Members of the European Pariament have determined that Tibor Navracsics, Hungary’s previous foreign affairs minister and earlier the country’s justice minister, is not fit to serve as the European Union’s commissioner for culture and education. Mr. Navracsics was the first candidate to be rejected during the current round of hearings. BBC News noted that this was a major slap in […]
The Canadian War Museum, in partnership with the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, is opening an exhibit on the internment of Eastern Europeans, including Hungarians, from 1914 to 1920. This represented Canada’s first national internment operations, which resulted in the creation of 24 internment camps, most in remote locations, and the internment of over 8,000 Europeans from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
