Officials from Hungary’s Orbán government, including Minister of Human Resources Zoltán Balog, met with Jewish community leaders this week to discuss new efforts to improve Holocaust education in Hungarian schools and to alert Hungarian Jews to the fact that they too may be “impacted” by the continued wave of refugees, arriving primarily from war-torn Syria and Afghanistan. Based on the […]
In the doldrums of summer, there is a growing and increasingly public conflict between Hungary’s Orbán government and the Ponta administration in Romania. In just the past two days, the diplomatic representatives of the two countries, serving in Budapest and Bucharest, have been summoned by the respective foreign ministries of the two EU member states and both are claiming that […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has a new admirer just north of the border in Slovakia. The regional governor of Banska Bystrica (Besztercebánya in Hungarian) Marian Kotleba, sent an open letter to Mr. Orbán on July 28th expressing his support for Orbán’s “brave and effective steps aimed at saving European countries from an inundation of immigrants.” “I express full support […]
Politics makes strange bedfellows. And this may be the case in the unexpected alliance between former Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, and Hungary’s Orbán Government. In November 2013 Rabbi Yona Metzger was arrested in Israel on suspicion of corruption and the Magistrate’s Court ordered him to be kept in custody. According to investigators, Rabbi Metzger accepted bribes of an […]
Máté Kocsis, the Fidesz party mayor of Budapest’s 8th district, is among the most avid Facebook users in Hungary, and in his case it’s not a press secretary posting updates on his behalf, but the mayor himself. Sometimes he gets himself into trouble, like when he engaged in a homophobic tirade earlier this year, after a liberal politician outed him […]
HFP readers will recall a story we published in June about how a small activist cell, which calls itself The Voice of Six Million Souls, “outed” a rabidly antisemitic and Holocaust-denying contributor to the Nazi website Kuruc.info (who wrote under the pseudonym Ottó Perge), as being a high school history teacher by the name of László Zábori. Since that article […]
I imagine that most of our readers have not been to, and perhaps never even heard of the northeastern Hungarian town of Érpatak (population: 1,700). The small town is run by far-right mayor Mihály Zoltán Orosz, who made a national name for himself by causing a scene at last year’s Gay Pride parade in Budapest, where he showed up dressed […]
Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, the author of Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2005), made a critically important point in an op-ed piece published Saturday in The Guardian. According to Professor Mudde, western journalists and activists who have been concerned primarily with, and focused almost exclusively on, the rise of the far-right Jobbik in Hungary have been wrong […]
Bishop Kolomon K. Ludwig responded to our article about the sudden removal of Rev. Béla Poznan the long-time Bishop of the Calvin Synod. In his email, Bishop Ludwig explained that Rev. Poznan was never accused of financial mismanagement, nor was this ever insinuated by anyone. He also indicated that the Synod has no further comment on this subject. We thank […]
Amidst all the kitsch, the tacky souvenir shops, the tourist traps and the overpriced “traditional Hungarian” restaurants along Váci utca, Budapest’s main pedestrian mall, there’s a little haunt called the Jégbüfé (Ice buffet), located just a block away, right near the foot of Elisabeth Bridge. When you go to the Jégbüfé, think more communist era retro, rather than old world […]
