Articles by: Christopher Adam

Solidarity with Ukraine protest in Budapest on August 30th, 2014. Photo: Együtt-PM

Pro-Moscow government silent while Hungarian opposition organizes Ukraine solidarity protest

While the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ parliamentary secretary, Péter Szijjártó, tries to discourage any further European Union sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Együtt-PM liberal-green opposition party took to the streets of Budapest, in order to protest the second Russian invasion of Ukraine this year. Demonstrators marched to Russia’s embassy in the Hungarian capital and the protest included key […]

by · August 30, 2014 · East
Ágnes Kunhalmi

Socialists set Ágnes Kunhalmi and Ferenc Falus up for failure

The democratic opposition’s election campaign ahead of the October 12th municipal elections in Budapest is the very epitome of a political train wreck. It is certainly true that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s decision to completely transform the Hungarian capital’s electoral system a mere four months before the vote would have thrown a wrench into the plans of any political party, no […]

by · August 14, 2014 · Focus
Yellow stars in Budapest remind Hungarians of the Holocaust and the houses where Jews were forced to live after June 1944.

Behind Hungary’s ‘Potemkin Village’ antisemitism flourishes

Seventy years after the murder of 600,000 Hungarian Jews, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government appointed an ambassador to Italy who declared that Jews were “agents of Satan” and has erected a monument in Budapest with the aim of denying Hungary’s role in the Shoah. It is a surreal turn of events for a government that sought to use the Holocaust […]

by · July 30, 2014 · Focus
Gellért Rajcsányi, a blogger with the pro-Fidesz Mandiner site.

Eastward gaze: Pro-Fidesz Mandiner blog notes that Tusnádfürdő offers nothing new

The pro-government (although essentially neoconservative and occasionally libertarian) Mandiner blog published an opinion piece, noting that Viktor Orbán’s infamous statements in Tusnádfürdő/Băile Tușnad represent nothing new in how the prime minister views East vs. West, certainly nothing novel in his nationalist and irredentist rhetoric or in his serial vilification of liberals, leftists and the “1968 generation.”  I should note that […]

by · July 30, 2014 · Politics
Budapest's Living Memorial in Freedom Square. Photo: Christopher Adam

Captive of the Past? A Pro-Government Historian’s Defense of the Indefensible

Mária Schmidt, a prominent Hungarian pro-government academic, wrote that “the historian cannot project the ideological schemes of his age on the past and cannot observe the past’s narratives with today’s sensibilities.” Ms. Schmidt took issue with the much-maligned “left-liberal intellectuals” who she believes are trying to insert a type of “intellectual terror” into any discussion of twentieth century Hungarian history […]

by · July 29, 2014 · Focus
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