Letters to Hungary
11 May 2015
In the coming days, the European Commission is preparing to table a proposal that will see a shake-up of the Union’s immigration rules and lead to a requirement that refugees reaching Europe should be spread more equally amongst Member States and not – as the current rules state – in the country in which they first arrive in the Union.
12 March 2015
This week, Lajos Simicska, a former friend and political ally of the Hungarian Prime Minister, gave an interview on mandiner.hu in which he raised his suspicion that Viktor Orbán might have been recruited as an informer of the old regime. This recruitment, suggested Simicska, most likely took place when Orbán and many of his Fidesz colleagues were conscripts in the early 1980s. The inference was that this was having a detrimental effect on the country.
16 October 2014
Now that the dust has settled on the Hungarian municipal elections, I am reminded of the immortal opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. For Fidesz, it would seem that they just can’t stop winning elections and for the opposition, no matter how they rearrange the deckchairs of leadership, they just can’t stop losing them.
1 October 2014
President Obama’s recent intervention in Hungarian affairs was undoubtedly unwelcome in Budapest. The Hungarian government’s dispute with a Norwegian NGO has seemed – at least on the surface – to be an unwarranted and politically motivated assault on civil liberties. Indeed, the fact that the US President saw fit to even comment on the affair was in itself interesting and in some ways a damning indictment of the Orbán government.
11 August 2014
Viktor Orbán’s recent speech to ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania on 26 July 2014, in which he mentioned Hungary’s movement towards the creation of a ‘workfare’ state – not per se built on current western liberal models – but rather a pragmatic response to social and economic developments, has been met by a somewhat hysterical and ill-informed reaction by Hungary’s liberals and their foreign supporters.
11 April 2014
The reaction of the Financial Times to Viktor Orbán’s decisive victory in last week’s Hungarian election was something to behold. An editorial steeped in invective set the tone; a leading commentator produced a hatchet job on the victors (no pun intended) and the FT’s resident journalist in Budapest found that the OSCE monitors had sullied the election victory with an observation that the rules gave an advantage to the incumbent.
Now the question I frequently ask myself is why? What is it about Hungary that so enrages the paragons of virtue at the Financial Times?
3 April 2014
According to the latest opinion polls, Viktor Orbán and Fidesz will comfortably win another term in office. Of course such forecasts have been wrong in the past, although this time even the political opposition in Hungary have already conceded defeat.
How should we account for this success, should it materialise, on 6 April?
2 February 2014
As Hungarians prepare for the next general election in a few weeks time, the political temperature is rising. Already, the first salvos in what is likely to be an acrimonious campaign have been fired, although as of yet there have been few casualties.
10 January 2014
For the past four years, the Hungarian Left-Liberal opposition have told us that they are going to win the next election. This boast is now no more than a hollow and bad taste joke.
1 November 2013
The political opposition in Hungary is dead in the water. Despite having over three years to regroup after the disastrous election result of 2010, it has singularly failed to do so.