Now that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has successfully made a mockery of Central European University, convincing its rector, Michael Ignatieff, to spend twenty months jumping through hoops for the government in the naive hope of good faith negotiations, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) is next in line for some penance. In an emergency assembly of the Academy on Thursday, […]
On Monday, Central European University announced that new students enrolling starting in September 2019 would begin their studies in Vienna, rather than Budapest, after Hungary’s highest ranked university was forced out of the country by the regime of Viktor Orbán. “CEU has been forced out. This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO […]
Before I got involved with current events in Hungary, I wrote fiction and occasionally poetry. I began my post-secondary education as an undergraduate student in English literature, immersed mostly in Canadian and British literary fiction. Some fifteen years later and after writing more than one thousand articles on current affairs in my two online publications, I felt that it was […]
On Tuesday, Hungary formally granted asylum to convicted felon and former Prime Minister of Macedonia Nikola Gruevski. Hungarian Foreign Ministry officials actively aided the disgraced former politician in escaping from Macedonia without a valid passport prior to the start of a two year prison sentence for corruption. The Hungarian Immigration and Asylum Office, according to a report in the pro-government Magyar […]
Former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski fled his home country ahead of his two year prison sentence on a corruption-related conviction and has claimed political asylum in Hungary. Mr. Gruevski ignored the order to surrender to authorities on 9 November, in order to begin his prison sentence and instead escaped to Budapest. He claimed that he had no choice but to flee […]
In Hungary, it’s not actually the police that are tasked with brutality, but rather private security firms hired by local governments or national institutes and ministries. I witnessed this first hand in 2016 (and I reported on this phenomenon in HFP at the time). This week we learned that the practice of outsourcing police brutality to the private sector is […]
Some 80,000 Hungarian citizens who live outside the European Union will be given voting rights for the upcoming 2019 European elections to elect a new European Parliament. Zsolt Semjén announced the proposed amendment to Hungary’s electoral laws, which also included one other change: politicians will be permitted to give various gifts to voters during election campaigns and this will no […]
The increasingly bitter diplomatic conflict between Hungary and Ukraine reached a new level this week, when Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Levente Magyar said that Ukraine has compiled a “death list” of Hungarians living in Transcarpathia (Western Ukraine). Mr. Magyar added that on the website of Ukraine’s parliament, people are advocating for the mass deportation of those ethnic Hungarians […]
In the increasingly surreal world that is Hungary in 2018, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has banned two presentations that would have formed part of an annual series of events where scholars present their research to broader, often non-academic audiences. The series, entitled “Give a Night to the Sciences” (in Hungarian: “Adjon egy estét a tudománynak!”) is scheduled for November […]
The conservative Századvég journal, unwavering in its loyalty to the government of Viktor Orbán for the past eight years, had its most recent issue deleted from the internet and its editors fired for publishing an article that was critical of the manner in which the current government handles the question of benefit programs and public salaries. The journal’s current issue […]
