It’s time to move on, although the saga of the Holocaust Memorial is far from over. Let’s look outside of Hungary to see what Hungarian foreign policy is up to. The first news item is from yesterday; I discovered it on the Iranian news agency’s website. The highest Hungarian dignitaries–János Áder, president; Viktor Orbán, prime […]
To illustrate that Ali Ahnani's visit to Hungary was more than a courtesy call or simply an Iranian initiative that was reluctantly accepted by Hungary, here is a piece of news that on the surface might sound trivial but surely it is not. Magyar Post and Iran Post have released a joint stamp. The Hungarian issue uses […]
On November 16 I happened upon an article in Magyar Nemzet that surprised me greatly. It announced the presence of Ali Ahani, deputy foreign minister of Iran, in Hungary. Magyar Nemzet learned about his visit from an Iranian source. MTI, the Hungarian news agency, reported the official visit of Ahani only the next day. It […]
As you know, I was contemplating writing something about the internet tax, but I felt I had to deal with the further reverberations of Hungary’s shaky relations with the U.S. Now, it seems, the two topics have converged with M. André Goodfriend’s appearance at the demonstration last night. So, let’s start with the demonstration itself. […]
Let’s cut to the chase: neither the Hungarian nor the American position has changed despite Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó’s meeting with Assistant Undersecretary Victoria Nuland in Washington today. So far we have two brief reports on the meeting. The first was published in Magyar Nemzet; its source is HírTV, which sent its own crew to Washington for the occasion. The […]
The news of the day is Hungary’s decision to stop the supply of gas to Ukraine despite its pledge to assist its beleaguered neighbor. Although the AFP news service assumes that the decision came after “threats from Moscow,” I have a different take on the matter. To make my case I have to go back a few weeks in time. […]
In May I wrote a post about László Székely, the ombudsman newly appointed by the Orbán administration. In it I suggested that Székely’s appointment might have been a mistake on the part of Viktor Orbán. I noted that the prime minister had erred earlier in naming Máté Szabó as the new sole ombudsman. Szabó turned out to be […]
There has been a lot of discussion about the Russian sympathies of the extreme right parties in Europe. I have written extensively about Jobbik’s close ties with Russia. I’m sure that many readers remember the strange story of Béla Kovács, Jobbik EP MP, who, by the way, was just barred from the territory of Ukraine by […]
It was on August 3 that I first read about the so-called Borbély castle in Tiszaroff. It was refurbished after the change of regime and was owned by a German businessman who made a four-star luxury hotel out of it. In the wake of the recent downturn in the economy, however, the business failed, and the owners put the […]
As I reported a few days ago, members of the Hungarian right-wing media and pro-government “political scientists” were outraged because editorials in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal called on the European Union to introduce sanctions against the Orbán government. The occasion was Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s July 26th speech in which he expressed his belief […]
Hungarian Spectrum 