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 […]
The Hungarian left is showing signs of breaking up into two quite distinct camps: on the one hand, we have two mainstream, establishment parties: namely, the Hungarian Socialist Party, which over the past 25 years has tried to be all things to all people, as well as former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition, which is a bizarre, hybrid concoction […]
While the radical left-wing Syriza was in the process of winning one seat shy of a majority in Greece’s national elections on Sunday, and as another fledgling, anti-establishment leftist party in Spain, called Podemos, is planning to do the same later this year, elderly conservative, liberal and a sprinkling of centre-left intellectuals sat down in Budapest for an academic and […]
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 […]
While the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ parliamentary secretary, Péter Szijjártó, tries to discourage any further European Union sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Együtt-PM liberal-green opposition party took to the streets of Budapest, in order to protest the second Russian invasion of Ukraine this year. Demonstrators marched to Russia’s embassy in the Hungarian capital and the protest included key […]
