Letters to Hungary
23 March 2016
As the dust and debris settles after the latest terror outrage in Brussels, it is inevitable that a sustained period of soul-searching will break out in Europe. Why has it come to this? Why should Europe suffer such carnage? There is no doubt that these are dark days for Europe.
29 October 2015
The European Union has failed to manage its migrant crisis. Mistakes have been made but others will be blamed, in particular Viktor Orbán and Hungary. Budapest has been a very useful scapegoat.
4 September 2015
The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, was back in Brussels yesterday defending his country’s approach to the migrant crisis, which has fragmented any concept of European solidarity. European officials delight in casting the pugnacious leader as either a pantomime villain or a fool – he of the ‘illiberal views’. Some feel ashamed of him.
4 June 2015
Hungarian Prime Minister, Orbán Viktor, resumed his usual role as the ‘Bete Noir’ of the EU’s liberal elite. Once again, he appeared to have little or no sympathy with EU policy proposals – in this case, for the handling of the current refugee crisis impacting on the Union’s southern Members, particularly Italy and Greece.
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.
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.
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?
8 May 2013
For some time now I have been pondering why the Hungarian government has attracted so much attention from the EU. From revised constitutions to unorthodox economic policies, the European Commission and the European Parliament, has seen fit to criticise Hungarian policy.
25 April 2013
Events of the last few weeks in Hungary and Europe must have strengthened Viktor Orbán and Fidesz’s belief that victory in next year’s election is looking ever more likely.
8 January 2013
As the New Year unfolds in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could be forgiven for smiling. Despite the recent Constitutional Court ruling on voter registration and the ringing of student protester bells in his ears, Fidesz is not entering 2013 in such a bad shape.