Ferenc Gyurcsány’s State of the Nation speech 2013, Part I
About two weeks ago I published the English translation of Attila Mesterházy’s policy speech. Some of you complained about the number of “ladies and gentlemen” in Mesterházy’s speech. In DK circles...
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Viktor Orbán and his fellow oligarchs
The Orbán government has given up the idea of solving the forex loan problem quickly and in one fell swoop. For a couple of weeks it looked as if Viktor Orbán was thinking of a radical solution that...
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House cleaning at Magyar Nemzet
Although for months all kinds of hypotheses have been floated about the Simicska-Orbán feud, I have judiciously avoided joining the rumor mill. Conjectures about the apparent rift between Lajos...
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Bálint Magyar’s “systemic characteristics of the post-communist mafia state”
Earlier I published several reports on Bálint Magyar’s theory of the mafia state. In fact, I devoted three consecutive posts, the first of which appeared on June 18, 2013, to his description of Orbán’s...
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Bálint Magyar’s post-communist mafia state: front men, transaction brokers,...
Yesterday we left off with a description of the kinds of oligarchs who play an important role in Viktor Orbán’s mafia state. Today we move on to the front men (stróman/Strohmann) and their function in...
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Ferenc Gyurcsány’s latest political road map
As an illustration of how little Viktor Orbán’s minions understand and respect democracy, it is worth recalling Szilárd Németh’s comment about the “outlandish” announcement of Ferenc Gyurcsány after...
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How to ruin a businessman with government help? The case of the famed Zsolnay...
Zsolt Páva made quite a splash back in October 2009, right after he became the mayor of Pécs in a by-election. One of his first acts was the forcible takeover of the city’s hydroelectric company with a...
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Conspiracy theories in Hungary
Five years ago Political Capital, a Hungarian think tank, published a survey on Hungarian attitude toward conspiracy theories. The result of that study showed that it was mostly Jobbik voters who had a...
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Viktor Orbán shut down Hungary’s leading opposition paper
By now the whole world knows that Hungary’s leading daily newspaper, Népszabadság, is no more. Although the Budapest correspondents of Reuters and the Associated Press pointed out that the newspaper...
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Conservative economists on Hungary’s prospects
It was exactly a year ago that I wrote about the “József Eötvös Group,” organized by a number of conservative economists and legal scholars. In the choice of its name, the group honors József Eötvös...
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Orbán’s plans unchanged: More hotels and more stadiums
On May 26, the Corruption Research Center Budapest (CRCB) published its latest report, which examines Hungarian procurement data between 2005 and 2020. This is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the...
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