Zsuzsanna Szelényi is a foreign policy analyst and Member of Parliament affiliated with the centre-left Együtt (Together) Party. Ms. Szelényi argues that through Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s war against the West and Moscow’s highly effective use of 21st century hybrid warfare, Hungary is being turned into a colony of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. We are translating Ms. Szelényi’s insightful analysis from the […]
HFP’s readers may recall Szilárd Kalmár from earlier articles; he is the former President of the fledgling Left Party, a left-wing activist and by day a social worker in Budapest, reaching out to some of the most marginalized populations (especially Roma in the 8th District, as well as refugees and immigrants). A group of mainly young Hungarian left-wing activists, not […]
Sándor Csányi, the 63 year old CEO of Hungary’s OTP Bank, is among the wealthiest people in the world, according to Forbes. Mr. Csányi’s net worth includes assets held in Singapore and this is what pushed the Hungarian businessman above the one billion dollar threshold to be profiled by Forbes as one of the world’s wealthiest people. Mr. Csányi’s net […]
The Hungarian Free Press has covered the efforts of an activist group in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), called Musai/Muszáj, to make the cultural capital of this multiethnic region of Romania more bilingual–at least in terms of encouraging the local government to allow for bilingual (Romanian/Hungarian) place name and street signs. András Bethlendi, a lawyer and activist with Musai/Muszáj, shared with our site […]
Béla Biszku, who died at age 94 last week, was Hungary’s most infamous unrepentant hard-line communist and the only official of the former pre-1989 regime ever prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Biszku served in the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja) from 1949, as well as in its successor, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt – MSZMP), including […]
Omar Adam Sayfo is a PhD candidate at the University of Utrecht, and foreign affairs columnist at Hungary’s pro-Orbán Demokrata weekly. His most recent piece, published on the Mandiner website and translated into English below for HFP’s readers, offers a glimpse into the thinking of supporters of Hungary’s Orbán government, when it comes to issues of racism, Islamophobia, liberalism and […]
A couple of months ago the Hungarian oil firm MOL Group made the surprise announcement that its executive vice-president of exploration and production, Alex Dodds, was quitting. Mr. Dodds helped to mastermind MOL’s “brilliant strategy” to build interests in Kurdistan and the UK North Sea region Years ago Mr. Dodds’ name appeared in British tabloids when he has sustained head […]
Panic broke out on Tuesday in the eastern Hungarian town of Tiszavasvári, with parents storming into the local school and kindergarten to take home children, as news spread that the local municipal government, led by far-right mayor Erik Fülöp, was planning to take Roma children into state care. According to official statistics, 9% of the town’s population of 12,840 is […]
More than twenty thousand teachers, school administrators, students, parents and union activists took to the very rainy streets of Budapest on Saturday morning, and marched together from Jászai Mari tér, near Budapest’s Margaret Bridge, to Parliament. The mass demonstration is the largest since the series of so-called “internet protests” in 2014, when tens of thousands marched in opposition to the […]
More than 5,000 teachers, students and parents took to the streets of Miskolc last week, in what may have been a first in modern Hungarian history, to demand that the Orbán regime in Budapest end its heavily centralized and authoritarian approach to public education, where teachers and school administrators are stripped of all autonomy and where they are ordered to […]
