Britain’s Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, a Tory politician appointed by the current prime minister, advised that Theresa May’s last ditch efforts to secure legally binding reassurances for her Brexit deal around the controversial backstop clause fell short of guaranteeing that the United Kingdom could unilaterally withdraw itself from a situation that would see Northern Ireland unified indefinitely with the Republic of […]
Hungarians who will soon receive a mailed letter from Viktor Orbán attacking Brussels, or who have seen the new anti-Soros and anti-Brussels billboards, which smear fellow Christian Democrat Jean-Claude Juncker, may think that Fidesz is engaged in a clear-cut and “noble” battle with a malevolent foreign power. What Fidesz supporters won’t know is that the ruling regime’s resolve is only […]
The number of asylum applications lodged in the European Union’s 28 member states declined by 10 percent in 2018. And the prior calendar year already showed a year-over-year drop of 44 percent. In 2018, the EU saw a total of 634 700 asylum applications, of which the largest country of origin was Syria (representing over 10% of all applications submitted). Within […]
Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, told Romanian President Klaus Iohannis that he considers the Romanian national holiday commemorating the unification with Transylvania to also be a European celebration. Juncker said: “Romania will celebrate on December 1 of the current year its centenary, the centenary of the great union, as our Romanian friends say. I wanted to say to […]
By a margin of 448 to 197, and with 48 members abstaining, the European Parliament accepted the Sargentini Report on the demise of democracy, systemic corruption and the attack on fundamental European values in Hungary by the ruling Orbán regime. With this, the issue of what to do with the rogue member state moves to the European Council, where representatives […]
It turns out that Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s hard right chancellor, was an agent of George Soros all along. He must have also been an adept confidence trickster to so successfully mislead his Hungarian fans up until now. Supporters of the Orbán regime are being fed a new narrative Tuesday morning, after the Austrian leader indicated that he supports enacting Article […]
Hungary served as a key gateway to the European Union for a growing number of Russian spies, oligarchs and Kremlin political operatives, thanks to the sale of residency bonds between 2013 and 2017. A joint investigative report by the 444 news site, Direkt36 and Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, published in both Hungarian and English, shows that Russian citizens who should have […]
Close observers of Hungarian politics are not surprised to learn that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a vociferous critic of Brussels at home, uses the European Union as a “cash register.” Any Hungarian entrepreneur would also know that winning major EU-funded contracts is a privilege reserved for a small circle of oligarchs close to the ruling Fidesz party’s inner circle and, it […]
The Orbán government does not appear keen on publicizing what it has done over the years to accept and integrate migrants and refugees, nor has Fidesz shared with the public its strategy, developed in 2013 and submitted to the European Union, that aimed to make Hungarians more tolerant of diversity. According to the government’s Migration Strategy completed in October 2013, […]
On Tuesday, Hungary’s parliament voted against a motion brought forward by independent MP Zsuzsanna Szelényi calling on the government to begin the formal process of replacing the forint with the euro as the country’s currency. The goal of Ms. Szelényi’s motion was to express that parliament is committed to adopting the euro and confirming that “the time had come to […]
