bombed gay clubs in Budapest and attacked the homes of Socialist and liberal politicians using Molotov cocktails, received a 13-year prison sentence on Tuesday in the Budapest Capital Regional Court. Between 2007 and 2009, György Budaházy led a group of far-right terrorists, called the “Arrows of Hungarians” […]
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 […]
Jobbik, the party that is a trying hard to shed its extremist, far-right image, will focus much more attention on the ruling Fidesz party’s unprecedented and systemic corruption spree. Tamás Pintér, the party’s local president in the industrial town of Dunaújváros, will enter parliament in the fall, and will take over the seat of Előd Novák, a founding member of […]
Lajos Simicska, one of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in Hungary, has often boasted that he was the one to lift Viktor Orbán–once his close friend and former college roommate–to power. (HFP reported on last year’s stunning and very public falling out between the two men here.) According to a report in the Népszabadság daily, based on sources close to Mr. Simicska, he has now […]
After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán questioned the masculinity of Jobbik leader Gábor Vona in Parliament on Monday, and suggested that Jobbik should stop trying to impress the European Union by striking a more moderate tone as of late, both Fidesz and Jobbik voted in favour of holding a referendum on whether the decision-making bodies of the EU had the right […]
