I was saddened when I learned about the untimely death of Ildikó Zentai. In the last decade I saw Ildikó at various Hungarian events around the San Francisco Bay Area, said hello, we briefly talked, but we didn’t really know each other. Ildikó was a wife, a mother and a devout Catholic. She moved to the US from Budapest in […]
The occasional peak into Jobbik’s King Attila Academy (Attila Király Akadémia) may cause the uninitiated to chuckle or raise an eyebrow at some of their bizarre, esoteric and decidedly cult-like practices. But the Jobbik academy, which serves as a training and indoctrination program for young Hungarian men who wish to find employment in the party, or in towns where the […]
Kim Lane Scheppele from Princeton University, former government minister and Central European University professor András Bozóki, and Professor Emeritus András Göllner will lead a roundtable discussion at Concordia University on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015 at 5:30 PM, on challenges to the rule of law in Hungary under the current Orbán government. The talk will be held at 1455 de Maisonneuve […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave what was by all accounts a strongly defiant speech, in which he responded to his government’s massive defeat in a Veszprém by-election last Sunday by noting that the right just had to “fight” harder, in order to ensure that what he thinks is an international smear campaign against his regime does not have a impact […]
An unpublished Ipsos opinion poll commissioned two weeks before a critical by-election in a traditionally centre-right Veszprém riding suggested that Zoltán Kész–the independent candidate supported by most of the left-centre opposition–stood a semi-realistic chance of beating Fidesz in a constituency that it had long held. The leaked poll found that Fidesz’s candidate, Lajos Némedi, was ahead of Mr. Kész by […]
Shoah Foundation founder and Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg recently travelled from Los Angeles to Krakow to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz where over one million Jews lost their lives in World War II. In his passionate remarks Spielberg warned of the global rise of anti-Semitism. Today he can find anti-Semitism in his […]
It’s been an absolutely astonishing day in the world of Hungarian politics; after all, it rarely happens, that the country’s wealthiest businessman and a close friend of nearly 35 years of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is humiliated in public, and then goes on a whirlwind expletive-laden media tour, in which he repeatedly calls Mr. Orbán a prick and claims that […]
On February 20, 2015, the New York Hungarian House (213 East 82nd Street) will stage a reading of works by Mr. Albert Wass, the late Transylvanian writer, who was convicted of war crimes after World War II. The event is being organized by a New York-based, Hungarian émigré group, Széchenyi István Társaság, led by Hungarian-American Mr. Ákos Felsővályi. It is […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán didn’t have an exceptionally good day. He almost certainly could have avoided an embarrassing press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel if only he would have taken the more pragmatic route of distancing himself from comments made last summer in Transylvania, about the possibility of turning Hungary into an illiberal democracy. Mr. Orbán was answering a question […]
Hungarians in New York City are joining a series of protests against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian and socially unjust government, under the slogan “Spring is coming – Orbán is going.” The protest aims to draw attention to dissatisfaction with Mr. Orbán, ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s official visit to Budapest on Monday. The New York protest is being held […]
