Eastern European Politics

His apology was public, stating that he's shocked that she's actually speaking like a decent and well-meaning person rather than a foul-mouthed troublemaker.

By apologizing, he also lost a bet he made a few days earlier that he'll never apologize.

The interviewer was obviously instructed to press specific uncomfortable topics and get the guy to make an ass of himself in front of the audience, but he was too savvy and an experienced guest on this channel and didn't bite.

Evasion or no, when the show's script is aimed at slandering you for state propaganda, it's perfectly acceptable for you to not play along, as far as I'm concerned. Not in Hungary in specific, everywhere in general. Any government that uses demagoguery and propaganda earns a place on my shit list, regardless of which country is it.

Edited by amitakartok on Apr 18th 2019 at 11:55:06 AM

I see! Well. Call me naive but this actually makes me hope the guy can change for the better.

As for the evading, I completely agree.

Hoping people will change after only one apology, especially after the shit he said prior about the clothes thing, is probably not the best idea.

Hence why I said can, not will. There is a difference between "not being as set in your beliefs as a stone statue" and "changing".

To be honest when I heard he apologized I thought it was a non-apology, at best a simple "Sorry" or even sarcasm. I didn't actually expect an apology - I thought his reaction to her post would be just more of the same mockery.

Edited by akanesarumara on Apr 18th 2019 at 6:59:32 PM

A Polish opposition MP accused Orbán of having conducted negotiations with the Polish government for dividing Ukraine up between Poland and Hungary during the height of the Ukrainian crisis. According to him, Hungary is dangerous because we have a, quote, complex about our territorial losses in WWI and are hellbent on reversing it.

Right.

Wut.

I wish I could be surprised, but this is well within the Orbán Zone.

Also, if you're annoying Poles over your territorial sabre-rattling, perhaps you should shut up and listen. They have a keen ear to detect and strong opinions about dumbass ideas about maps which promise nothing but ill.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Apr 22nd 2019 at 2:00:18 PM

"we have a, quote, complex about our territorial losses in WWI"

Well I mean that is kinda true. How many would consider reversing it to be a viable possibility is a mystery though.

As for dumb ideas about maps... let me just say there is a reason that peace treaty is contentious here.

Only for a vocal minority. To the great majority, they just don't give a damn because it was waaaaay before anyone living today was born.

Or they might figure "it was so long ago trying to undo it would be impossible and pointless anyways."

There is a reason why the useful notes for Hungary mentions there is a lot of bad blood in the area, and the treaty is both one of the results and one of the reasons for that.

Edited by akanesarumara on Apr 22nd 2019 at 3:50:09 PM

The Speaker of the House made a celebratory speech on the 150th anniversary of the law guaranteeing the independence of courts - but instead of celebrating, he said "150 years ago, the question was whether the government should guarantee courts' independence. In the future, the question should be whether the courts wish to guarantee the country's independence. [...] You, the courts, can only be independent to the same extent as the government. [...] the judges and politicians of our time still have to decide for themselves which values they wish to defend, which side they want to be on: those who protect and build the state, or those who attack and destroy the state." According to him, there's some kind of unnatural liberal force out there that threatens the independence of European states and desires to take over Europe's resources under the guise of human rights, hence why judges should protect the state.

Afterwards, the Association of Hungarian Judges released a strong condemnation of the speech, stating that this kind of political pressure / manipulation / "this is what we expect from you" from the government towards the courts on the apropos of this day is absolutely unacceptable, not the least because it utterly ignores the message of the past.

Orbán was recently asked of Fidesz once again pulling the migration card for the EP election campaign. He stated expectations of keeping the topic on the public consciousness for the next 10 years. I'm not kidding, he actually said that.

Oh, and he also said in the same interview that although the word nationalism has strong negative connotations in Europe, in his opinion it's not nationalism that's inherently bad, but it having been used as an excuse for empire building in Europe in the past, which is why he desires the EU to remain economic-only (and believes that Hungary will become a net contributor to the EU in a couple of years).

Something a bit more funny. The European Commission was recently going to release a statement condemning Israel for not being as cooperative with their neighbors as they could be. Right at the last minute, immediately before the session with the statement, Hungary submitted a veto (as Orbán is Netanjahu's ally)...

...which the Commission pointedly ignored and released the statement anyway, listing off all the other countries who signed it and refusing to back down from saying what they felt needed to be said merely because of "Hungarian stubbornness".

OK, I'm now in full "what the frak" territory right now. Yesterday, state media quoted the Speaker of the House as having stated that according to a recent poll in Germany, only 31% consider migration as the most important question whereas 32% consider climate change as most important "due to the brainwashing of independent and impartial media".

Except when an opposition MP today asked the Speaker whether he meant that, the Speaker denied it, accused state media of putting words in his mouth and revealed that he actually considers climate change one of the most pressing problems right now.

The state media are now falsifying their own side's statements as well. How sad is that?

But before you start to believe that he's a good guy, he's of the opinion that "proper" homosexuals desire conformity instead of equality because they know that they are out of the norm and want to fit in rather than rebelling against the world, that giving transgender people their own bathroom is discriminatory because none of the other four groups of LGBTQ get theirs, as well as that homosexual adoption is basically pedophilia because both treat the kid as nothing more than an object of enjoyment and self-validation, seeing how homosexuals refuse to have their own kids yet demand the right to raise someone else's.

Oh, and he believes that Fidesz' anti-migrant propaganda can get as much as an 80% majority in next Sunday's EP elections, provided turnout will be higher than last time (29%).

Edited by amitakartok on May 15th 2019 at 12:00:48 PM

Why am I not even surprised at this stupidity...

BTW a politician from the opposition replied to the homophobic remarks of Kövér by linking to Fuck you (very very much) by Lily Allen

According to Népszava (a left-wing daily newspaper, used to be the party paper of the Communist Party before 1989/90), the Hungarian county newspapers (by now all in the hands of Fidesz-affiliated oligarchs) will all be revamped to look the same, will all carry the same pieces of news and reports and have precious little local content (which was originally their point), which will be penned by a handful of people, without the local newspaper companies.

EP election results are in. Turnout was 43.47%, about triple of the previous election.

Of 21 seats:

• Fidesz: 13 seats, 1 more than the previous
• Democratic Coalition (ex-Socialists): 4 seats, double of the previous
• Momentum: 2 seats, a major surprise to everyone considering that this is the second newest political party in Hungary right now
• Socialists: 1 seat, they didn't get any last time around
• Jobbik: 1 seat, 2 less than the previous

Nobody else got in. Not the far-right ex-Jobbik MH, not the Hungarian Workers' Party, not LMP. In particular, LMP's 2.1% is a catastrophic face-plant, they did even worse than MH and MKKP. Their leadership did not even bother with excuses, they just resigned straight away.

Edited by amitakartok on May 26th 2019 at 1:10:53 PM

So, is that good or bad? I mean, I hate it when Orban gets a seat more, but considering how much he controls the press in Hungary, I kind of feared more...

According to DK, it's good. Fidesz is still ahead but they only got 53%, instead of two-thirds once again.

Brigitte Bierlein appointed interim chancellor of Austria. Approved by all parties - apparently she's part of the right wing despite her unaffiliation, but (digging a bit) I get that she's trusted not to put up with any subversion of democracy by the fash.

Diplomatic incident between Hungary and Romania. A while back, the municipal authorities of a Romanian town in Transylvania unilaterally and illegally set up a concrete monument inside a nearby ethnic Hungarian military cemetery dating back to WWI to commemorate unnamed Romanian soldiers who may or may not be resting there, something the local Hungarian ethnic minority considered an act of desecration.

This week, the monument was announced to be consecrated but when ethnic Hungarians attempted to prevent it by forming a living wall around the cemetery, Romanian far-right nationalists beat them with flag poles and broke the cemetery's gate, then proceeded to hold the ceremony anyway. Local gendarme authorities pledged to arrest anyone who committed assault but in the end, they only started investigation for vandalism. Because of this, the Hungarian govt sent a written protest and called in the Romanian ambassador to convey their condemnation of violence against ethnic Hungarians and desecration of a cemetery in the name of ethnic conflict, only for the ambassador to refuse the summons, citing orders from the Romanian govt.

The Romanian opposition is, of course, accusing the ethnic Hungarian party RMDSZ of having organized the blockade on Budapest's orders and trucked people over from Hungary for the purpose of denying entry to Romanians wanting to pay their respects to their heroes.

RMDSZ is demanding the resignation of the minister of interior and the county prefect, calling the incident provocation, history denial, occupation and desecration of the past.

The Romanian govt is blaming the ethnic Hungarians for having started it with refusing to let the Romanians into the cemetery, stressing that the right of remembrance belongs to everyone regardless of nationality.

Edited by amitakartok on Jun 7th 2019 at 5:55:02 PM

Wait so the monument didn't go through the usual route of approvals (building permit or similar) before being set up and there are even doubts there are even Romanian soldiers resting in the cemetery (to be fair, given Romania is Orthodox and Ethnic Hungarians tend to be Protestants or Catholics, this is a reasonable doubt to have) in the first place?

While I agree with the "everyone deserves to be remembered" argument, but geeze...

It was indeed built without going through the legal channels, yes.

Meanwhile, the Romanian PM spoke up about the matter and called for dialogue and compromise, condemning the fostering of ethnic hatred for political credit. He pitched the possibility of turning the management of the cemetery in question over to the ministry of defense to emphasize the multinational aspect of those resting there.

I also read it (in HVG) that apparently even the Romanian Ministry of Defense said "just to be clear we never gave permission for the memorial".

It seems there is now a constitutional crisis in Moldova. The elections earlier this year had created a deadlock between the pro-EU, pro-Russian, and pro-Oligarch factions of the parliament. The former two factions managed to put aside their differences and form a unity government on Saturday. On Sunday, today, the Constitutional Court dissolved parliament and also ousted the pro-Russian president at the behest of the pro-Oligarch faction and installed the faction leader as the new president.

Naturally, the other two factions are up in arms about this.

Ministry is now officially formulating a memorandum requesting that they be placed in charge of administrating the cemetery.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Hungarians and Romanians were jointly protesting in Cluj-Napoca against the violence, with some believing that the whole incident was deliberate provocation; not by each other, but by politicians who got scared of losing power after the recent EP elections' very narrow results and are therefore trying to stir up ethnic unrest as a distraction from the country's actual problems.

The Hungarian opposition submitted a proposal for a legislative ban of evicting families with small children unless they are quartered by the state elsewhere. Fidesz refused to even put it on the daily agenda for a debate, with their spokesman explicitly declaring that they are refusing it because the opposition supports it. Granted, they then went on to declare that this is payback for the opposition refusing to back even one Fidesz proposal for helping out the unfortunates who went bankrupt when the exchange rates of foreign currency loans skyrocketed a couple of years back, but still. They can't really claim the moral high ground if they're this willing to engage in a childish tit-for-tat for ideological reasons.

Speaking of which, the Hungarian Science Academy is on the fast track towards being nationalized. After months of fruitless negotiations with the Minister of Innovation and Technology basically repeatedly declaring that the Academy either rolls over to his demands or he will make them roll over because he will have his way no matter what, he submitted a legislative proposal that every single one of the Academy's research institutes are to be placed under the oversight of a committee that answers only to the Parliament. Half of said committee would be elected by the Academy, half would be appointed by the govt, plus the head of the committee would be appointed by the PM. Oh, and the govt would have free and unlimited say in spending the Academy's fortune.

Thousands of researchers have signed a petition to Manfred Weber to do something about this atrocity, but I don't think it's going to work. Fidesz became considerably quieter after the EP elections, but they are still saying that the guy is incompetent, so I don't think they'll do much. Just yesterday, the ministry released a statement that they kicked over the negotiating table because of one thing the Academy refused to compromise on.

Yeah it really looks like we are going to lose our Academy here... I don't even know what to say.