The main Hungarian candidate in the first round of voting in Romania’s presidential election – Hunor Kelemen of the centrist Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) – received only 3.50% of the vote on Sunday, but came out on top in the country’s two Hungarian majority counties, namely: Hargita (Harghita) and Kovászna (Covasna). The right-wing Transylvanian Hungarian People’s Party […]
The monument of the Hungarian Freedom Fighter stands at the edge of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. It was inaugurated and blessed by Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary in 1974; today this corner of the park is named after him. Each October, Hungarian Americans gather here to commemorate the 1956 Revolution, dignitaries give speeches and lay a wreath on the monument. […]
With all the chatter and protest around the Internet tax (the implementation of which has been merely postponed until 2015), little attention has been given to the Orbán government’s rather insidious plans to “reform” the country’s education system. Fortunately, Népszabadság – the country’s most widely-read daily newspaper of record – published an analysis of what is likely in store for Hungary’s […]
Zoltán Vass, Hungary’s honorary consul in Vancouver, Canada, announced his resignation today, Budapest-based Klubrádió reported. Mr. Vass decided to resign in protest over two deep concerns that he had, regarding how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government was operating both at home, but also in the Hungarian Canadian diaspora. “The Orbán government has incrementally destroyed the pillars of democracy and continues to […]
The central crisis management of the ‘central power field’ has taken on a rather unique turn. The politicians and their key backers are also displaying mighty strange signs of what they are able to actually process of the world. What we get includes: slow, cautious backing out, the labeling of the American chargé d’affaires as a fifth-rate CIA agent and […]
1. How did Fidesz, the party which stood up against the ‘yes-man’ parties that roamed the corridors of power, the same parties that were essentially Mamelukes, and which shook their fists at the West, winking instead at the East, parties that played to the choirs of Kádár’s people, that rejected the civic ethos, that understood ever less of the modern […]
Dear Dr. Ódor, The Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter has read with interest your address to Hungarian Canadians, published on the website of Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As you may know, we are a civil rights group comprised of academics from both Canada and the United States who have been critical of the decline of democratic checks and balances in […]
Budapest’s Radnóti Theatre, with Director Csaba Horváth, has put on a production of the Ancient Greek tragedy Orestes, with a somewhat modern visual spin. Written by Euripides in 408 BCE, the play explores the lasting impact of blood feuds and the necessity of replacing these with a modern civic legal process. The play focuses on the concept of earthly justice […]
On Sunday night, over 10,000 Hungarians from many walks of political life protested in Budapest, ostensibly against a new circa $0.75CDN/GB Internet tax, but on a more latent level also against the growing diplomatic row between the oligarchic Orbán government and Washington. At one point in this protest, a group of demonstrators attacked Fidesz party headquarters, located just across from […]
Professor Charles Gati, in an interview published in Saturday’s Népszava newspaper, observed that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces the toughest decision of his political career as he must weigh Hungary’s future place in the transatlantic community, and whether Hungary is, indeed, on the verge of either exiting or being tossed out of the EU, as László Kövér suggested. “The historical […]
