The Trump campaign’s pro-Russian friends who live in the hills, overlooking the Budapest Bridge Part 2 of a 3 part investigative report by András B. Göllner “There must be some way out of here” said the joker to the thief. “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. None of […]
Ásotthalom (population: 4,200) is a small town in southeastern Hungary, located a mere 3 km from the border with Serbia. Since 2013, the town has been led by Jobbik Mayor László Toroczkai, who is also the far-right party’s vice president. In 2015, the town made news for producing a bizarre, Hollywood-esque video awkwardly entitled “Message to Illegal Immigrants from Hungary” […]
One of the relatively refreshing aspects of Hungarian politics until recently was that, broadly speaking, the personal lives of politicians were not paraded before the general public, and the public did not seem especially interested in this either. Over the last few years, however, media tied to Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has rejected this unwritten rule, even to the point of […]
A far-right extremist, whose group sadistically assaulted and nearly killed a media personality, bombed gay clubs in Budapest and attacked the homes of Socialist and liberal politicians using Molotov cocktails, received a 13-year prison sentence on Tuesday in the Budapest Capital Regional Court. Between 2007 and 2009, György Budaházy led a group of far-right terrorists, called the “Arrows of Hungarians” […]
The premise of fledgling director Viktor Szűcs’s film sounds like the beginning of a classic joke, but this 33 minute production is actually a fantastic short documentary on how Hungarians of different faiths share a meal with other. It is also a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the popular Hungarian reality television show called Fish on the cake (Hal a tortán). For […]
It was another bad week for the increasingly erratic Máté Kocsis, the Fidesz party mayor of Budapest’s 8th District, after the politician, who is also the ruling party’s president in Budapest, went on yet another homophobic tirade using social media. As we reported, Mayor Kocsis recently lost a court case that he launched against liberal politician Klára Ungár, who he […]
Máté Kocsis, Mayor of Budapest’s 8th District and the ruling Fidesz party’s president in the Hungarian capital, launched another homophobic tirade, after a court ruled that a liberal politician’s suggestion that the Fidesz politician was gay did not qualify as defamation. In 2015, we covered the conflict between Klára Ungár and Máté Kocsis, and the Fidesz mayor’s hysterical reaction to […]
In 2008, Péter Árvai, Ádám Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy founded Prezi, an innovative software company in Budapest. They wanted to create a new type of presentation software that people could use to share and tell their stories in a memorable and engaging way. They succeeded, and today Prezi is a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint. Seven years ago* the Budapest-based company […]
In a landmark case, a Budapest court ruled that calling someone a homosexual in public can be seen as defamation of good character. The decision is astounding, even if the justice argued –somewhat strangely–that it has nothing to do with the court passing moral judgment on sexual attraction, as such. We have written before about the public polemics between Fidesz […]
Dezső Máté is a Junior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Minority Studies whose work focuses on the fate of a minority within a minority: namely the treatment of Gay Roma in Hungary within their own ethno-cultural community. In the past, he has also explored the survival of Roma languages and the representation of minorities within […]
