On Friday, a tight group of prominent Fidesz personalities, government advisers, intellectuals and policymakers met in an even tighter courtyard in Budapest to hear Prim Minister Viktor Orbán give a speech that represented a 180 degrees rhetorical turn from his last “State of the Nation” speech in February. He spoke of the dawn of an era of apolitical prosperity: the […]
![Poster advertising RCA Victor radios in 1937. John Vassos papers, 1920-[198-], Archives of American Art.](https://hungarianfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/rca-victor-records-poster-225x145.jpg)
We go abroad to wonder – at the towering beauty of the mountains, at the crashing power of the waves on the high seas, at the winding flow of a majestic river, at the vastness of the oceans, at the miracle of the stars above: but we often walk past ourselves, without wondering The Confessions of Saint Augustine Introduction How […]
Friends of Hungary, the organization that claims to be non-partisan, has been given its marching orders by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The authoritarian Hungarian leader’s speech on Saturday, at a conference organized by the Friends of Hungary Foundation, was at least as inflammatory as that which he gave last summer in Transylvania on the value of illiberalism, and which made […]
Ever since the governing Fidesz party’s defeat in the Tapolca by-election to the far-right, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been shamelessly scrambling to appease and win back the support of those who voted for Jobbik. A few days ago, I wrote about the Orbán’s government overtly xenophobic “national consultation,” where a series of loaded questions suggest that immigration and terrorism […]
Based on the results of the recent Tapolca by-election (although no longer concentrating directly on this vote), one can argue that this is yet another sign that Fidesz has lost its political buoyancy. And it’s possible that the party, in this current form and in this construction, won’t ever be able to get it back. If it searches for different avenues, […]
Political scientist László Lengyel gave an excellent interview this weekend to Hungary’s left-centre Népszava daily. The chat, with Népszava’s Tamás Bihari, began with a comparison to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and to the king of the jungle, Shere Khan. Mr. Lengyel had previously referred to Viktor Orbán as a tiger, and as the merciless king of the jungle. “Between 2010 […]
The Orbán regime’s infamous Counter Terrorism Centre (Terrorelhárítási Központ, TEK) has reportedly fallen out of favour with President János Áder. The president, who is a Fidesz politician previously charged with developing the country’s new, controversial electoral system, recently decided to engage the Operational Police (Készenléti Rendőrség) for his personal security needs, even though this is a role that would normally […]
This week’s issue of Heti Válasz, a right-wing print publication that is apparently going to be spared the purge that is currently unfolding in the world of pro-Fidesz newspapers, television stations and news sites, confirmed that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is looking to build a broad alternative media base to that currently offered by mogul and Fidesz oligarch Lajos Simicska, […]
Recently, I had a chance to chat with Johannes Bloos the Deputy Consul General of the German Consulate in San Francisco, California. Mr. Bloos is a Saxon; his parents were part of this German speaking community in Brasov, Romania, before they immigrated to Germany. We talked about another Romanian-Saxon, Romania’s new president – Mr. Klaus Iohannis. His recent election was […]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave what was by all accounts a strongly defiant speech, in which he responded to his government’s massive defeat in a Veszprém by-election last Sunday by noting that the right just had to “fight” harder, in order to ensure that what he thinks is an international smear campaign against his regime does not have a impact […]
