Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán frequently talks about having zero-tolerance for racism and antisemitism, yet his government recently honored Cécile Tormay, a prominent anti-Semite. Cécile Tormay was born in 1877 and died prematurely in 1937 at the age of 60 in the picturesque village of Mátraháza where she shared a house with Countess Ambrózy-Migazzi. The Hungarian writer was an admirer […]
On Monday we learned that the opposition finally did what it should have done before April’s national election: it is rallying behind a single mayoral candidate in the central Budapest district of Józsefváros, in the hope of reclaiming it from Fidesz in a local election to be held on 8 July. With outgoing Józsefváros mayor Máté Kocsis moving to national […]
Two municipal by-elections are scheduled for Sunday in Budapest and both could serve as an indication of what impact half a dozen mass protests (each drawing tens of thousands) and the scandal surrounding Central European University have had on voting intentions, less than a year before national elections. Both by-elections are in areas that, in any other country, would likely […]
There is nervousness in Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, as very low turnout in a referendum aimed at rejecting EU-wide “migrant quotas” for Hungary means that the vote may be invalid, and thus an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Nationally, turnout at 3:00 PM local time was just 31%, according to statistics released by the National Election Office. The […]
Hungary’s National Election Office has processed 32,254 mail-in ballots for the Sunday referendum against EU-wide “migrant quotas” and has deemed that 18% of them (5,708) were spoiled by voters. Hungarians living abroad and holding dual citizenship are eligible to vote by mail-in ballot, but thus far only 28% of the 274,573 registered voters have chosen to participate in the October 2nd […]
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 […]
Ákos Kovács is one of contemporary Hungary’s most established singers and songwriters, with over two decades of experience and fame under his belt, not to mention a prestigious Kossuth Award from the Government of Hungary. Ákos – as he is simply known in public – is also well-known for his conservative political and social views and there is nothing necessarily wrong with […]
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 […]
