Remix News

Tag: Hungary

  • Vaccine passport issues threaten diplomatic war

    Vaccine passports are probably the only way to restore international travel to anywhere near pre-pandemic levels, but there are several considerations that could trigger diplomatic conflicts before a globally accepted solution is found, according to Norbert Tóth, teacher of international law at the National University of Public Service, in remarks he provided during an interview on Hungarian national station Kossuth rádió on Sunday.

    EU rules allow vaccines to be authorized in the member states, which means that a citizen protected by a vaccine who has not been vaccinated with a vaccine from the EU’s procurement scheme cannot be excluded. In the same way, after countries reopen, tourists and businesspeople who received a Chinese or Russian vaccine as a defense could not be excluded.

    Tóth said that the European Commission was currently preparing two draft regulations on the free movement of citizens holding a vaccine card. This includes citizens who have been protected from vaccination or who have been shown to be cured of the disease or who have been tested for infection-free status. The associate professor added that the committee had proposed the introduction of a digital ID card, but so far this is just a draft, so it is not in force.

    The draft does not contain any information about countries being required to accept vaccines that were not authorized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which could mean that citizens that accepted Russian and Chinese vaccines may not be eligible for travel.

    According to another draft, member states would have the discretion to decide which vaccinated citizens to admit to their territory. 

    Given the potential roadblocks being put up the by the EU, the task of Hungarian diplomacy is to ensure the vaccination of Hungarian citizens is recognized internationally, including those citizens vaccinated with a Russian or a Chinese vaccine.

     

    Tóth also spoke about the fact that free movement within the European Union also has an economic dimension in reference to the flow of labor between countries. But he pointed out that the right of individuals — the free movement of EU citizens — is even more important. According to him, the European Commission’s approach to this issue does not comply with international law because, although the coronavirus is a new phenomenon in the world, there have been other infectious diseases and practices. The World Health Organization (WHO) already has experience with documents proving protection, and the system worked in the case of yellow fever.

    Persons vaccinated with WHO-authorized vaccines must be allowed to move inside and outside the European Union.

    The expert also explained that the European Union must ensure that protection certificates are accepted in countries outside the member states. He added that it would have been a much better solution if Brussels had instead entrusted the WHO, which has expertise in the matter, to develop a certification scheme, and the principle of certification developed by the WHO would apply both inside and outside the EU.

    According to the expert, the tug-of-war in Brussels regarding vaccines from the East might also contain elements of vested interests seeking market-protection for European and Western vaccine producers, and the European pharmaceutical lobby could also have an impact on the procrastination of politicians and policy-makers. This, in turn, also means that a temporary vaccine war could ensue, as the Russians and the Chinese, Brazilians, Indians could also make exclusionary decisions similar to the planned EU decision to admit only those who had been vaccinated with the vaccines they had developed or adopted.

    Title image: Travelers walk through the Salt Lake City International Airport Wednesday, March 17, 2021, in Salt Lake City. Airlines and others in the travel industry are throwing their support behind vaccine passports to boost pandemic-depressed travel, and authorities in Europe could embrace the idea quickly enough for the peak summer vacation season. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

  • Salvini, Meloni want Fidesz in their respective EU parliament factions

    The leaders of two right-wing Italian parties would welcome Fidesz in their respective European Union parliamentary groups, Italian media reported on Sunday. According to the outlets, both the League, led by Matteo Salvini, and the Brothers of Italy (FdI), led by Giorgia Meloni, would welcome the creation of a joint European Parliament formation with the Fidesz group.

    According to La Stampa’s analysis, Salvini wants to set up a joint European Parliament group with the Hungarian and Polish parties. The League is currently a member of the Identity and Democracy (ID) party family formed in 2019, which includes, among others, the National Assembly (RN) led by Marine Le Pen.

    Meloni’s FdI, part of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, born in 2009, is also ready to cooperate. Meloni was elected President of the ECR last September, and the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) is also a member of the party group.

    “He who believes in sovereign nations, secure borders, the family that is the center of society and Christian values ​​will find his home in the ECR,” La Stampa quoted Meloni as saying. According to the newspaper, the president of the FdI wanted to point out that there is no need for another European Parliament group in connection with the above.

    According to analysts, Meloni’s words were mainly intended for her Italian domestic political ally, Salvini, telling him that “the League just needs to knock on the ECR’s door.”

    In the Italian press, the speculation was triggered by Viktor Orbán’s statement on Friday. The Hungarian prime minister said he was thinking of building a new European right after Fidesz representatives left the European People’s Party (EPP). Orbán highlighted relations with the League led by Salvini and the Law and Justice (PiS) party led by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

    According to the analysis of the political daily Il Foglio, Salvini and Meloni are also “courting” Orbán — and Fidesz — who are currently not affiliated with any party family. Still, the newspaper believed that Orbán was thinking of setting up his own faction, as neither Identity and Democracy, represented by Salvini, nor the ECR led by Meloni, proved to be “comfortable and inclusive”, Il Foglio wrote.

    According to press comments, Fidesz’s search for a position has invalidated an earlier plan that the League could move closer to the European People’s Party, a move supported by Salvini’s right-hand man Giancarlo Giorgetti, the current Draghi government’s economic minister.

    Salvini has avoided journalists’ questions about the joint European faction of the League and Fidesz in recent days, stressing that he now considers a solution to vaccination to be the most urgent issue.

    Analysts see Salvini and Meloni as competing within the Italian center-right coalition as a problem: the League has joined Mario Draghi’s government and has 23 percent support, while the Brothers of Italy remained the only party in opposition and its support jumped to 17 percent.

    The two parties have not yet been able to agree on the candidates for the municipal elections due in the autumn, including the right’s candidate for mayor of Rome.

    Title image: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and League leader Matteo Salvini.

  • Hungary’s Fidesz shouldn’t rebuild European right from scratch, says Polish MEP

    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently announced his plan to attempt to reorganize the European Right along with Poland and Italy, but there are still doubts from other leading conservatives about what the best course of action is to create a strong Christan-conservative movement at the European level. 

    Orbán has signaled that he has already contacted Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and the leader of the Italy’s League party, Matteo Salvini, about potentially organizing a new party in the EU parliament. Fidesz recently left the European People’s Party following years of dispute about the direction of the party and conflict between Fidesz and key leaders in the party’s power structure, including Germany’s Manfred Weber and Poland’s Donald Tusk. 

    Law and Justice party (PiS) MEP Ryszard Czarnecki stated on the Polish Radio 24 public station that a cooperation of political groups which support the idea of a ‘Europe of Fatherlands’ is needed. He noted, however, that fulfilling such an initiative will face many difficulties.

    Czarnecki explained that PiS currently cooperates with the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party in the European Parliament, which is in competition with the League in Italy despite the two parties being closely aligned. Moreover, the current Italian government of Mario Draghi was supported by the League, which joined a coalition with Draghi, but the FdI decided to remain in the opposition.

    “Yet, I believe that through good faith and finding of what unites us and rejecting what is divisive, we will find a common political denominator on the international forum. I think we should converse and search for a good solution. As PiS, we are always open to discussion and ready to cooperate for the good of Poland and Europe,” he said.

    Both FdI and the League are eager to have Fidesz MEPs join their competing factions in the European Parliament, with Hungary’s contingent of MEPs surely to boost the political weight of any party they ultimately choose to call home. 

    Czarnecki is also of the opinion that the issue of whether the European right should be united under a new political party or expand the current European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) in the European Parliament is secondary and purely technical.

    He pointed out that it takes a lot of time and effort to establish a new formation within the European Parliament and there might not be enough time for that. Therefore, he stated that it would be better to base the new alliance on the ECR.

    The MEP also underlined that it would be better for Polish interests to develop the ECR, which would enable PiS to have real influence over one of the three biggest groups in the European Parliament.

    “This would increase our area of influence and translates into the ability to care for Polish interests even more,” he said.

    Czarnecki stated, however, that the decision to support Orbán’s proposal lies with PiS leadership and the party’s leader, Jarosław Kaczyński.

    “In terms of the actual date, I think this is a matter of weeks, not months,” he added.

    Title image: PiS MEP Ryszard Czarnecki in Polish Radio studio, source: polskieradio.pl

  • Hungarian foreign minister calls Brexit an ‘enormous loss’

    During a webinar address posted on social media, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó outlined his country’s priorities in developing a new relationship towards post-Brexit Britain. The tangible emphasis throughout his speech on what he called the “sad news” can be interpreted as an indirect criticism of the circumstances that had led to the departure of the UK from the European Union.

    Péter Szijjártó had also emphasized the fact that Hungary has been especially affected by the UK’s departure, as the two countries have in the past seen eye to eye in a number of political issues. They had similar views, for example, on the future of the European Union. The two countries are known to have been vocal opponents to the recent doctrine of “ever closer union”, a federalist approach that would centralize the government of EU member states through nation states handing over legislative powers to Brussels.

    The foreign minister has emphasized that importance of continuing business relationship between the two countries even after Brexit, as Britain remains Hungary’s 13th largest trade partner, and the number one destination of exports outside the EU. There are currently around 900 British companies in Hungary, employing 55,000 people. Among the largest are Tesco, Vodafone, Provident, Shell, BP, British Telecom, British American Tobacco, Glaxo Smith Kline, KPMG, and others.

    Since the beginning of the pandemic, UK companies have not scaled back their activities in the country. On the contrary, five of these businesses that have drawn from the investment stimulus fund set aside by the Hungarian government, have in the past 12 months made a total of €5.5 billion investment in the country.

    Szijjártó has acknowledged the fact that Brexit means extra expenses for both sides. As a result, the minster had pledged to support Hungarian companies with the implementation of the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement in such a manner that it should help these enterprises in overcoming the new challenges. At the Exim Bank, the government had deposited a €590 million fund especially designated for the cooperation between Hungarian and British businesses, with the aim of improving the competitiveness of Hungarian businesses in the UK. There is also a €40 million EU-Brexit adjustment fund reserved for Hungarian entrepreneurs.

    The webinar marks the 100th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In recent years, the government of Viktor Orbán was looking at a succession of British governments for a common voice against the ever-growing power of the EU bureaucracy, trying to steer the EU away from grabbing competences away from national legislatures. The two countries were the only ones in 2014 opposed to the choice of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. Hungary was also advocating a non-punitive approach to the withdrawal agreement with Britain after the Brexit referendum in 2016, a minority stance among other EU members.

    The main Hungarian governing party Fidesz may also end up joining the European Parliament group founded by Prime Minister David Cameron, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). As is known, to prevent the British public from punishing his government at a future EU membership referendum because of what many had perceived as an increasing amount of interference in British affairs by the EU bureaucracy, Cameron had in 2009 co-founded the center-left faction of the ECR. Its mission statement was to achieve more democratic accountability for the EU’s institutions, an emphasis on family values, a respect for the sovereignty of the EU member nation-states, opposition to federalism, and more efficient immigration control, among other objectives.

    These goals are strongly reminiscent of the topics surfacing amid bitter debates among the Hungarian government and other EU leaders, which may prompt Fidesz, that had recently left the European People Party’s parliamentary faction, to apply for membership in the ECR.

  • ‘There is an arrogance in the way Western journalists write about Hungary,’ says British-Hungarian author

    Western media often condemns Hungary based on incomplete information and that is why every now and then British-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer will write articles in defense of his ancestors’ country, news and opinion portal Mandiner wrote in an interview.

    “There is a kind of arrogance in the way Western journalists write about Hungary. They come to Budapest for a weekend and then make summary judgments in their writings,” Fischer said in the interview. The 61-year-old Fischer, born in Stockport, is the son of Hungarian handball players who emigrated to the United Kingdom after the failed 1956 anti-Soviet uprising and settled in London. He grew up in London and studied Latin and French at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

    The author believes that the Hungarian government is so popular for a reason and that reports about the demise of democracy in Hungary are false:

    “Most critics point out that human rights are being violated in Hungary, that democracy is being demolished – but in most cases this statement is not substantiated by real examples. If a government has a two-thirds majority, it has much more room for maneuver, but that’s part of the game of democracy. Whoever has such a majority can do almost anything,” he said.

    He also indicated that because Hungary is a democracy regardless of what the press claims, saying, “It is also part of democracy that if people don’t like it, they will nicely replace this government. One of the keys to Orbán’s success is doing his job well, being good at what he does.”

     

    Fischer said that “the opposition consists of a bunch of clowns. Presumably, they can’t even organize a barbecue party in the back garden. It is incomprehensible to me, for example, that the effectiveness of a Russian or Chinese vaccine is being questioned by the opposition. If these vaccines turn out to be effective, then these politicians will look pretty foolish.”

    Fischer’s first book “Under the Frog” — partially based on the story of his parents — was written in 1992 and received the Betty Trask Prize for literature. It was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Since then, he has written another seven books, including the 2014 “The Hungarian Tiger”, a profile of both Hungarian politics and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

    He first came to his ancestral Hungary in 1982 to visit his relatives and was back again in 1986 while doing a BBC documentary about the 1956 uprising. During the country’s transition from communism, he was the Budapest correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.

    “Things began to change slowly: new papers appeared, the press began to write on topics they had not previously mentioned, an opposition figure was invited to television political programs here and there, and so on. These were all signs that the communist regime was slowly disintegrating. No one knew where the processes were going, in 1988 everything was in flux,” Fischer said. “Negotiated regime change has begun, and not only in Hungary, but in Poland and finally in the entire Eastern bloc. Eventually, the collapse of the Soviet Union also occurred.”

    He said that as an already established writer, he began writing articles in the British press in defense of Hungary and dispelling misconceptions because he does not like “ignorance and stupidity”.

    “I did so not in the interests of the political defense of the Hungarian government, but because it was disturbing that Hungary was regularly treated as a banana republic in the British papers,” Fischer said. “I know exactly that not everything is perfect in Hungarian politics either, so you can criticize the Hungarian government in many ways, but it is a democracy, and Viktor Orbán is neither a far-right politician nor an anti-Semite.”

    Title image: British-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer. (Mandiner/Márton Ficsor)

  • Hungary is the second most vaccinated EU nation for Covid-19 after Malta

    Statistics show that the inoculation rate for Covid-19 in Hungary was 14.3 percent, second only to Malta’s 17.49 percent, according to statistics complied by daily Magyar Nemzet. The only other EU member state with a ratio over 10 percent was Denmark at 10.23 percent. 

    Although Hungary and many other EU nations still have a long way to go in terms of inoculation, Hungary’s initial success is likely related to its decision to embrace Russian and Chinese vaccines after the EU’s vaccination rollout has widely seen as failing. 

    Cabinet Minister Gergely Gulyás stressed that it is important to obtain vaccines from wherever possible, and Hungary is among the best in Europe in terms of vaccination. 

    Despite early successes, it is not yet time to relax coronavirus restrictions, and the only defense is if vaccination continues, Gulyás told media after the weekly cabinet meeting at a press conference on Thursday, daily Magyar Hírlap reported.

    Gulyás emphasized that experts say we are close to the peak of the third wave, and the numbers are extremely bad, but the healthcare system is expected to maintain free capacity.

    He stressed that the most important thing is for everyone to follow the rules, do everything possible to reduce the number of contacts so that the current wave can quickly recede. If people are vaccinated quickly and many register, there will be no fourth wave, he said, adding that maybe the time until the restrictions are relaxed can be counted in “weeks or days”.

    He explained that the peak of the third wave could be even harder than the second was in late December and early January. On Wednesday, 207 people died of the coronavirus, there are more than 6,500 new infections, more than 10,000 are in hospital, and 1,170 on ventilators, he said.

    Gulyás thanked the doctors and nurses for the hard work. There are another 11,000 free hospital beds and 1,700 beds with ventilators, he said. He added that both residents and medics can take part in the defense, which means that the staff is larger than before, and there is no capacity problem.

    Title image: Hungarian woman being inoculated with the AstraZeneca vaccine in Kunszállás, south-central Hungary on March 18, 2021. (MTI/Csaba Bús)

  • The EPP chose mass immigration and left-wing values, writes Hungarian minister about Fidesz leaving the group

    The inevitable has happened: Hungary’s ruling Fidesz has left the European People’s Party (EPP) two weeks after having left the group’s European Parliament faction, Fidesz Vice-President and Minister of Families Katalin Novák announced in a tweet on Thursday.

    “I hereby notify the Presidency of the European People’s Party that Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Union no longer wishes to maintain its membership in the European People’s Party, and thus resigns according to article 9 of the statutes,” read the letter addressed to EPP Secretary General Antonio López-Istúriz White and signed only as “Fidesz International Secretariat”.

    Fidesz suspended its membership in the European People’s Party in March 2019, but the tension between the group and Hungary’s ruling party only took a critical turn when Poland’s Donald Tusk assumed presidency of the group on Dec. 1, 2019.

    Novák gave the following arguments for leaving the EPP in a Facebook post:

    “In 2015, during the immigration crisis, it became clear that the People’s Party saw the future in supporting migration, but the Hungarians rejected it and made it clear that we did not want to share the fate of countries where the effects of mass immigration had become irreversible.”

    Now that the fight against the coronavirus epidemic is seizing all the energy of decision-makers, instead of seeking solutions to the problems surrounding EU procurement of vaccines and helping to combat them effectively, a secret amendment to the statute has deprived elected Fidesz representatives of their parliamentary rights.

    In recent years, it has become clear that on most issues, the European People’s Party already represents left-wing values ​​that we cannot identify with. As several leaders have explained: the People’s Party is no longer a right-wing party. We take note of this. Fidesz belongs to the European democratic right, which needs to be rebuilt.”

    Novák’s words echoed a thesis paper published by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two weeks ago, the day after Fidesz left the EPP faction. In it, Orbán wrote that Hungary is tasked with rebuilding the European-democratic right in support of Christianity and national sovereignty along with the rejection of multiculturalism and globalism.

    “It is widely known that we Hungarians wanted to return the EPP – which is in continuous retreat, jettisoning its political values, as if from a sinking airship – to its former position as Europe’s leading intellectual and political force. We wanted to return it to being a large, strong, democratic formation of the right, which could bring together centrist, conservative and traditional Christian democratic parties and their voters into a great shared political home,” Orbán wrote.

    EPP President Donald Tusk acknowledged Fidesz’s departure in a short tweet.

     

    Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet — citing unnamed high-ranking Fidesz sources — wrote that Fidesz might form a new group, whose other main participants would be Italy’s League and Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, with even the possibility of future cooperation with the EPP in the medium term.

     

  • Increasing number of border walls being built around the world

    The world has now more border walls than ever before and there are no signs that this trend will slow, reads a report co-authored by three independent European research centers. 

    The contemporary trend can even be referred to as “the walling of the world”, according to Damien Simonneau, researcher at the Collège de France and author of L’Obsession du Mur.

    From just six in 1989, there are nearly 63 physical walls today, according to the report co-authored by the Dutch think-tank Transnational Institute, the Center Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau in Barcelona, and the German group Stop Wapenhandel.

    The last two decades have been particularly prolific in terms of building walls and other electrified fences. But while the Berlin Wall was intended to prevent residents of the Eastern Bloc from fleeing, these new walls serve to prevent others from entering. 

    “Walling and militarizing borders has become very common,” explained Damien Simonneau, researcher at the Collège de France and author of L’Obsession du Mur. “Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the border has been associated with an idea of ​​security and control, which was not the case before.”

    Almost 60 percent of the world’s population lives in a country that has walled up its borders, most often to fight terrorism, smuggling, or unauthorized immigration.

    Anti-migrant walls

    The European Union is no exception. Contrary to the image of openness conveyed by the free movement allowed by the Schengen agreements, 1,000 kilometers of walls have been built along its borders over the past 20 years, mainly aimed at fighting unauthorized immigration.

    “Building of walls presents a strong state that controls its borders and its territory,” said Simonneau. “This aims above all to respond to the anxieties of citizens and to make certain political actors fruitful.” 

    The fence built in 2015 by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the border between Hungary and Serbia stretches 175 kilometers with its barbed wire top reaches four-meters high. Designed to “preserve the Christian roots“ of Hungary against real or perceived migratory danger, it inspired Austria, Slovenia, and Macedonia, which have done the same at their borders. Bulgaria has also built nearly 176 kilometers of barbed wire fence along its border with Turkey, the mainland entry point for migrants to Europe, and Greece has also built up its border wall. 

    However, according to Damien Simonneau, “the construction of walls against immigration is more part of political show than the issue of controlling mobility. Rather than reducing migration, the construction of a wall mainly involves moving the migrants.“

    It is complicated to estimate the real impact of these walls on unauthorized immigration. Deprived of land access routes, migrants now use the dangerous sea route to reach Europe.

    At the same time, for countries such as Hungary that installed barriers, migration to those countries has dropped dramatically. Overall migration to Europe has also fallen overall since the 2016 crisis, but some of the drop can also be accounted for by agreements with countries like Turkey designed to stem migration.

    In the United States, the closure of the border with Mexico has pushed South Americans to the desert areas of Arizona, making the migration route more dangerous and deadly. At the same time, there is general recognition that border walls or fencing are just part of a comprehensive package to reduce immigration, and not in their self a panacea that will solve the problem, which also applies to the US. 

    Other walls are being built in areas that have suffered conflict. Constructed to limit mobility and separate the belligerents, Simonneau claims they contribute to the “stagnation“ of the situation.

    In Cyprus as in Belfast, Northern Ireland, these barriers survived the armed conflict. They then mark, according to the researcher, the “freezing of tensions and the absence of a diplomatic process“, which could lead to a more lasting solution between the two parties.

    Ditto for the demilitarized border which separates South Korea from North Korea since 1953, or for the fortified “wall of sand” stretching 2,700 kilometers between Morocco and the areas controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, proclaimed in 1976 by the Front Polisario.

    In Georgia, Russia and the de facto authorities have been trying to establish a physical border between the separatist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the rest of the country since the end of the 2008 conflict. The construction of barbed wire fences establishes, according to Simonneau, “a zone of ceasefire, while registering the presence of Russia on the territory”.

    Likewise, while the wall built in 2002 by Israel along the “green line” in the West Bank was originally designed to combat terrorist attacks in the context of the Second Intifada, it has since, according to the researcher, changed the function.

    “The wall was intended by certain Israeli actors as a policy of annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank,” he asserted, “and as a means of control of the Palestinian populations, which prolongs the grip of the Israeli state.”

    Condemned since 2004 by the International Court of Justice, the nine-meter-high concrete wall is from 85 percent in the West Bank and isolates almost 10 percent of the Palestinian Territory. Still under construction, the structure should eventually reach 712 kilometers in length.

    The construction of walls, therefore, shows no signs of slowing. In 2009, the militarization of the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq turned out to be a profitable contract for the Franco-German company EADS. In 2018, a report from the Transnational Institute estimated the international border security market at €17.5 billion and predicted growth of at least 8 percent in the years to come. Announced last February, the project of a new wall between Haiti and the Dominican Republic shows there is little contradicting this trend. 

    Title image: In this Oct. 13, 2016 file picture a police officer, second right, and border guard, right, of Poland patrol with Hungarian policemen along the temporary border fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke, 180 kms southeast of Budapest, Hungary. (Zoltan Mathe/MTI via AP,file)

  • The blunders of Brussels

    In a recent article, British conservative daily The Telegraph has confronted EU leaders with serious facts: Hungary, Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia have broken with the EU’s unified vaccine strategy, and that is big news.

    Brussels is heavily criticized for failing to procure vaccines, and Austria and Denmark — as well as Hungary and the Czech Republic since the article was published — are negotiating with Israel, while many Central and Eastern European countries are also turning to China and Russia for vaccines. According to the author, all this shows that Europe is starting to become geopolitically irrelevant.

    The overwhelming criticism is, of course, hardly independent of the debates over AstraZeneca, but it doesn’t change the point: joint EU vaccine procurement has not been a success story. It can be said, of course, that if member states started to compete for vaccines individually, the situation would be even worse, but that does not diminish the failure itself.

    Indeed, more and more member states have expressed their anger with Brussels. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently held a joint press conference with the prime ministers of Czechia, Slovenia and Bulgaria where he called for a correction mechanism to remedy the disparities in distribution, and urged the European Commission to show the solidarity that it so often preaches. 

    The system is slow and the contracts are obviously bad, as the EU really doesn’t know what to do if manufacturers don’t deliver on time or fall short on the promised quantities. The Commission is, of course, pointing to the manufacturers, sometimes to the member states, but it has serious problems with taking responsibility.

    As Prime Minister Viktor Orbán put it recently, “Brussels has botched vaccine purchases, and if Hungary had not ordered vaccination from the East, the country would be in big trouble now.”

    As in the case of the migration crisis, the Hungarian prime minister’s proposal for a solution was initially criticized and later adopted by others. It has become clear that whoever is just waiting for the Union to come to the rescue is making a huge mistake. The Hungarian representatives of Brussels, that is, the liberal side, of course, insist that we will be vaccinated in months, otherwise we will take the country out of Europe, but they will be left alone with their dangerous idiocy.

    The already battered crisis management reputation of Brussels obviously cannot withstand another fiasco. The migration crisis has already demonstrated that we have a major perceptional problem. It took them years to finally at least consider the solutions and proposals that the leaders of member states said hundreds of times.

    They may have, over the years, finally arrived at the idea of flexible solidarity, but were unable to ditch the failed concept of a compulsory distribution quota — a plan that not only did not solve the migration crisis, but outright aggravated it by sending an invitation to migrants, gave arguments to human traffickers who first rid people of their property and then set them on their way in a dinghy all in the hope that a Soros-ship somewhere will pick them up.

    Will there be self-correction in Brussels, will the Commission remember? We do not yet know this, but I certainly do say that the European Parliament is still busy working out how to best punish Hungary and Poland. They conduct blackmail and threaten the European Commission to enforce the withdrawal of budgetary funds without a court decision.

    Meanwhile, the Hungarian left-liberals enthusiastically applaud all this.

    Title image: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks during a media conference on the Commission’s response to COVID-19 at EU headquarters in Brussels, Wednesday, March 17, 2021. (John Thys, Pool via AP)

  • Hungarian scientist László Lovász wins ‘mathematics Nobel prize’

    Hungarian academic László Lovász (73) was awarded this year’s Abel Prize, also known as the “mathematics Nobel Prize”, Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet reports. He shares the prize with Israeli mathematician Avi Wigderson.

    In its announcement, the awarding committee said the two received the prize “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics”. Lovász’s field of study, graph theory, became in the early 1970s one of the first areas of pure mathematics able to illuminate the new field of computational complexity.

    Lovász, born in Budapest in 1948, was a math prodigy in his teens, winning three gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad between 1964 and 1966. He has two doctorates, one in natural sciences and one in mathematical sciences. After an academic career in Hungary and the United States, he joined Microsoft as senior researcher in 1999, where he worked until his return to Hungary in 2006. He was the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.

    After Péter Lax (2005) and Endre Szemerédi (2012) he is the third Hungarian to be awarded the Abel Prize.

    “In 2012, I was present at the presentation of Endre Szemerédi’s Abel Prize in Oslo. I toyed with the idea that one day maybe I could stand there with the Norwegian king,” Lovász told Magyar Nemzet. “At the same time, you need to know about me that rewards never motivated me. The joy and excitement of discovery has always been an incomparable experience for me.”  

    Title image: Hungarian academic László Lovász. (source: Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Laszlo Mudra)

  • Ousting Fidesz from the EPP wasn’t a smart move – Interview with Prof. Werner Patzelt

    No one benefits from the Fidesz-People’s Party breakup, nor should the Hungarian government expect improved relations from a possible future CDU-Greens coalition; the best thing they can do now is to keep their policy sound, says German political scientist Werner Patzelt, who was asked about German domestic politics and German-Hungarian relations.

    Werner J. Patzelt (born in 1953 in Passau) is a German political scientist and professor emeritus at the Technical University of Dresden. He was a co-founder of Dresden University’s institute of political science in 1991, where he taught until his retirement in 2019, which was partly politically motivated. He graduated in political science, sociology and history in 1980 from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, after which he received his doctorate and habilitation at the University of Passau. He has been a visiting professor in Paris, London and Moscow and at several events of the International Federation of Political Science (IPSA), as well as a member of the executive committee of this prestigious professional organization from 2009 to 2015. He has been a member and periodic adviser of CDU since 1994, as well as the party’s deputy campaign chief in the 2019 Saxony state elections. He is a sought-after expert who is very active in the German media.

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    Who will benefit from Fidesz’s withdrawal from the European People’s Party?

    I believe nobody will gain from this — except those German politicians in the CDU who have been constantly attacked by the German media for tolerating Fidesz in the EPP. They now have one reason less to be attacked. Other than that, however, I don’t think anyone will benefit from this.

    Could CDU have lost votes due to media attacks?

    We will know more about this following the elections on Sunday. However, I do not assume that this EU-related political move of the CDU will be significant at the domestic level. This is a topic that interests those who are into politics; it plays a role in the cooperation between journalists and politicians, but most people just ignore it. Depending on one’s stance, it strengthens one’s fundamental position. Anyone who leans toward the conservative wing of the CDU or AfD will say: Behold, we can see again that the Left is already dominating the CDU! And those on the Left will say: It was about time we won another round in the fight against the Right by ousting Fidesz.

    Do you see any strategic considerations behind the move on the part of EPP leaders? Was it a politically wise move?

    I don’t think it was a smart move. After all, political groups within the European Parliament aim to achieve a majority, and allowing center-left and left-wing groups to force their own group to become weaker limits their own influence. This is exactly what the EPP’s political opponents wanted to achieve, and they can now rejoice at the People’s Party’s strategic blunder.

    What do you think about the timing? Why was it so urgent for the EPP to change the rules of the faction, and why has Orbán’s party had enough?

    It could have been because Manfred Weber, EPP faction leader, is a CSU politician who had been prevented from chairing the European Commission and wanted to demonstrate: I am not a righty, I am acting against right-wing populism in Europe, so please do not punish my party at the upcoming election because it is too right-wing! But he may have been just a hunted man who could no longer get rid of some of the ghosts he had summoned before.

    There was a sharp and not very friendly reaction from Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder to the news of the exit. Do you have an explanation as to why CSU suddenly doesn’t like Fidesz when they are traditionally the best German friends of Hungarians?

    The CSU is slowly beginning to realize that it will never be able to govern alone in Bavaria, and in the years to come, its most important coalition partner will be the Greens. The CSU therefore will dismantle, step by step, any political position that could annoy the Greens; meanwhile, it also tramples on the heads of old friends. We can also call this political infidelity. We have never seen such unfortunate behavior on the part of the CDU before.

    Will the separation of Fidesz from the People’s Party result in the deterioration of Hungarian-German relations, or is it entirely a political party matter?

    A lot will depend on the attitude of the Hungarian side. If Hungary continues to pursue a well-explained political course without resentment, Fidesz can demonstrate that the EPP has been unfair. If it does not respond to this with harshness or bitterness, there will be the possibility of a positive restart after the European Paraliament elections. In any case, they should avoid letting themselves be chased into taking on a role previously assigned to them that makes them an ideal target.

    There is also a media-policy dimension to Hungarian-German relations. At the end of February, Deutsche Welle announced that it would launch online platforms in Hungarian, and German media has run anti-Hungarian propaganda in recent weeks in ZDF and Deutsche Welle. Is it possible that Berlin wants to send a message to Fidesz through public media?

    This is conceivable from those responsible for public television, less directly from the government. The tentacles of power aren’t that simple. To give a clearer picture: Roughly 70 percent of German journalists are currently leaning toward the Greens, Social Democrats or the Left; and now, this generation of journalists occupies key positions in the public media, which it uses to translate its own political beliefs and desires into journalism. In addition, there is a fundamental sympathy between Green-Left journalists and Angela Merkel, so politics and media pass the ball to each other on this issue.

    However, this is not a background conspiracy that goes beyond the usual influence of politicians on the decisions of public television. It is therefore less of a kind of “secondary foreign policy” than a consequence of the Green-Left cultural hegemony, which determines Germany’s politics and its political culture.

    Let’s move on to German domestic politics: This is an important election year for Germany, with federal and local parliamentary elections. Who will be the German chancellor in 2021?

    We do not know yet because it is neither clear who will be CDU/CSU’s candidate for chancellor, nor can we rule out that CDU/CSU achieves such a poor election result that a Greens-SPD-FDP coalition will be possible. Besides, the Greens do not have a chancellor candidate either. The only thing that’s pretty sure is the end of Angela Merkel’s mandate as chancellor.

    Can you see a favorite person within the CDU who is likely to win the nomination?

    The CDU must close behind its president – anything else would hurt the party. By the way, the CDU has so far consistently accepted a CSU chancellor candidate when there was any chance of losing the election, as in that case, the CSU candidate would be held responsible, not that of the CDU. Whether this is still the case is yet to be seen. In any event, the current Bavarian prime minister (CSU) is not being shy in his efforts of total self-denial to become popular as a possible chancellor of a black-green (CDU-Greens) coalition. If a green-red-yellow (Greens-SDP-FDP) coalition fails to come together in the autumn, we are indeed going to see a black-green coalition – that way, Markus Söder could follow in the footsteps of Louis IV of Bavaria and Charles VII of Wittelsbach as German regent.

    You have repeatedly referred to the possibility of a black-green coalition, both in Bavaria and at a federal level. From 2021, do you think it will be possible to govern without the Greens at all?

    There is a good chance that for many years it will not be possible to govern at the federal level without the Greens. The Social Democrats have long been happy to govern with the Greens, while CDU has navigated itself into total strategic dependence on them. Since the emergence of AfD an dthe FDP, the CDU/CSU will not gain a majority, and it is not possible or desirable to cooperate with AfD. However, any rapprochement between CDU/CSU and the Greens will further strengthen AfD. Thus, CDU’s only hope is that the radicalization of AfD will be its ruin. Overall, it can be a fun thing to be with the Greens now and succeed in politics!

    What do you think about the internal state of CDU? Two “mask scandals” have broken out in recent weeks, with two CDU/CSU politicians having indulged in accepting a “brokerage fee” for mask purchases. Are these unique cases, or do they point to a kind of arrogance of power within CDU?

    Hunger for power in politics is not a bad thing! CDU also deserves praise for its decision to, when in doubt, use power instead of negligible principles. However, it is scandalous for politicians to get rich through their political office at any time, especially in times of crisis. Regarding CDU’s internal affairs, one can conclude that several ambitious generations within the party have gained influence. They are less concerned with what is good for the public and more focused on their own interests. This is detrimental to CDU, but it is entirely their fault and they do not deserve any sympathy for it.

    Meanwhile, the self-serving joy of the Social Democrats and Greens [in the face of CDU’s failings] is, of course, still wrong. In any case, it will make it easier for SPD to get off CDU’s sinking flagship and once again give the Greens a chance to do a little moralizing. Both parties are happy about this because, of course, for a year they were annoyed by the fact that Angela Merkel’s star was taken up again by the coronavirus crisis and CDU was hitting new highs in the polls. Now, CDU/CSU’s support is declining again, and the Social Democrats and Greens obviously cannot wait to see them below 30 percent again.

    Let us talk about Social Democrats too. Do you see any chance that in 2021, after 16 years, an SPD chancellor will govern Germany again, or is that completely out of the question?

    In the foreseeable future, chances for an SPD chancellor are very slim. In the fall, SPD is unlikely to get stronger than the Greens. So why should the latter hand over the chancellery in a coalition with SPD? The Greens will surely remember SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s famous saying that the bigger coalition partner is the chef while the smaller one is a waiter.

    How do you evaluate the one-year performance of SPD’s new co-chairs, Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans? Has anything been achieved for the party or is the downturn continuing?

    This co-presidency does not represent SPD in its full spectrum; it only displays the left-wing of the party. That is why they failed to broaden their electoral base. On the contrary, by turning SPD into a movement for identity politics and criticizing the talented former SPD Bundestag President Wolfgang Thiers, many loyal Social Democrats have been challenged. In summary, this co-presidency has proven to be particularly harmful to SPD, so there is a good chance they will not politically survive the federal election.

    AfD is maneuvering in German domestic politics with virus-skeptical, anti-vaccination sentiments. Do they have a chance to benefit from this in the federal election?

    By opposing the federal government’s coronavirus policy, AfD cannot achieve anything. This is because it wasn’t built only by those on the Right but also by representatives of liberal, ecopolitical and esoteric views. Coronavirus policy in no way carries as many mobilization opportunities for AfD as immigration policy. Nonetheless, the chancellor continues to enjoy such stable media support that any AfD attack on her coronavirus policy will be crushed.

    AfD faces a much bigger, fundamental problem.

    It has not decided whether it wants to be a “normal” party in the future that could one day be a coalition partner of CDU/CSU or a demagogic right-wing group working on abolishing Germany’s established political system. Most of the East German party base wants the latter, but many in the West German AfD, as well as the narrow majority of the national presidency, want AfD to become a coalition partner of CDU. There is a power struggle between the two camps, fought using ugly means at times. This is further exacerbated by the fact that parties are trying to use state defense agencies to dissuade as many decent people as possible from participating in AfD. Under such circumstances, of course, the “fundamentalists” of AfD only further solidify — making the goal of the “realists” seem unattainable.

    Which leading personalities represent the two wings of AfD?

    Currently, Jörg Meuthen represents the realist wing of the party, and nobody has emerged in the fundamentalist wing as a leader. Björn Höcke’s policy has expired, Andreas Kalbitz has been expelled from the party, Alexander Gauland is too old, Alice Weidel is maneuvering, and Beatrix von Storch does not have enough influence. However, the fundamentalist wing does relatively well within the AfD with its indefinite tendency toward outrage and solidarity and thus cannot be targeted by the realist camp.

    Let’s suppose that a CDU-Greens coalition is formed in Germany in 2021. How should Hungary relate to such a government? What can Hungary expect from them? Will there necessarily be a deterioration of relations?

    There is no reason to assume that a black-green German government will seek to improve German-Hungarian relations. In the alliance with the Greens, the ideological rejection of Orbán and Fidesz will not lessen. The best the Hungarian government can do in such a situation is to ensure its policies remain sober, accountable and governed by the rule of law; it should tolerate unjust accusations rather than behave in a way that justifies those accusations. One finds this attitude difficult when they think they are doing the right thing. However, a position that can be well defended in terms of content must be represented prudently, carefully, in moderation and with soberness — especially when it encounters malicious criticism.

  • German action plan for integration: Merkel’s diversity utopia

    As Angela Merkel’s CDU suffers a further slip in the polls during two regional elections due largely to her chaotic management of the coronavirus management, her government is still mainly preoccupied with social engineering projects and a fight against the country’s political right.

    During this month’s 13th Integration Summit, the German government and the federal commissioner for migration, refugees and integration have unveiled a new action plan for the integration of the millions of migrants now residing in the country. According to the published roadmap, enormous cultural changes must take place within German society in order to make the new arrivals feel at home and to integrate them into the job market, with jobless migrants currently costing the country at least €6 billion a year and most failing to enter the job market.

    The new action plan, drafted with the help of increasingly influential pro-migration NGOs, is a brainchild of the Green Party dominated German Integration Commission. It purports to “support the federal government in further developing integration policy and promoting the coexistence of all people in the country — whether Germans and foreigners, with or without a history of immigration… [and to] further develop the conditions for the most tension-free coexistence between all citizens, promote mutual understanding, and counter xenophobia and inequality.”

    The five-stage plan envisages a period of a multi-stage integration, a phase of “growing together”, and finally a state of cohesion. It not only aims to integrate migrants already in the country, but also to positively encourage foreign nationals with job adverts and language courses in their country of origin, to prepare for a life in Germany before their arrival.

    Its aim is to attract more immigration on top of the ongoing spontaneous process by means of  “resettlement and humanitarian admission” or by offering “support to employers in recruiting foreign workers”.

    The proposal recommends the acquisition of more healthcare workers with migration background, and recommends the establishment of a learning platform for existing employees to “promote transcultural skills in nursing”. In other areas of professional life, during stage five of the integration process, the action plan recommends participation in political education, the launch of anti-discrimination initiatives, and the introduction of quotas for migrants or people with foreign background in public services.

    The latter refers back to an earlier demand by Elke Breitenbach from the radical left Die Linke party for the creation of 35-percent migrant quotas in the capital of Berlin’s administration and public services. In these there is already a 60-percent quota existing for women, and if the 35-percent migrant quota were to be fulfilled, this would make it increasingly difficult for native White man to get a job in public services, or at least they could be excluded from active recruitment for the next two or three decades.

    The action plan would also aim to introduce radical changes in the business environment. Under the heading “Diversity in Business”, the government urges business to create what they call a “working environment that is free from prejudice”. This would not only mean the introduction of special recognition schemes for promoting diversity or diversity projects in which employees should participate, but this would inevitably lead to sanctions against those who would refuse to take part in such political schooling on the basis of their conscience. The initiative could in fact overrule Germany’s Basic Law, which forbids negative or even preferential treatment towards anyone on the basis of their religion or racial origin, and also protects every citizen’s right to choose their own political or cultural viewpoint.

    This fact does not seem to discourage the main authors of the action plan, Germany’s Green party, who proclaim the creation of a “diverse country of immigration” in their own mission statement. This is confirmed in the final stages of their integration action plan, where they advocate the cultural transformation of German society via immigration, where the majority society is expected to open itself up to more influences from foreign arrivals. Under the Green Party’s proposal, the new arrivals are spared of almost all responsibility for their own success in Germany, and instead the program unmistakably resembles a drive for the large-scale political re-education of the country’s native population.

    The government’s influence on the freedom of speech is also targeting Germany’s free press, as it is evident from the pages of the New German Media Makers Association, which is broadly seen as the Merkel government’s long arm in the world of German media.

    Through the association, the government is attempting to interfere with the country’s media outlets in order to advise them to accept their diversity drive as their own. The government openly declares on its own website that “in order to promote diversity in film, television and editorial offices, the New German Media Makers Association, in cooperation with media houses and journalism schools, aims to provide targeted support to media workers with an immigration and refugee background, and media companies and journalistic training centers to develop their approaches to diversity.”

    By any standards, this is just short of direct interference with the staffing policy of the German media, as well as mandating a particular political ethos as the one to follow in their journalistic editorial decisions.

  • ‘Be proud of your history’ – Polish PM greets Hungarians on Hungary’s National Day

    At a time when the alliance between Hungary and Poland appears to be growing in strength, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki greeted the Hungarian people in an online address to the Hungarian nation on the occasion of the Memorial Day of the 1848 Revolution in Hungary, which is commemorated on March 15.

    “We Poles, as a nation who like Hungarians had to fight for its sovereignty, understand the symbolism of days such as this one,” Morawiecki said 

    The Hungarian uprising erupted on March 15, 1848, in the town of Pest following the news of revolutions in Paris and Vienna. It became a War of Independence and a part of the Spring of Nations.

    Morawiecki recalled the words of Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi who participated in the uprising. He emphasized that Hungarians “had a great desire for freedom which was shared by Poles”.Morawiecki said that Poles showed their support for the uprising, especially with Polish General Józef Bem, who fought a number of battles with the Hungarians, resulting in Hungary memorializing the Pole as a national hero to this day. 

    The prime minister underlined that Poles and Hungarians are united by a centuries-long friendship and brotherhood.

    “Our nations love freedom and showed that they can fight for it and support each other in that battle. While today, we do not have to fight with swords, we still support each other and our allies. Together we care for the well-being of not only our citizens, but also the region’s development and security,” he said.

    Morawiecki wished Hungarians to be able to use their talents and skills in service to values in which they believe in, just like Sándor Petőfi had. Petőfi is considered Hungary’s national poet and is generally believed to have died in action during one of the final battles of Hungary’s War for Independence. 

    “Be proud of your history, culture and language. Nurture the deeply enrooted desire for freedom. It is that desire, as you have shown many times, which can change the world for the better,” he stated.

  • Romanian president praises ethnic Hungarians on March 15 for first time since taking office

    Perhaps reflecting the shift in legislative power in Romania, where the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians (RMDSZ) is part of a coalition government again, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis has for the first time during his two terms in office issued a message to the ethnic Hungarian community, praising them for the “significant contribution of the Hungarian community living in Romania and its political representatives in paving the way toward European integration”.

    Iohannis’ message is important because ever since the 1990 regime change, Romanian presidents have sent a message to the ethnic Hungarian community in Romania every year on March 15, the anniversary of the 1848-49 anti-Habsburg revolution, the main commemorative event of the  community. Many of the decisive battles of what the Hungarians still call the “glorious revolution” have been fought on what is today Romania and it was in Arad (also in Romania now), that the Austrians executed the 13 generals of the revolution.

    While the revolution was doomed from the moment Tsar Nicholas of Russia offered assistance to Austria, sending 200,000 troops and 80,000 auxiliary forces to complement 170,000 soldiers of the Austrian Empire, Hungarians still celebrate to this day the heroic fight of the outgunned and out-manned Hungarian forces.

    When first elected in 2014, Klaus Iohannis — himself belonging to the German ethnic minority — broke with the tradition of addressing ethnic Hungarians in Romania on their day of celebration.

    Now, however, he issued the first such message, saying, “On this occasion, I would like to emphasize the significant contribution of the Hungarian community living in Romania and its political representatives in paving the way toward European integration, the restoration of democratic values, ​​and the efforts made to base our society on the bedrock of human rights and the protection of minorities. These form the foundation of our common European future and foster a better understanding of the lessons learned from the past.”

    Romanian prime ministers also traditionally commemorated this day, with the exception of last year. Now Prime Minister Florin Cîțu, whose government includes the ethnic Hungarian party, has returned to the tradition.

    “Today, we are celebrating the ethnic Hungarian community living in Romania and the peaceful co-existence we have developed over the past few decades,” Cîțu wrote. “March 15 is a good opportunity to look toward the future. It’s time to establish a common future, to develop this country together. I’m firmly convinced that this is the only way we can establish a country we would love to live in.”

    Title image: Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

  • Hungarians and Poles are linked by their yearning for freedom, says Hungarian president

    Linked by their yearning for freedom, Hungarians and Poles are the “indivisible historical twins of Central Europe”, Hungarian President László Kövér said on March 15, the anniversary of the 1848-49 anti-Habsburg revolution which brought democracy to Hungary.

    Kövér emphasized that the freedom-loving Hungarian and Polish citizens still feel and know which side to choose, and in the face of anti-nationalism, anti-family sentiment and anti-Christianity, “we are still on the same side today”, he said.

    Kövér added that “the sacrifice of our freedom-fighting ancestors and the faith in freedom of our children and grandchildren obliges us” to “protect our nations, our families and our Christian faith, and our European and national culture rooted in Christianity against nihilist efforts that are trying to disintegrate our societies and their natural components — families”.

    “Should we be prisoners or free?” Kövér quoted the poem of famed Hungarian revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi, adding that every time history poses the very same question to the sons and daughters of all nations. The Hungarians gave their answer in 1848: they wanted to be free, and therefore they created freedom for themselves.

    In 1848, freedom meant national self-consciousness, a state based on popular representation, i.e. a democratic, independent and self-determined state, and social justice, and this is exactly the same in Hungary and Poland today, Kövér said.

    In 2021, “the words of the members of the vibrant and freedom-loving Hungarian and Polish nation” — again paraphrasing the words of Petőfi — should be: “We swear to the God of Hungarians and Poles that we will not be prisoners again!”

    László Csizmadia, the founding president of civic group CÖF-CÖKA, which organized the event, spoke about the fact that “while we remember our common heroes and martyrs, we can feel that our peoples are again threatened by imperial ideas”.

    The enemy is attacking from two directions, inside and out, threatening “our freedom, independence and Christianity”, he said, adding that the Hungarian and Polish ultra-liberal opposition became allies of Brussels and sacrificed their respective nations for “promised vicarious roles” on the “altar of sick, sick imperial visions of the United States of Europe.”

    Csizmadia also mentioned that Hungary’s ruling conservative party Fidesz, which left the European Parliamentary Group of the European People’s Party, could be the initiator of a “new, Christian-Democratic, conservative unification of national values and interest in the Union”.

    Jerzy Snopek, Poland’s ambassador to Budapest, recalled that the War of Independence of 1848-49 became an example of heroism and love of freedom for the whole world, and the common struggles were the mainstay of centuries of friendship between the Polish and Hungarian people. He recalled that during the War of Independence, thousands of Polish young people rushed to the aid of their Hungarian brethren, with more than four of them fighting alongside of the Hungarians. He added that many other examples of Polish-Hungarian solidarity are based on the fact that “we can still work together in full confidence”.

    Tomasz Sakiewicz, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska, emphasized that although there had been no opportunity to celebrate together in the last two years, no epidemic or border could prevent a friendship and alliance between Hungarians and Poles. He said that the two peoples love freedom equally, for which they have paid the same price for centuries. He added that they love their people and their country in the same way, and they just won’t let “crazy left-wing ideologies” tear their dreams apart.

  • Hungarian journalists could face ‘ban’ under radical proposal from far-left leader

    In an ominous statement by the leader of the far-left Hungarian political party Momentum, András Fekete-Győr, said that in case his bid to become prime minister were successful, he would effectively ban journalists whom he deems to be “propagandists”.

    Although in his video message he did not single out the Hungarian conservative media as such, both media outlets he mentions by name are center-right conservative news agencies.

    In a video message to his followers, Fekete-Győr states that “… in this opinion I am more radical than the majority, and those propagandists, and I speak of propagandists, such as those in TV2 or those in Origo, who deliberately defame others, are deliberately stating falsehoods, then I would ban them for some time from their occupation.”

    The politician, who is leading the far-left liberal Momentum party that is popular mostly with young voters, is one of the prime ministerial candidates from the joint opposition list that is to stand against the ruling government in the 2022 elections. The party currently polls only at 7 percent, and it has two MEPs in the European Parliament who are regularly voting for punitive measures against the Hungary. They have also been found to have ready access to the leaders of key European institutions, such as to Vera Jourová, vice-president of the European Commission.

    The statement from Fekete-Győr is undoubtedly an attack on a free press and freedom of speech, but also speaks volumes regarding the democratic deficit that the Hungarian left-wing opposition tolerates. There have been no negative comments coming from the rest of the Hungarian left, but most notably no criticism has been voiced from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) in the Euroepan Parliament, which Momentum is a member of. This is notable considering the ALDE group has been at the forefront of criticism against the Hungarian government for its alleged repression of opposition media in the country.

    Currently, there are no laws in Hungary that would allow a politician to legally ban a journalist from his profession, either for being identified as what Fekete-Győr calls, a “propagandist”, nor are any politicians allowed to be the legal arbiters of what constitutes “deliberate defamation” or what is a “falsehood”. Current Hungarian legislation, on the contrary, does allow for published opinions or statements to be tested in court, and those affected can seek legal remedy for the damage to their reputation.

    In a reaction to the Momentum leader’s statement, the Hungarian National Media Association have published a protest against the Momentum president’s statements, writing on their website that “reacting to these threats we are resolutely rejecting the word propagandist used against our colleagues. In our view, there will not be peace among journalists until we allow the representation of sovereign opinions to be labeled as propaganda-work, and until our colleagues who have strong opinions can be harassed by politicians, and threatened existentially. The threats can set a dangerous precedent for the entire profession, when the opposition’s candidate for prime minister expresses his desire to hinder anyone in exercising their journalistic work.”

    The Media Association’s statement also recalls the fact that this was not the first time that the Momentum leader and his colleagues have threatened journalists. In 2017, they have burst into the offices of the largest Hungarian media outlet Origo, and started filming and obstructing its editorial staff with provocative questions. This is a known tactics employed by opposition politicians trying to reinforce the impression that there is no media freedom in Hungary.

    In 2018, for instance, a group of left-wing opposition MPs have burst into the building of the Hungarian public television filming themselves in the process and clashing with security guards. During the livestreaming of their actions, they have alleged that they are being assaulted by the guards, while later footage had shown that they were in fact throwing themselves on the floor and running into doors without any outside assistance.

    Threats of retaliation from activists and politicians of Hungary’s liberal-left parties should they manage to gain power are not a new phenomenon. During an interview for Radio Free Europe, Fekete-Győr had warned that the left-wing coalition possesses the means to rid the state of Fidesz, probably referring to voters of the current government.

    He has also stated that they would remove the country’s president from office, and would also prosecute the general attorney. The Hungarian Justice Secretary Judit Varga had reacted to the threats from the left, saying that “if their [Momentum] interest would dictate so, they would remove legally elected leaders of the state from their position by entirely getting rid of the rule of law. I am eagerly awaiting the reaction of Momentum’s allies in Brussels to the words of András Fekete-Győr,… in which he threatens to entirely dismantle the rule of law.”

  • PM Orban: The left’s anti-vaccine campaign will worsen Hungary’s crisis

    Hungary is locked in a life-and-death struggle with the coronavirus, but many from the country’s left-wing opposition parties are discouraging people from being vaccinated, which could cost thousands of lives, said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

    “When people’s lives are at stake, the left is making a political policy out of the epidemic… and misleading videos are being made. It is a question of how to deal with their own conscience,” Orbán said, warning about the left’s strategy on Kossuth Radio on Sunday after returning from a trip to Israel,

    Hungary’s left-wing parties have attacked the country for embracing Russian and Chinese vaccines. However, momentum is quickly building within other European nations to follow the same path after the European Union’s vaccination rollout failed to deliver to member states, leaving countries scrambling to catch up with Israel, the United States, and even Serbia, all countries with higher rates of vaccination. Italy, for example, has now struck a deal with Russia to produce the Sputnik V vaccine on Italian territory while other countries like Czechia have also embraced the Chinese vaccine.

    The Lancet, generally considered Britan’s most prestigious medical journal, also produced a study that found that the Russia’s vaccine is “safe and effective” and featured an efficacy rate of 91 percent. 

    Orbán said that 63,000 people were vaccinated in Hungary in one day, but if the left is successful at spreading its anti-vaccine ideology, it will lower vaccination rates, according to Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet. 

    Orbán has emphasized that the goal is to save lives, and that spreading conspiracy theories about the Russian and Chinese vaccines is a political gambit that will harm the nation. 

    “For that reason, the left must stop its anti-vaccine campaign,” the prime minister underlined.

    The prime minister noted that 500,000 people have now received the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine and that the vaccine could not have been replaced with anything else. While 13 million Western vaccines have been ordered, Orbán said that his government saw procurement issues, which led the government to also secure over 3 million Eastern vaccines as well.

    Orbán pointed to severe problems with the Western procurement system for vaccines, and that the vaccines that the EU ordered were arriving slowly or not at all. He said there is grave disappointment with Brussels at the moment and that is the only reason vaccines from Eastern nations like Russia and China were ordered, which have arrived on time.

    Europe is currently the most infected area of the world and accounts for 20 percent of all deaths to date. Orbán remarked that his visit from Israel showed a country with an exemplary vaccination program, and that the situation was also good in Britain, which had left the EU.

    Orbán said that he believes Hungary is going through its “darkest” moments before the “dawn”, but in the meantime, the country has sufficient hospital beds and the most ventilators on a per capita basis of any European nation.

    In addition to restrictive measures, the country is also thinking about the long-term, said Orban, who pointed to Hungarian scientists who are currently working on a Hungarian vaccine with domestic production in mind. The goal is to vaccinate between 10 million to 15 million Hungarians quickly in the event the virus picks up steam. 

    He noted that 3 million people are currently registered to receive vaccinations and that those over the age of 60 will receive priority due to their vulnerability and be ranked higher regardless of when they registered for vaccination. 

     

  • Von der Leyen would’ve lost her job over vaccine fiasco if she wasn’t German, says Polish expert

    Austria and Denmark will be cooperating with Israel when it comes to vaccines. Italy will produce the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and Hungary is taking its own path and is vaccinating its citizens with Chinese and Russian doses.

    The OSW Center for Eastern Studies expert Konrad Popławski explained that Austria and Hungary’s actions are a serious argument in favor of a Europe of Fatherlands, as the EU has started to take responsibility for matters in which it has no competencies. The vaccine fiasco shows that people without expert knowledge dealt with the matter while on the other side there were the experienced negotiators of pharmaceutical companies.

    The slow speed of the EU vaccination program was criticized by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz who alongside Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen signed an agreement concerning developing and producing a new generation of vaccines with Israel. French diplomacy criticized this move, claiming that EU states should base its vaccine policy on cooperation within the EU.

    Popławski pointed to a crucial element which is lacking in EU cooperation.

    “If the EU took responsibility for the vaccine purchase program, then it should also bear political responsibility. In every normal company or state, following such mistakes which have cost lives, someone would be held responsible. Meanwhile, nothing seems of the sort in the EU. If Ursula von der Leyen wasn’t German, she would’ve lost her position,” says Popławski.

    He emphasized that it is embarrassing for the EU that countries such as Serbia are more advanced when it comes to vaccinations. He believes that this is proof that EU competencies should not expand and that integration should only take place where it brings additional benefits.

    Despite the systemic failure of the EU in relation to the vaccine, on Feb. 25, David Sassoli, the European Parliament president and a left-wing politician from Italy, called for member states to delegate more of their competencies to the EU level to prevent further crises caused by the pandemic. In his opinion, the European Commission had passed its test during the coronavirus.

    Popławski warns that this line of thought is unrealistic and if politicians are unable to reflect on their failures then this line of thinking may cause even larger mistakes in the future.

    “It is interesting that politicians whom Brussels tried to blame for all the evils of the world, like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, were able to achieve results for their countries. EU politicians are unable to do so and this takes us back to the question concerning political responsibility,” he said.

  • Deadlier British coronavirus mutation responsible for 95 percent of new cases in Hungary

    A whopping 95 percent of the new coronavirus infections confirmed in the past few weeks in Hungary were of the much more infectious and severe British variant, Budapest-based diagnostics firm Neumann Labs said on Thursday.

    “Recently, we have identified the British variant in about 95 percent of the 3,000 tests performed daily in our laboratories, but what is even more frightening is that we measured far more viruses in these samples, on average 15 times as many as in the first and second wave of Wuhan virus infections,” Miklós Nyíri, CEO of Neumann Labs told news portal Origo.

    “Nucleic acid-based PCR testing is not only capable of detecting infections with amazing efficiency but is also an effective method for measuring viral load. In other words, it shows not only if someone is infected but also how many viruses are presumably in your body,” Nyíri said.

    “Seeing the number of new infections and deaths per day, the data we measured confirm the scientific assumption that the amount of virus found in a person’s sample may be directly proportional to the severity of the disease,” he said. “Moreover, it is conceivable that the British variant is more contagious by roughly 50 percent because patients simply produce more virus, so they can pass it on more easily.”

    “Unfortunately, it is already quite clear that this mutation has become dominant; 95 percent of the infections detected in Hungary can be linked to the British variant, while only a few cases have been found of the South African virus,” Nyíri added. Hungarian-owned diagnostics firm Neumann Labs has been offering PCR coronavirus testing since the outbreak of the epidemic in Hungary last spring. The laboratory has performed a total of over 200,000 tests so far, with the proportion of positive cases in recent weeks approaching 20 percent.

     

  • Hungary makes public its Russian, Chinese vaccine contracts

    In a world where most purchase contracts for coronavirus vaccines are either closely guarded secrets or at least their financial terms are rarely revealed, Hungary made the unprecedented move of making public the contracts it signed with the Chinese and Russian manufacturers the country is using, news portal Mandiner reports.

    Contracts for the procurement of Chinese and Russian vaccines against the coronavirus were shared by cabinet minister Gergely Gulyás on Facebook Thursday afternoon. “The Hungarian government is on the side of openness on the issue of vaccine purchases,” Gulyás wrote, adding that Hungary will also ask the European Commission to publish similar contracts concluded by Brussels.

    The cabinet minister announced at a press briefing on Thursday after the weekly cabinet meeting that the government would make public its contracts for the Russian and Chinese vaccines within a day.


     

    The Facebook post includes all pages of both contracts, both in Hungarian and English.

    Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Cecília Müller announced on Thursday that Hungary has received another 450,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, which are much-needed, as she added that the pandemic is present in 98 percent of Hungary’s settlements.

    Müller said that the number of new cases is rising at an “extraordinary pace,” with 35,802 new cases registered in the ninth week of the year (March 1-7), and 8,312 new cases on this past Wednesday alone. She said that during the third wave of the pandemic which began in Hungary on February 18, the number of patients requiring hospital care has tripled and the number of those on ventilators has doubled.

     

  • Israeli-Hungarian-Czech mini-summit in Jerusalem

    On Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem for a mini-summit. The leaders primarily discussed the coronavirus pandemic, but Czechia also used the occasion to officially open its embassy branch in Jerusalem.

    At their joint press conference, Netanyahu said several topics were on the agenda, including the adoption of “green passports,” i.e., certificates proving vaccination against the coronavirus. The Israeli prime minister pointed out that Israel had already agreed with several countries on the mutual acceptance of digital immunity certificates that would allow for freer travel; he thought it important to add Hungary and the Czech Republic to this circle.

    The tripartite summit also discussed in detail how Hungary and Czechia could be involved in the planned international vaccine production in Israel.

    “Together, we can do more,” the Israeli prime minister said.

    On the day of the visit, Babiš also officially opened a branch of his country’s embassy in Jerusalem, which has technically been open since March 1. This makes Czechia only the second European Union member state to do so, after Hungary opened a trade office there on March 19, 2019.

    Netanyahu called both the Hungarian and Czech prime ministers “close personal friends.” He praised the fact that both countries had opened missions in Jerusalem and were also helping Israel on the international stage as true friends.

    At the meeting held at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Orbán pointed out that he traveled to Israel with his Czech colleague to understand how the country had become “the world champion in the fight against the pandemic” and how Hungary could follow its example.

    Orbán added that the friendship between Hungary and Israel is alive and well, and one proof of this is that the balance of Israeli-Hungarian trade increased last year, while the balance of world trade decreased by several percentage points.

    In his turn, Babiš highlighted that Israel is a textbook example of an effective fight against the coronavirus and will soon be the first country in the world where life can return to normal. He especially praised the fast and smooth way Israel handled the immense logistics operation entailed for mass vaccination.

    He also thanked Israel for the 5,000 doses of Moderna vaccine it had sent to Prague. He noted that he hopes the Czech Republic is already past the peak of the epidemic and that the situation will soon begin to improve. Babiš further stated that the Czech Republic and Israel are allies and strategic partners.

    Title image: Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (L), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán meet in Jerusalem on March 11, 2021. (MTI/Zoltán Fischer)

  • Where to next, EPP, where to next, Fidesz?

    Super flumina Babylonis illic sedimus et flevimus, cum recordaremur Sion. (Ps 136,1)
    By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. (Psalm 137)

    We sat by the rivers of Babylon. We wept. Babylon is without a sea.

    (Ágnes Gergely: Psalm 137)

    A different song is ringing in everyone’s ears with the news that Fidesz has left the EPP: For Manfred Weber, it’s the “Ode to Joy”; for Ferenc Gyurcsány, “The Traitor Is Dead” [from Ferenc Erkel’s opera László Hunyadi]; for József Szájer, perhaps the contemporary Hungarian pop song “I’m Staying Away”; as for me, I simply couldn’t get Psalm 137 out of my head.

    Apparently, Christian democracy has become an exile, a shipwreck, a prisoner in the European Parliament.

    On the left, it is bordered by a motherless-fatherless People’s Party, with CDU/CSU as its engine, a group that contains traces of Christianity but is actually more of a gay-party whose car-manufacturing/deporting right-wing can’t even agree that “right-wing” isn’t a swear word (I’m looking at you, Mr. Söder).

    On the right, it is bordered by Identity and Democracy, within which you have the eyesore of Germany’s AfD, which has some legitimate, socially critical ideas but zero preparedness; one or two slightly Nazi-smelling leaders; and some unacceptable views that are embarrassing even in rural pubs.

    We are caught between two German factions, both of which have the same problem: that the circles of Weber and Meuthen are pagans disguised as conservatives, and pagans will never become proper Christian Democrats.

    It is painful to think about Zion between these two stinking streams of Babylon. It makes one’s position within the European Parliament’s largest faction, a seemingly strong mainstream community, uncomfortable. To leave a faction, especially a huge one built up since 2004? This may be simple for a voter — but a nightmare for a politician.`

    The faction means human resources, the faction means money, the faction means infrastructure, the faction means position, the faction means security.

    Even if the arguments are not entirely clear in one direction or another, and comrades-in-arms are uniting with liberal crusaders, leaving is no easy thing.

    Yet he who remembers Zion knows: We had to move on.

    In salicibus and medio ejus suspension organa nostra. (Ps 136.2)

    We hanged our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof. (Psalm 137.2)

    Our harp is on the willow. Torment speaks with a different voice. (Ágnes Gergely: Psalm 137)

    There are two manifestations of Fidesz.

    For those who do not believe this, I will explain.

    One Fidesz governs Hungary — well or poorly — of course, everyone has a different view on this. As a descendant of a Transdanubian, Christian, intellectual family, well-trained in the ways of communism, a traveler and a church-school graduate, I saw this kind of government as good; others may not agree with me, nor do they have to. We will discuss this later. But Hungary is undoubtedly an existing thing, a tangible, travelable country in the traditional sense that needs a government and is now governed pragmatically by One Fidesz — a party that supports families and is pro-market, is very conscious of its foreign policy and holds anti-migrant views, albeit sometimes in an awkward and culturally warlike way. One may like or dislike it, according to one’s personal taste.

    The Other Fidesz works in the European Parliament. And the European Parliament is not simply an existing entity — it is a postmodern media space in a “Puzsérian” sense [Róbert Puzsér is a Hungarian publicist, known mostly for his sharp criticism of various political phenomena], where reality is constructed by words and motions, and truth, lies, law, rules, and honor have no immanent value. If the European Parliament maintains any contact with the world outside the bubble of meeting rooms, political offices, lobby meetings, restaurants, and gay parties in Brussels and Strasbourg, then this is, at best, through Facebook.

    There is no antecedent, basis or consequence in the postmodern media space, there are only stand-alone statements worth voting for, and these expire the same day. Here Pozsony can become Bratislava, while Wien stays Vienna; here, Anna Donáth may or may not be an informant for Věra Jourová, depending on the target audience; only here can Hungary be fascist depending on the current interests of capital and the opportunity for migrants; the dictated gay law, democratic; the indigenous Hungarian minority, irrelevant; European foreign policy, successful; József Szájer, a Christian Democrat; Jean-Claude Juncker, a statesman. The world of the European Parliament is a dream world constructed by words, from which, sometimes, a postmodern mess descends into utter nonsense.

    The Other Fidesz works here and does not govern but represents — Hungary on the one hand, and common sense on the other, with educated, gentle, smart Europeans, not only for the benefit of our country, but also in the face of postmodernism.

    One Fidesz will benefit from the exit. Its supporters have long been anti-People’s Party, and leaving the faction will not entail material or domestic political damage to the country; moreover, its dignity will benefit from a move that has been hanging in the air for so long. The Other Fidesz, on the other hand, lies weakened. Very much so.

    The Other Fidesz works here and does not govern but represents.

    Yet, the mission of the Other Fidesz is important, and if we looked closely at the work going on there, perhaps more people would agree with it than with the domestic Fidesz. The judgment of the latter may be subject to the interests of the former, but the Other Fidesz is the representative of the Good. And its harp is now on a willow. It cannot stay there.

    Quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena? (Ps 136, 4)

    How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalm 137,4)

     We need a team, we have to do a job that Fidesz may have never done intensively enough during its 12-year EP majority:

    European allies must be sought and the chaff must be actively separated from wheat.

    Until the next European Parliament elections in 2024, a concept must be drawn up that unites the right within the European Parliament, which is currently scattered in three completely non-conceptual factions against the Social Democrat, Liberal and Green groups, which are clearly demarcated along ideological lines. It is necessary to ensure that the EPP remains the hospice home of pseudo-right putty associations, such as the Swedish Moderates, the stagnant Polish Civic Platform or the Romanian National Liberal Party, and to organize the Hungarian right to join forces with at least the Italian Right, comprised of Salvini’s League and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy as well as the Polish PiS, the Swedish Democrats, the Finns, the Flemish conservatives, the Danish People’s Party, and others.

    There must arise a strong European Christian Democratic pillar that cannot be blackmailed by the left and which distances itself from the pagan far-right.

    Over the next three years, the European right must focus on renewing and building alliances. Otherwise, it’s all over. The EPP will remain, which the left will blackmail into any political position it wants; and the lunatic, rude extremists will remain.

    Si oblitus fuero tui Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea. Adhaereat lingua mea faucibus meis, si non meminero tui. (Ps 136,5-6)

    If I forget you, O’ Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you. (Psalm 137, 5-6)

    May Amen be inscribed on my right arm grown cold, if I forget you, Jerusalem.

    (Ágnes Gergely: Psalm 137) 

    No one is offering up a framework for MEPs who are stepping out independently. We need something, someone to whom the Hungarian right can stick to in the European Parliament.

    There are warning signs from the past. If MEPs representing our country do not have a moral stance, it will be harmful both to the party and the country.

    The European People’s Party is not a framework, not a backbone, not a direction. If gutter Christianity is an accepted view somewhere, then it certainly is there, and if József Szájer had not happened to be a Hungarian at a time when it was not advisable to be so in Brussels, his parallel life would never have come to light. Many others are not exposed, and the People’s Party has plenty of room in its closet for politicians in Brussels hiding many strange things.

    The political community that now remains in the solitude of independence for a few years needs moral strength. The Hungarian loneliness in Brussels cannot contain parallel lives, unbalanced souls, or expired morals. Christian democracy is a sacred cause to be defended, not a pose, not a livelihood. If you don’t believe in it, don’t do it. But whoever forgets Jerusalem on the way, let their tongue stick to the roof of their mouth.

    Filia Babylonis misera: beatus, qui retribuet tibi retributionem tuam, quam retribuisti nobis. (Ps 136,8)

    O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! (Psalm 137, 8)

    The people claw our sign into the wall. Who incites them—they don’t know why they do it. / A royal sign, it has outlived many other signs. Do not blame them, my Lord, their transgression! (Ágnes Gergely: Psalm 137)

    The European People’s Party is not on the ballot anywhere in the world. Criticism of the EPP over Fidesz arose in the postmodern space of the European Parliament, and there it remained, and yet, there was never any real political consequence. Nobody in Germany is going to opt for the Greens instead of the CSU because Söder was colluding with Fidesz; even the Polish opposition did not become socialist because Donald Tusk and Orbán had the same tag on their foreheads. Consequently, with the exit of Fidesz, the cumulative amount of benefits remaining for the European People’s Party is zero.

    We are talking about a typical lose-lose situation: Fidesz has quit a dominant, large faction, which will at least lead to the loss of parliamentary positions; and the People’s Party lost its third-strongest delegation in terms of population, weakening it vis-à-vis the very groups that blackmailed it into this decision, namely the Socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe and the Greens. The EPP did not see through the elementary political math. They did their opponents a favor for nothing. It was political suicide instead of wise restraint or a sense of responsibility. They didn’t know why they did what they did.

    Brussels’ self-destructive daughter will not wait long for punishment. Anyone who has ever seen organized crime in action knows that blackmail rarely stops at the top. The blackmailer blackmails for as long as the blackmail works. And the People’s Party allowed its political opponents to force it to stab its decades-long ally in the back — for zero compensation. It showed weakness. From here on out, the trends of the People’s Party in the coming years are clear: the European left will blackmail them to the point of total self-sacrifice until all of their positions begin to look eerily similar to those of the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens.

    They will pull the People’s Party to the left until it is no longer needed at all. The People’s Party, which once achieved 38 percent of the votes in the 1999 European Parliament elections, was not far from that magical 20 percent in 2019. If they continue like this, they will be pushing up daisies in 2024.

    And by God, they deserve their loss. They were warned.

    Just let there be a European right by then: real, simple, Christian. And Brussels’ self-destructive daughter can salami slice herself into a neat pile, as nicely as the stars move across the sky. It will be worth it.

  • Swedish feminist blogger demands Volvo change its ‘male chauvinistic’ logo

    A feminist blogger recently called on Swedish carmaker Volvo to change its ubiquitous circle and upwards-pointing arrow on grounds that she found it a display of male chauvinism, Hungarian women’s automotive blog drivemebaby reports.

    “Wake up, Volvo! The world is not the same as it was 90 years ago!” Petra Rees wrote in a Linkedin entry that has since been removed. Rees argued that as it stands, women have to face discrimination from male chauvinistic societies, and she only realized the meaning of the logo while driving her mother’s Volvo.

    “How is it possible that in 2021 one of the world’s biggest carmakers still uses the male symbol as its logo?” Rees asked, and even suggested a “gender-neutral” logo to Volvo, which is third logo pictured below.

    Volvo — owned by Chinese multinational automotive group Zhejiang Geely Holding Group — responded online by pointing out that contrary to the blogger’s claim, the logo is not intended to represent the male symbol.

    The symbol used by the company is the sign that has been used in alchemy since the Middle Ages to symbolize iron. The iron sign thus symbolizes the strength of the Swedish steel used in cars, as Sweden is known for its high-quality steel. Volvo also pointed out to Rees that its company policy is based on “acceptance and diversity”.

  • Demand for Hungarian medical e-buses is surging in Western Europe

    Demand for a Hungarian electric medical bus is surging across Europe due to the coronavirus crisis, with the bus’ capacity for treating up to 12 patients inside driving sales. 

    The Hungarian busmaker Ikarus has proven to be an unexpected success in Western Europe, with the company’s fully electric, configurable buses being used as medical or vaccination stations, daily Magyar Hírlap writes.

    Gábor Széles, president of the Ikarus group, located in Székesfehérvár incentral Hungary, told the paper that the buses originated from a dedicated development for the Hungarian Armed Forces. He said the demand for such multi-function buses first became evident in the first half of the past decade, when Europe suffered several terrorist attacks and many wounded had to be treated on-site at the same time. Later, the demand grew further when France and Spain experienced the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.


     

    “The first Hungarian response was that at the request of the [Hungarian] Defense Ministry we developed a new range of Ikarus buses. From the onset, the ministry wanted reconfigurable buses. Since then, we have delivered some 150 of them,” Széles said. “These buses can have their seats reconfigured to accommodate armed troops, or function as mobile command posts or host other administrative purposes. A third — and the most important function right now — is patient transport and care.”

    Széles added that while an ordinary ambulance can only carry one patient at a time, these buses can accommodate up to 12 patients, which are also equipped for their care.

    The medical e-bus is currently undergoing a licensing process by Hungarian authorities, but demand is already such that the company has to carefully balance its commitments.

    “The production capacity is, of course, finite, and there is also a serious interest in these buses from abroad, from Western Europe, so we need to allocate our production capacity wisely,” Széles said. “We must determine the size of Hungarian healthcare orders and what is the demand from abroad. Abroad, the problem is even more acute, we see the example of containers and trains, which are fighting the same shortage of rural medical care as we do, but the demand abroad is even higher.”

    “City Pioneer is Europe’s most modern bus in terms of price and performance, and Ikarus now has a chance to regain its position in the international market,” Széles said.

    Title image: Ikarus mobile medical bus. (Magyar Hírlap/László Katona)

     

  • Exclusive: The departure of Fidesz is very bad news for the EPP, says MEP François-Xavier Bellamy

    Is the departure of Fidesz from the European People’s Party good news according to you?

    This is obviously very bad news. We must be careful not to come to too quick a conclusion: this is in fact the departure of the Fidesz delegation of MEPs from the EPP Group in the European Parliament. Fidesz as such is still a member of the European People’s Party for the time being. The real debate still awaits us when the European People’s Party has to decide on the place of Fidesz in its ranks. As far as our group is concerned, this departure of Fidesz is both a cause of great sadness and a real weakening. Everything must be done to succeed in rebuilding the link, and I see a strong sign that the Fidesz MEPs will remain non-attached. It is a way of showing that they are still waiting to see how they can succeed in reconnecting with the EPP. For our part, we’ll work on it, of course.

    When you say “we”, who are you thinking of? Not everyone in the EPP is in favor of Fidesz staying.

    No, indeed not, but the French delegation is in favor of it, and it is, in particular, true for me. Even in recent weeks, when certain MEPs wanted to exclude our Fidesz colleagues from the group of the European People’s Party, we rallied the German, Italian and Spanish members to prevent this. We worked for a month and a half to ensure that no collective exclusion was possible. The great paradox is that the Hungarians chose to leave at the moment when we had managed to move away from this perspective; but I can understand their choice, of course.

    Those in our group who were campaigning for the departure of Fidesz had proposed new rules to be able to exclude a delegation collectively. Moreover, it would have taken the support of 50 percent of the EPP members to exclude a delegation, instead of the two-thirds required for the individual procedure in force so far. We amended that proposal massively and won on the most important points: collective exclusion had become impossible and it still required a two-thirds majority to exclude a member from the group. This made it impossible to exclude Fidesz members, including individual members, because there is not a two-thirds majority in the EPP Group for such an exclusion.

    So what made Fidesz decide to leave anyway?

    For years, Viktor Orbán and Fidesz have been permanently on trial. Once again, a vote was taking place clearly concerning Fidesz, and, understandably, this has convinced them that it was no longer relevant to remain in our group. I regret this, however, and I have discussed this at length with my Hungarian colleagues because the risk of their being excluded from the group no longer existed.

    What do you think of the attitude of Manfred Weber, the German chairman of the EPP Group? You get the impression he was making it personal. Do you think it was because Viktor Orbán prevented him from becoming president of the European Commission?

    I have the feeling, despite the rather personal dispute between Manfred Weber and Viktor Orbán, that in the way he managed the group, Manfred Weber never sought to lead a crusade against Viktor Orbán. We have colleagues in the group who are really on a crusade against Hungary. Some were determined to obtain the exclusion of Fidesz from the group and this will also be the case for the exclusion of the party. Donald Tusk, for example, as party president, made it very clear that he wanted to exclude Fidesz against the advice of many EPP members. In the case of Donald Tusk, it is very clear that he is committed, that he has a bias against Fidesz. Manfred Weber never behaved like that. I have always defended Fidesz’s place in the EPP. I have been to Hungary. I have met Viktor Orbán and I have been strongly criticized for this by some colleagues in the group. Manfred Weber has never blamed me for this, and he has even shown his confidence in me by asking me to lead some groundwork on the political identity of our group.

    What were the points of disagreement between the Hungarian delegation and part of the EPP Group?

    The tragedy is that in the misunderstandings that have accumulated, I see little substantive political disagreement. For example, on the issue of migration, today there is no longer really any debate in the group. The perspective proposed by Viktor Orbán in 2015 is today very widely shared in the EPP. The rejection of the compulsory relocation of migrants is voiced today by the president of the European Commission and Commissioner Margaritis Schinas. The fact that the commissioner responsible for immigration is in charge of defending the European way of life seems to me to be a sign that things have changed and that, basically, the line defended in terms of migration policy by Viktor Orbán in 2015 is the one that is now shared by the overwhelming majority, not only within the EPP but, more generally, in the European institutions.

    In the way in which the European institutions operate, there is, of course, a scandalous instrumentalization of the idea of the rule of law in an attempt to punish member states that persist in having conservative policies. However, within the EPP, if we set aside certain MEPs or certain parties who have always been very hostile to Fidesz, today, with many delegations from different countries, it seems to me that what has been lacking is communication and dialogue.

    Which EPP parties are the most hostile to Fidesz in your opinion?

    They are well known because they have manifested themselves several times. There is a group of 14 member parties that had published an open letter calling for the exclusion of Fidesz. What has always struck me is the weakness of the accusations made against Fidesz. Last night, I was listening again to a program on French public radio France Culture in which the question of the rule of law was discussed. The show is an hour-long and there are no facts. In one hour of broadcasting! One is struck by the very evanescent nature of this trial which is constantly being organized against Fidesz and Poland. This is, moreover, totally asymmetrical, because when a journalist is murdered in Malta, nobody activates Article 7 against Malta and nobody asks the European Socialists to separate from the Labour Party in power in Malta, whose prime minister —obviously, because he wanted to hide corruption cases — at least interfered in the investigation into this murder. So there’s a staggering double standard.

    The second thing that strikes me about the anathemas launched against Hungary is the lack of strategic thinking. No one is thinking about the future of the right in Europe when we have succeeded in causing an irreparable rift through perpetual accusations. No one is thinking about what will happen to Europe, to our civilization, if Europeans are no longer capable of anything other than throwing exclusion procedures, sanctions, etc. at each other. Meanwhile, the great world powers must be laughing at these Europeans who are incapable of coming together around common objectives, of respecting and understanding each other, and who are therefore incapable of facing the challenges of the 21st century.

    Do you not think that the problem with the European Parliament is that it is always dealing with ideological issues? It has recently discussed abortion in Poland on several occasions, even though the regulation of abortion does not fall within the competence of the EU. There was to be a resolution this week to declare the whole EU an ‘LGBTIQ freedom zone’ and call for sanctions against recalcitrant countries. Does this not create unnecessary tension among Europeans?

    Of course, and what fascinates me is that we are always talking about the rule of law when we are constantly ignoring it ourselves. In fact, we are voting on texts that do not in any way fall within the competencies of the European Union. This is a way of repeatedly violating the prerogatives of the member states. This attitude is ridiculous in view of what is at stake. We have to face the rise of Islamism in our societies, great powers that are mastering increasingly advanced technologies, a global epidemic with immense geopolitical consequences… In the meantime, we are discussing whether to include ‘gender’ perspectives in budgets, build ‘intersectional’ policies, establish ethnic quotas in the management of companies and public institutions. All this is totally out of step with the reality of what is at stake, and I often have the impression, when we discuss these issues, that the European Parliament allows us to imagine what the Byzantine Empire must have been like when theological cases were discussed there at a time when the empire was collapsing and the ramparts were crumbling.

    I myself am in favor of unconditional respect for people’s dignity and rights, but declaring the European Union to be an LGBTIQ freedom zone will not change the reality of people’s lives and the reality of their protection from what threatens them.

    The French government is highly criticized for its decision to dissolve Génération Identitaire, or Generation Identity in English, an organization that opposes immigration but has always taken peaceful action and was finally acquitted by the courts whenever the authorities wanted to take legal action. Is it not France that has a problem with democracy and the rule of law, rather than Poland or Hungary?

    Indeed, I spend my time repeating that in France, too, the issue of the rule of law should be dealt with. Freedom of association is a fundamental freedom and a constitutional right. If an association is dissolved because it has non-conforming opinions, then the basic democratic requirements are gradually being abandoned. Some organizations have never denied their closeness to ideologies that have caused millions of deaths, such as the Communist Party, and they can function. On the other hand, we dissolve Génération Identitaire! Greenpeace launches drones against nuclear power plants or enters secure airport areas. They put concrete blocks on the bottom of the sea to endanger navigation to prevent fishermen from working normally, and Greenpeace still exists. Let us hope that justice will act against arbitrariness. When the current French government tried to attack fundamental freedoms, freedom of worship for example, with this limit of up to 30 people in churches, which was purely vexatious and completely unfounded, it is fortunate that the country’s top administrative court put a stop to the government’s abuse of power. Several of us had appealed for this. I imagine that it will do the same, ruling according to the law against the dissolution of Generation Identity.

  • Pope Francis’ visit is recognition of Hungary’s efforts helping persecuted Christians

    As Remix News reported yesterday, Pope Francis will visit Hungary on Sept. 12 this year, and will celebrate a mass at the closing event of the International Eucharistic Congress, according to an announcement from Cardinal Péter Erdős. The Eucharistic Congress is a meeting of Roman Catholic clergy and laity, and is usually attended by thousands of people and dignitaries from all across the world. Its closing part, Statio Orbis, is a mass celebrated for the town and the world, and if the pope is to visit the congress, this is the part he usually attends.

    The pope has also accepted the invitation of Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová, and will visit the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava, after his stop in Budapest. This is the first papal visit to Slovakia since 2003, when John Paul II had celebrated mass in the country.

    The visit to Hungary is seen as a significant recognition of the Hungarian government’s efforts in supporting persecuted Christian communities by the Vatican. During his visit to Iraq on March 8, Pope Francis met with Tristan Azbej, the Hungarian State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians and the Hungary Helps Program. This is a sign of recognition of the efforts of the Hungarian government in rebuilding Christian communities in Iraq, destroyed by wars, or during the occupation by Islamic State terrorists. Azbej had informed the pope about the ongoing efforts in rebuilding Iraq’s war-ravaged Christian communities, and the pope had in turn blessed the Hungarian mission.

    During the visit, the Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph Yunan had also praised the Hungary Helps Program and thanked the Hungarian government for its assistance in rebuilding the Church of Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh in northern Iraq, former home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. The Church was torched by Islamic State jihadists in 2014, and the 55,000 Christian residents of the town were forced to flee for their lives, mostly towards the autonomous Kurdish regions. After the terrorists were ousted in 2016, less than half of the original Christian residents have returned, yet the church was successfully rebuilt from international donations.

    It is the declared goal of the Hungarian government to help persecuted Christian communities in the Middle East and Africa to rebuild their lives at home, rather than to be forced to migrate to Europe. As the government program’s website claims, “the basic principle of the Hungary Helps Program is that help should be taken where the trouble is, not for the trouble to be brought to Europe. As a result, in the last nearly four years, we have made it possible for more than 100,000 people living in crisis areas to stay in their homeland or to return there.”

    As Amal Ezzo, headmistress at a Catholic school in Qaraqosh, noted, “We need to live in peace. The government didn’t help us rebuild our homes — international organizations did.”

    Cardinal Louis Sako, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, had also recalled atrocities committed in Qaraqosh by IS terrorists. According to him, those Christians who did not flee were forced to convert to Islam or were murdered.

    “Here, the churches were transformed to prisons. Everything was broken. It was heartbreaking,” said the Cardinal.

    The Hungary Helps program had also allocated funds in the region of €1.2 million to projects in Africa. These will support communities in Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, again with the express goal of “enabling people living in crisis areas to stay in their homeland.” As their official website states, “a new secondary school for internally displaced youth is being built in Nigeria. A program to promote the social reintegration of families living in poverty has been launched in Kenya. In Ethiopia, education, water management, and agriculture projects are supported by the Hungary Helps Program, and in Mozambique, support projects provide assistance to thousands of internally displaced persons.”

    The coronavirus crisis has affected Christian communities in Africa and the Middle East disproportionately, as they are doubly isolated under the threat of Islamic terrorism and pandemic-induced economic strain. The Hungarian government had sent aid to Syrian, Lebanese, Congolese, and Nigerian Christian communities worth over €150,000, providing food aid to local churches whose followers are most exposed to the food crisis.

  • Central Europe can only count on itself, says CEO of Hungary’s oil company

    Central European countries must stick together and make the best of their present opportunities, Zsolt Hernádi, Chairman and CEO of the regional oil and gas group MOL Zrt, told news portal Mandiner in a rare interview.

    “This is not about Hungary, but about Central Europe. Thank God borders are becoming less and less important within the union. We are the dominant company in the Central European region under the Carpathians. Our goal is to have economic prosperity in the neighboring countries as well, because that is good for all of us. The common goal is the prosperity of all of Central Europe,” Hernádi said.

    “Let’s connect with as many strands as possible, so we can best preserve ourselves. Central Europe cares for no one but the locals; we must therefore learn to defend our values. A friend of mine said that there is no other part of the land where people in neighboring countries know as much about each other as they do in Central Europe. It was in Moscow’s interest last year not to see our region connected while today the goal is to teach each other and open our eyes. It is also my own mission to learn to love each other again.”

    In 2019, which is the last full financial year from which data is available, the MOL Group had net sales of $18.1 billion (€15.24 billion) and a consolidated net profit of $1.27 billion (€1.07 billion). It has subsidiaries in six other regional countries as well as oil and gas exploration rights — alone or with partner companies — in Yemen, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Russia, Cameron, Iraq, and Pakistan.

    Though the head of a major carbon-based energy company, Hernádi said they are investing more and more in renewable energy, green projects, data collection, and the digital economy, with the CEO pointing out that companies with huge businesses today had their roots in entirely different industries. Samsung, for example, began as a company trading dried fish.

    “And Nokia with rubber boots. One shouldn’t be afraid of major changes, and you have to hear the word of the times. Let’s not long for yesterday. We will still be selling hydrocarbon-based fuel in 30 years, and demand in our region will even increase in the coming years, but that is partly a thing of the past,” Hernádi said. “Nokia developed the first touchscreen phone, yet it didn’t believe in it, it was discarded from an engineering point of view. You need to know how to live the shift. We have a good basis for this, we are market leaders in three countries, and we are among the top three in four countries.”

    Asked about how he thinks the Hungarian economy has weathered the coronavirus pandemic, Hernádi said that given its possibilities, it did pretty well, placing in the middle of the rankings and in line with Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He stressed, however, that countries more advanced in digitization fared much better.

    “Countries that were more advanced in digitization, such as Estonia, survived the crisis the most. To this day, we [in Hungary] have not dared to move boldly. How many times have you experienced that while digitization is important, agencies are demanding things on paper? Eight out of ten offices. However, this is a matter of making the right decisions. The [Hungarian] National Tax and Customs Administration, for example, has changed a great deal. The goal is exclusive electronic communication so that there is no alternative.” Hernádi said. “The current period is particularly well suited to improving competitiveness. I believe that stages of development can be skipped and opportunities must be seized. We are now facing such an opportunity. We need a competitive economy with a seasoning of patriotism.”

  • Most EU countries didn’t order full Moderna vaccine complement

    More than half of the EU member states have not signed up for as many Moderna vaccines as they could have, according to an EU document published by Hungarian cabinet minister Gergely Gulyás. A report from Romanian news portal Hotnews indicates that 16 member states opted not to call up the full contingent available to them.

    Hotnews reports that the Romanian authorities have not yet officially commented on why Romania has not requested additional shipments of Moderna’s vaccine either. Government sources told the portal that in the third and fourth quarters, Romania will still receive more than 6 million servings of Moderna.

    Gulyás released the EU document after Hungarian opposition parties accused the Hungarian government of buying too few vaccines from Western suppliers and taking Russian and Chinese vaccines instead.

    Hotnews writes that the 16 member States which decided not to request additional supplies of Moderna vaccine are Poland, Romania, Belgium, Greece, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta.

    At the same time, Gulyás confirmed in his Facebook post that Hungary has indeed not ordered as many Moderna’s vaccine as it could have, as the American manufacturer would deliver its vaccines late, only by the end of the year and the extra order would arrive by the time there would be enough vaccine left over from other sources anyway.

    “Moderna’s delivery schedule shows that they will be delivered to Hungary only in the fourth quarter, so even the vaccine belonging to the first (initial) category can be obtained only in the third quarter. By then, there will be vaccines left even if all Hungarians of legal age live with the possibility of voluntary vaccination,” Guláys wrote. 

    Romania seems to have decided, for similar reasons, to procure less Moderna vaccine than possible, government sources said. Romania could have claimed 3 million extra doses in addition to the approximately 6 million coming in the third and fourth quarters, but authorities said they would no longer be absolutely necessary, a source told Hotnews.

    Hotnews also notes that Moderna shipped less than expected quantities to the EU during February, and there were weeks when the shortfall was up to 25 percent. A spokesman for the manufacturer, however, said they could meet quarterly deadlines and targets.

    Title image: Israeli soldiers stand guard as a Palestinian that works in Israel recieves a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the Tarkumiya crossing between the West Bank and Israel, Monday, March 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

  • Number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients peaks in Hungary

    The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has reached a record high in Hungary, and the country’s chief medical officer has warned the population to observe all measures and exercise extra caution in their daily lives as there was no sign that the infection rate would subside.

    Chief Medical Officer Cecília Müller said the epidemic situation in Hungary was “extremely serious” with growth levels exceeding all previous levels. The number of active patients increased by tens of thousands in just a few days, she added, pointing out that screening buses also work in seven places around the country.

    Müller explained that the number of active patients had increased by 5,000 to 10,000 in a few days, with 6,494 new infections found in the last 24 hours. So far, the highest number of people on a ventilator was on Dec. 7 (674) and the most hospitalized was on Dec. 8 (8,045), but these figures have now been exceeded with 8,270 in hospital and 833 on a ventilator.

    She added that this puts a heavy burden on the healthcare system, with new wards having to be opened daily for coronavirus patients.

     

    No improvement in sight

    Müller said the environmental health data is also deteriorating, and the amount of the virus’ DNA material measured in wastewater has increased in virtually all major cities, meaning there will be no improvement in the coming days. She said that “an increase in the number of those infected is to be expected”.

    Elevated coronavirus levels in wastewater were observed in Eger, Kecskemét, Győr, Kaposvár, Nyíregyháza, Salgótarján, Tatabánya, Veszprém and in the Budapest metropolitan area: Tököl, Biatorbágy, Budakeszi and Százhalombatta.

    She said 1,047,045 people have received the first dose of the vaccine so far, and 314,485 have already received the second dose. However, she pointed out that the vaccine “gives a false sense of security”, as no one should yet be considered protected. It takes at least two to three weeks to develop protection, so hygiene rules must be strictly followed even after the vaccine is taken, she said.

     

    Müller emphasized that the vaccination strategy had changed and now the goal is to get as many people as possible to receive the first dose of the vaccine, as it already provides a certain level of protection.

    She mentioned that 100,000 doses of Sputnik V vaccine had been released by healthcare authorities, which individually check every batch arriving in the country. In addition, 120,510 doses of Pfizer vaccine had also been received, and these will be sent to the vaccination points on Tuesday. This week, general practitioners can already vaccinate with AstraZeneca, for which 105,600 doses are available. From Thursday to Sunday, those who would have been due this weekend will also receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. Anyone who falls into this category will receive a message and will be waiting at one of the 429 hospital vaccination points, she said.

    Vaccination of police officers and soldiers begins

    Vaccination of law enforcement officers and soldiers will also begin, Müller said. The national chief medical officer asked those vaccinated to take the consent form with them to vaccination appointments, which can be downloaded from vakcinainfo.gov.hu.

    The 1818 phone number can also be called for data reconciliation, she said, adding, however, that only a GP, attending physician or vaccinator can be asked about vaccination. Staff at the National Center for Public Health do not and cannot give information on what vaccine is right for any given person, she added.

    Due to deteriorating epidemiological data, Müller urged everyone to abide by the rules of mask wearing and distance and to accept the vaccination offered.

  • Hungarian foreign minister links immigration with proliferation of drugs in the EU

    Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has criticized the European Union for not doing enough to break the link between illegal immigration and the growing drug trade.

    During the 14th UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Japan, Szijjártó pointed out that there are two major security challenges linked to organized crime that the world is currently facing: illegal migration and the rise in drug consumption. In his view, the EU’s responsible authorities are not employing the appropriate measures to break the link between the two.

    The minister had pointed out the global pandemic is directly exacerbating this concrete problem. Until now, illegal mass-immigration had only represented a cultural and security threat for Europe, however, in the present context, it also represents a serious health risk, as the uncontrolled influx off masses into the continent could accelerate the spread of the virus. This, in turn, will feed organized crime, as migrants are paying people-smuggling networks to get in to Europe, and are often assisted by NGOs on their way, he claimed. 

     

    The minister accused Brussels of supporting illegal migration and tied this to a rise in criminal drug activity, including smuggling and narcotics sales within European countries. This in turn has led to a rise in drug use for Europeans. The European drugs trade is now largely controlled by immigrant gangs whose tactics include increasingly violent methods. A 2014 report on global organized crime, for example, found that drugs and illegal immigration were closely linked.

    “Migrant smuggling in North Africa is often linked with illicit trade and the trafficking of numerous other commodities. For example, drug trafficking is becoming closely integrated with migrant smuggling. Historically, the routes for migration flows, such as Agadez, are now transforming into conduits for narcotics on the black market,” the report reads.

    It goes on to describe how drugs are flowing into Niger and heading northward into Libya and how Libyan border towns such as “Zuwarah, Sabrata and Zawiya see a large number of smuggled migrants and are involved with cocaine trafficking”.

    In many countries, migrant gangs control a significant amount of the drug trade. In Germany’s Frankfurt, Der Spiegel wrote that North Africans dominate the drug trade in the neighborhoods around Frankfurt’s train station. In Berlin, Arab clans dominate the drug trade in neighborhoods across the city, according to Die Welt.

    In Sweden, Deputy National Police Chief Mats Löfving said that migrant clans have arrived in Sweden are responsible for a surge in crime in many areas, including drug offenses.

    “These clans have come to Sweden solely to organize crime. They work to create power, they have a great capacity for violence, and they want to make money. And they do that through drug crimes, violent crimes, and extortion,” said Löfving, who made remarks during an interview on Ekot’s Saturday program on Swedish Radio. 

    In 2019 alone, there were 257 explosions linked to drug violence in Sweden, prompting the leader of the opposition Moderates party Ulf Kristersson to say that “this government has lost control over crime in Sweden. We have seen in recent years how the number of fatalities has increased.”

    The country’s police chief, Anders Thornberg, has warned that gang violence coming from parallel societies is a threat to Sweden’s democracy.

    Even in Italy, perhaps the European country most famous for its own organized crime network, migrants are increasingly making up a greater share of such networks, including the drug trade. 

    Drugs are big business

    Szijjártó  also pointed to the lack of institutional support from global institutions, referring to the vote by the UN commission in December last year, which had removed marijuana from the list of more addictive and potent drugs. The Hungarian government was opposed to the reclassification, but instead of supporting a similarly tough stance on drugs, the European Commission had instead launched rule-of-law proceedings against the country.

    During the above-mentioned vote by the Commission for Narcotic Drugs in 2020, the UN had removed cannabis from a list of stronger drugs such as cocaine or heroin. The goal was to allow the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes and for research. Although the global pro-cannabis drive is being dressed up in humanitarian and medical arguments by its proponents, it is telling that the UN decision was celebrated as a victory by pro-cannabis human rights NGOs such as the one headed by French-Algerian Kenzi Riboulet-Zemouli, who reacted by saying that “this is a huge, historic victory for us, we couldn’t hope for more.” It was also welcomed by owners of businesses having a direct financial interest in the legalization of cannabis products, such the Canadian-born Dirk Heitepriem, vice president at Canopy Growth.

    Although American and European leaders were enthusiastic about the adoption of the new cannabis reclassification, countries such as China, Nigeria or Russian were strongly opposed to the move. There are also political undertones behind the legalization drive. The move is advocated by mostly green and left-wing political movements who accentuate the civil liberties aspect of drug use but are largely silent about its impact on public health, mental illness, crime and, social cohesion. 

    Unsurprisingly pro-liberalization NGOs and left-wing parties enjoy the support of big business, as the industry for marijuana-derived CBD oil is estimated to be worth $16 billion by 2025 in the US alone, and the American medical or recreational marijuana market is expected to grow to over $34 billion in the next five years.

     

  • The jackals of Brussels

    The departure of Fidesz from the European People’s Party’s (EPP) parliamentary group has caused new cracks in the increasingly leftist and very loose coalition, Magyar Hírlap columnist Mariann Őry writes:

    I would not want to be in Manfred Weber’s place. Over the weekend, he told the Austrian weekly Profil that he was not happy that the Fidesz delegation had left the group of the European People’s Party.

    If this is indeed the case, he perhaps sees the situation with a dose of reality. There really is nothing to celebrate for an (imaginary?) faction leader who considers himself a bridge builder whose group loses twelve members during his tenure.

    The more liberal half of the People’s Party is, of course, apparently celebrating. Representatives of some Scandinavian and Benelux states see it as their own victory that Fidesz has left the faction, and EPP President Donald Tusk’s enraged Polish party mates also seem satisfied. In fact, of course, Fidesz spoiled their calculation and did not let themselves be forced into a humiliating situation of being forced out — but rather quit instead.

    The leaders of the witch hunt wanted a vote on the suspension — a public shaming — although they knew for themselves that there would be no majority for the exclusion, and they could not go much further than the party family on this issue anyway. This circus act has already been performed in the case of Tamás Deutsch, they enjoyed the situation, but Fidesz has had enough of it.

    The ongoing hysteria over Fidesz within the People’s Party was basically in the interest of some to show the liberal media, who were constantly putting pressure on them, that they were not like the Hungarian government. It was a very important element of their virtue signaling that they always demanded more than was realistically available and then they pointed at the “others”. In a normal, conservative, Christian Democratic and center-right People’s Party, these politicians would have no place.

    Speaking of self-promotion! Dennis Radtke, one of the most critical German MEPs against Fidesz, recently asked the socialist Katarina Barley on Twitter when, after the People’s Party had already “cleaned up” its party when the left would it finally hit Malta where some members of the socialist government were involved in the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

    In the second half of the sentence, Radtke is absolutely right. But what kind of “cleaning” is he talking about? He is talking about the fact that the group’s liberals wanted to deprive Fidesz members of their rights in a legally questionable, insidious, passive-aggressive way, while also avoiding the EPP group and its coffers shrinking? Such nonsense is common in the European Parliament and, unfortunately, also in the People’s Party, but to be proud of it is not very dignified.

    There are, of course, useful idiots in the People’s Party who sincerely believe that the liberal factions will love them more now and that Fidesz leaving will be of benefit to them. We are sorry to disappoint them. Liberal factions, complemented by posturing advocates, lobbyists, Soros mercenaries and opinion leaders, are like jackals. Do the liberalists of the People’s Party, transformed into Brussels droids, really think they will be left alone now?

    Well, not really. This Wednesday, the plenary session of the European Parliament will not only discuss the “attacks on the media” in Poland and Hungary, but also those in Slovenia. The goal seems to be clear: Janez Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party must also be excommunicated from the People’s Party. Let the group lose two more members and the European People’s Party will slowly lose its power to the benefit of the left.

    That would be quite a luxury for the People’s Party, given that it was once in government in most member states and now in opposition in two-thirds.

    So, all of Mr. Weber’s bridge-building efforts were in vain. Liberals never wanted that.

    Title image: EPP faction leader Manfred Weber. (AP file photo)

  • Hungary’s economy remains resilient

    Although economic operators also tend to look ahead rather than backwards, 2020 was unfortunately a special year, and worth a closer look. Given that the macroeconomic figures published by the Hungarian Statistics Office (KSH) in recent days have been better than expected, it is worth looking at them because this data underpins how 2021 will turn out.

    The most important metric is how our country’s overall economic performance develops. In the last three months of the previous year, our economy expanded by 1.4 percent compared to the previous quarter, which beat the estimates. Incidentally, it has become known that, overall, our decline has been more than 5 percent on an annual basis compared to the EU average of 6 to 7 percent.

    In this sense, Minister of Finance Mihály Varga is completely right, according to whom the Hungarian economy is more resilient than the EU average and found its footing sooner than after the crisis of 2008–2009. As it turned out, industry was the main contributor to domestic performance, with output rising after closures ended last spring and exceeding the previous year’s level in each of the last four months.

    The growth of investments has also helped to protect the economy, the rate of 27.5 percent is also high in European comparison. And what we are all feeling is that although unemployment has risen, we are in a good position in the EU, because although more than 50,000 people have lost their jobs in Hungary, the 4.3 percent unemployment rate is not a bad number even in times of peace. Almost all of us can also feel the wage data published by the KSH in December 2020, as the average earnings of full-time employees increased by more than 10 percent.

    The average net salary in Hungary is 270,000 forints (€734), and if the double-digit wage dynamics experienced in recent years remain, a Western European salary level in Hungary does not have to remain merely a dream.

    Those who view this claim with skepticism should take a look back into the past. From 2010 to 2020, average wages increased by more than 80 percent. This is due to the government concluding a six-year wage agreement in 2016 with the private sector and social partners on how to increase wages, the guaranteed minimum wage, and how contributions will develop in the future.

    It is also worth analyzing the development of investments in detail, as they represent the belief in the future.

    In recent months, there has also been an upswing in this area, mainly due to the central budget and growing household activity. In connection with the recent figures, it can be said that dynamic growth is expected in this area as well this year. In addition to the 5 percent discounted new housing construction tax, retail investment will be boosted by a number of family support measures, red tape cuts and other cost reduction programs, as well as housing renovation subsidies. A substantial upswing is also expected in the area of ​​public investment as well as investment supported by EU funds.

    Meanwhile, manufacturing developments are also supported by record levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. All in all, there are two reasons why the economy has recovered relatively quickly.

    On the one hand, thanks to the economic policy of the last ten years, Hungary has been hit by a much stronger crisis than in 2008. On the other hand, the government is not dealing with the situation with austerity measures, but with tax cuts, job creation and investment incentives.

    Last but not least, the question of whether last year’s 5.1 percent recession could be followed by 4.5 percent growth this year — which is the government’s forecast — is legitimate. As surprising as it may be, this is hardly the mandatory optimism of the treasury, as serious international and financial organizations are predicting higher growth for us as well. Moreover, even credit rating agencies that were not very friendly with us before see more potential in us than can be deduced from the government’s optimistic plans.

    We seem to be quite resilient.

    Title image: Antal Feller, CEO of Hungarian medicines wholesale company Hungaropharma, holds a batch of Sinopharm vaccines in the Budapest logistics center of the firm. (MTI/Zsolt Szigetváry) 

  • Pope Francis to visit Hungary and Slovakia in September

    Pope Francis will attend the closing Mass of the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest on Sept. 12, said Cardinal Péter Erdő and András Veres, Bishop of Győr, on Monday.

    Afterwards, Pope Francis has tentative plans to travel to Slovakia, saying, “Now, I have to go to Hungary for the closing mass of the congress, but Budapest is two hours from Bratislava, so why not visit Slovakia? This is how things come,” Pope Francis said.

    In a statement issued by the Press Service of the Hungarian Catholic Episcopal Conference (MKPK), Péter Erdő and András Veres stated that they were pleased to learn that the Holy Father had announced his decision to go to Budapest for the closing Mass of the 52nd International Eucharistic Congress.

    “We hope that your visit will be a great encouragement and spiritual confirmation for all of us and future participants in the Eucharistic Congress,” Erdő wrote in the statement.

    The 52nd International Eucharistic Congress was originally scheduled for the autumn of 2020, but it was postponed because of the coronavirus, according to Magyar Kurír. The Vatican later approved Erdő’s proposal that the congress, which is a Catholic world event, be held in Budapest from Sept. 5 to Sept.12, 2021.

    Pope Francis’ visit to Hungary has been an issue for many since the pope’s three-day trip to Csíksomlyo, Romania, in 2019 (and his Mass there). For a long time, all that was known was that the pope had previously been invited to the Budapest conference, according to both state and church protocol. The pope recently returned to Rome from his visit to Iraq. Prior to his trip there, a Roman pope has never visited the Middle Eastern country before.

    Headed to Slovakia?

    Slovak President Zuzana Caputova had also invited the Pope to Slovakia last December, saying,  “I am looking forward to welcoming the Holy Father in Slovakia. His visit will be a symbol of hope, which we need so much now.”

    On Monday, Pope Francis announced that he had accepted the invitation of Čaputová and would visit Slovakia after Hungary.

    President Čaputová invited the Pope to visit Slovakia during their meeting in December 2020 in the Vatican.

    The Vatican has not yet officially confirmed the Pope’s visit to Slovakia, however, as the Slovak Bishops’ Conference noted, the pope has apparently already inquired about the distance between Budapest and Bratislava.

    “We are pleased by the words of the Holy Father said on the way from Iraq. We do not have further information yet. We will wait for it,” said Archbishop Stanislav Zvolenský.

    Slovakia last welcomed the Pope, John Paul II, in 2003. He visited the country a total of three times. When it comes to the Czech Republic, the last Pope who visited the country was Benedict XVI in 2009.


     

  • Opinion: Viktor Orbán is correct; the time has come for a new European Right

    It is clear that the European Parliament will pass a resolution this week to declare that the European Union is to become an “LGBTIQ freedom zone.”

    This is a document filled to the brim with LGBT ideological agenda points that criticize Poland for “discrimination” but does not specify what kind of discrimination. The declaration’s content is dominated by demagogy and broad statements that don’t actually mean anything. It speaks of LGBT-free zones, which is a lie that has been denied thousands of times but to no avail.

    The document imposes all of the main points of LGBT ideology, including the legalization of homosexual “marriages,” adoption of children by gay couples and other similar goals. This is all about the imposition of a particular worldview as the one true vision. That is, one particular liberal-left paradigm of human rights is being forced as an absolute.

    The institution of the European Union is being used as a weapon in the hands of those who want to introduce ideological totalitarianism.

    What is interesting is the position of the European People’s Party (EPP), which is still seen as a Christian Democrat party but stands behind the current declaration and signed another declaration a few months ago calling for the legalization of on-demand abortion in Europe. Thus, European Christian Democrats are supporting the murder of unborn children and LGBT ideology, which falsely presents itself as human rights. In this case, how do Christian Democrats differ from the Left and liberals?

    Ohnsorge believes that the injection of EU funds could help Central Europe to increase both investment and growth in the region. In her interview with news portal Obserwator Finansowy, she says that predictions about the global supply chains breaking down have not come to pass, and as a result, world trade has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

    The World Bank expert argues that the “pandemic may give added impetus to automation and digitalization, which can help to take emerging economies to a higher level of productivity in the global supply chain values, especially if this is backed by investment in transport and digital communication”.

    According to Ohnsorge, given time, the supply chains may be restructured, making them more diverse and resilient.

    “This could open up new possibilities for Central Europe within global value chains which promote trade, direct foreign investment and the know-how transfer,” she concludes.

  • ‘Freedom ceased to exist in France a long time ago,’ says French left-wing philosopher Michel Onfray

    French philosopher Michel Onfray is sometimes described in his home country as a “left-wing Zemmour” because of the positions he has taken in the media, which are often considered politically incorrect, particularly on immigration. Reacting on RT France to the British weekly The Economist classifying France as a “failing democracy,” Onfray said that “freedom ceased to exist in France a long time ago.”

    The philosopher, who is considered a leftist libertarian but also a sovereignist or a “leftist Gaullist”, said: “Since 2005, when the people voted against the European treaty when there was a referendum… we have seen most of the political class consider that what the people did not want, they would still have it [with the Lisbon Treaty] through the Senate and the National Assembly, and I think that was a kind of putsch that made us enter at that time into an era that was no longer a democratic era. We are in a post-democratic era.”

    Then Onfray spoke about freedom of expression in France, saying that “many troublesome intellectuals are being ousted. For example, I was myself kicked out of [public radio station] France Culture because I made Emmanuel Macron uncomfortable. Many newspapers that are subsidized by public money hold an ideological discourse in which there is not much room for freedom and intelligence. People who do not follow the Liberal logic of Maastricht are insulted a lot…. In the French media — I am thinking of [public radio] France Inter for example — which is state media, or in media outlets like Arte that operate with public money, which are totally ideological media, freedom is non-existent. When you don’t think the way those people think, you are considered a Nazi, a fascist, a Petainist.”

    In June 2020, Onfray launched the quarterly review Front Populaire, which describes itself as the review of “sovereignists from the right, the left and, above all, elsewhere — namely, those who do not recognize themselves in the bipolarized, and therefore Manichean, political game”. In September, the launch of the magazine was hailed a “great editorial success” by the French Journalism Observatory.

    Thanks to his editorial successes and popularity, Onfray still manages — like his right-wing counterpart Éric Zemmour — to make his voice heard and feel rather safe in France, but this is no longer the case for all philosophers.

    Didier Lemaire, a philosophy teacher at a high school in Trappes, near Paris, has also always had strong left-wing convictions. Since November 2020, Lemaire can only leave his home under police escort. His crime was to publish in a left-wing magazine (L’Obs) — following Samuel Paty’s throat was slit by a Chechen jihadist — an open letter denouncing the Islamist threat in his city and the overwhelming responsibility of the government in this very dangerous drift.

    Such a situation perfectly illustrates the discourse of the philosopher, columnist and writer Eric Zemmour at the “Convention of the Right” in 2019, who commented on the alliance of liberal, human-rightist totalitarianism and Islamic totalitarianism against the freedoms typcially represented in French society, an alliance that Zemmour compared to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

    In the “fatherland of human rights”, as the French like to call their own country, the author of that speech was fined €10,000 for insult and incitement to hatred. In addition to these fines, Zemmour was ordered to pay the legal costs of the NGOs that had filed civil suits under French laws which provide tools against freedom of expression that are unique in Europe.

  • Misleading Reuters article about alleged corruption snowballs in Hungary’s left-wing press

    In a strongly-worded report, the venerable news agency Reuters has again joined ranks with Hungary’s opposition left-wing media regarding alleged “systemic fraud” within the Hungarian government’s public procurement process. In an “exclusive” article, journalist Gabriela Baczynska, known for her highly critical and deprecating opinions regarding some Central-Eastern European conservative governments, based her report on what she called “an internal document seen by Reuters”.

    The article alleges that the European Commission had sent a document to the Hungarian government in which they demanded specific legal changes from the Viktor Orbán government in order to be eligible for recovery funds. Quoting the internal document from Jan. 26, the Commission allegedly demanded a correction to what the journalist quotes as “systemic irregularities”. The author of the article goes as far as claiming that the Hungarian government was already working on a response.

    Gergely Gulyás, the minister responsible for the Hungarian Prime Minister’s office, had at a press conference flatly denied claims that the government had received such a request from the European Commission. He called the Reuters report “fake news” and had expressed concerns that its claims have been adopted by some in the Hungarian opposition media as facts. The minister had therefore called on the European Commission to urgently distance itself from these reports.

    As is customary, the Hungarian left-wing media had quickly adopted the false claims included in the original Reuters article. One of the largest business publications, HVG, known for their staunch anti-Orbán views, had published an article repeating all the claims of the Reuters piece without any fact-checking. Despite the government’s official statement, according to which such a request from Brussels has not in fact been received, the opposition business portal had again repeated the claims, even expanding on certain points.

    The misleading news report from a respected news agency comes at a sensitive time following revelations by Time Magazine that a conservative head of state was removed from office through an organized and relentless manipulation campaign designed to sway public opinion. According to Time, the campaign involved media outlets, social media platforms, and left-wing NGOs financed with hundreds of millions of dollars from big business which all conspired to spread critical views about former President Donald Trump and suppress those supporting him prior to the US presidential elections.

    Although Reuters proudly declares “that the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved” in its Trust Principles, they have not retracted any sections of the problematic article.

    Instead, the article seems to use gratuitous inflammatory expressions such as “systemic fraud”, while even the alleged sources quoted by the author never describe the Hungarian public procurement process in such damning words.

    Furthermore, the article refers back to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) report from two years ago, which had calculated irregularities in the use of EU structural funds in Hungary at almost 4 percent, which is ten times the European average. However, the Reuters article fails to mention that the lion’s share of this amount is made up by a single fraud case perpetrated during the times of the previous socialist-liberal government and not under Orbán’s government.

    During the construction of the Budapest underground system’s fourth line, partly financed from EU funds, hundreds of millions of euros were siphoned off by corrupt officials under the noses of three consecutive socialist prime ministers along with the liberal mayor of Budapest, Gábor Demszky.

    Although the irregularities have been committed under the previous government, it was during Orbán’s term when these cases were identified. As a result, the Hungarian government had to repay €280 million. Without this information, the entire premise of the Reuters article, which is that Orbán leads a corrupt and fraudulent government, is misleading at best.

    Ever since the 2015 migrant invasion that had seen over 10.000 illegal daily crossing through the Hungarian borders, Reuters journalists have been producing one-sided and emotionally charged news reports to the world’s media depicting Orbán as a corrupt and undemocratic. This strategy of mixing facts with half-truths, quoting unverifiable sources and relying on anti-government NGOs’ opinions while suppressing the voice of those being accused, could be a sign of a similar campaign reminiscent of what Times Magazine called the “Democracy Defense Coalition” that had helped to win the election for Joe Biden. In view of the planned 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary, this does not bode well for the democratic process in the region.

  • German police release migrant suspected in murder of Hungarian housekeeper

    A 31-year-old Syrian migrant was arrested in Kaiserslautern for the murder of a 48-year-old Hungarian housewife, but he was eventually released, Hungarian news portal Origo reports.

    The German prosecutor’s office said no evidence had been found that the man had been directly involved in the murder of the woman only identified as Diana, but the man was still being investigated whether he had been involved in the crime as an accomplice. Although he is still being investigated, that did not stop the police from releasing him.

    Origio reports that a Hungarian woman named Diana went to Munich for the first time last year to take up a nursing position, but she eventually refused this job on health grounds. She then went to the Kaiserslautern area, where she found work as a housekeeper for an American family.

    German police arrested a 31-year-old Syrian asylum seeker accused of murder shortly before Christmas. The man also remanded in custody on the grounds that he was in danger of escaping but was later released.

    German police are investigating the murder case, and although 140 clues have been recorded at the scene, polixe say they still have plenty of questions. They are still looking to determine exactly where Diana lived, who else she worked for, and who last saw her between Dec. 4 and Dec. 14.

    Police currently suspect that the murder could have been committed between Dec. 11 and Dec. 13, but they are also looking for eyewitnesses who may have seen the perpetrators carrying the body away from the murder scene. Their current assumption is that the woman was not killed at the scene where the body was found, but her killer only later transported the body there.

    Title image: German police (illustration)

  • Poll: Most Hungarians agree with strict COVID-19 lockdowns

    Since November last year, the proportion of Hungarians who consider the government’s measures related to the coronavirus to be sufficiently strict has steadily exceeded 50 percent, a representative poll conducted by the Nézőpont Institute from Feb. 2 to Feb. 4 showed.

    The survey, commissioned by Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, compared responses to the lockdown from the end of last year with the beginning of this year. It found that the ratio of those wanting an easing is still in a significant minority, increasing slightly to 22 percent.

    The proportion of those who want further tightening (11 percent) and those who are satisfied with the current restrictions (59 percent) combined is currently 70 percent. However, with the increase in the number of vaccinations and the arrival of milder weather, the proportion of those who support society opening is expected to increase, the Nézőpont Institute said.

    Only every tenth Hungarian citizen would further tighten the measures, last autumn the proportion urging for restrictive measures exceeded 40 percent. However, the austerity measures introduced in November were satisfactory to the public.

     

    The research also shows that measures related to the virus divide the left-wing voter camp: almost half of those dissatisfied with Viktor Orbán’s work are in favor of current or stricter measures (39 percent). The most pro-opening demographic group is the youngest age group, but there are also fewer of these positions among 18-29 year olds (41 percent) than those who are satisfied or even consider further tightening desirable (50 percent).

    It is also interesting that in Budapest there is also a large majority of those who are satisfied with the current regulations (56 percent), and there is no significant difference between those who want further opening (18 percent) and those who want further tightening (15 percent), which also helps explain why the few protests against the measures in the capital gained so little traction.

    Title image: Coronavirus vaccines are distributed to general practitioners in Budapest on Februray 9, 2021. (MTI/Balázs Mohai)

  • Romania steps up efforts to clean its rivers running into Hungary

    Reacting to Hungarian complaints that the rivers running from Romania into Hungary are being clogged with trash and flotsam, the Bucharest Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forestry has replied that Romania is taking measures to reduce the environmental strain.

    The ministry said in a statement that the amount of floating debris has increased in rivers due to the chaotic weather of recent weeks. Indeed, in the recent period, cooling and intense warming have alternated, and in the latter time, not only rainwater but also melting snow in the mountains has increased the flow of rivers.

    According to the ministry — led by ethnic Hungarian Barna Tánczos — in times of flood risk, rivers cannot be effectively cleaned of floating debris, which consists primarily of plastic bottles, other plastics, and wood waste. According to the announcement, on Feb. 4, Romanian authorities warned the competent Hungarian authorities about the difficulties of water treatment.

    The ministry also reported that in the last two years, platforms have been developed in the bed of the most important rivers to allow intervention during potential river pollution. At the same time, water authorities regularly warn riverside municipalities of their riverbed-cleaning responsibilities and impose penalties if they see illegal dumping in riverbeds. The ministry also mentioned that in the long run, educating the population and introducing responsible waste management could be the solution.

    Romanian news agency Agerpres recalled that last July, Hungarian President János Áder wrote a letter asking the presidents of Ukraine and Romania to take action to keep the rivers clean. The head of state explained that the waste shipped to Hungary is also epidemiologically dangerous and hinders both fishing and tourism, and also has a serious impact on wildlife. Last year, Áder also informed the president of the European Commission in a letter about the problem that is recurring year after year.

    The National Institute of Water and Water Management (INHGA) in Romania issued a second-level (amber) flood warning on the tributaries of the Tisza on Tuesday. According to the warning, there is a large amount of water flowing from the mountains, Visó, Iza, Kraszna, Berettyó, and Fekete-Körös. The first Romanian tributaries of the Tisza, with the exception of the Maros, are under a first-level (yellow) flood warning.

    Title image: Hungarian intervention teams cleaning the Tisza river of debris arriving from Romania. (source: MTI)

  • Hungary’s PM Orbán says East-West cooperation needed in new economic era

    The coronavirus pandemic has brought fundamental changes in global politics and economies, and countries must adapt to the new realities, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the 9th China-Central and Eastern Europe summit, which this year was held online.

    “This crisis has changed everything. It has torn us out of our comfort zone, ushered in a whole new era of world economy and global politics, and presented states with a double challenge. We need to protect the lives and jobs of our citizens at the same time,” Orbán said, adding that the pandemic remains dominated by shortages, although of a different nature.

    “Although a whole year has passed, we are now exactly where we were last spring: the whole world wants to buy a product whose supply falls far short of demand. What was a mask and a ventilator a year ago is now the vaccine,” Orbán said, adding that vaccination is the only solution to the crisis.

    The Hungarian Prime Minister also spoke about the fact that, as the lives of citizens and the recovery of economies are at stake, we need more constructive East-West cooperation than ever before based on mutual respect and goodwill.

    The conclusion of negotiations on a China-EU agreement on mutual investment protection was a good step in that direction, he added.

    Orbán said Hungary is grateful to the People’s Republic of China and personally to President Xi Jinping for all his help in this challenging period. He recalled that last year an air bridge was established through which tens of millions of medical devices were transported to Hungary from China. Chinese companies also took advantage of the investment opportunities provided by the Hungarian Economic Action Plan and brought significant projects to Hungary, which made China the number one investor in 2020.

    Orbán underlined that Hungarians support free and fair global trade, which is more important today than ever.

    “The fewer barriers to economic and trade cooperation, the faster our economy can recover,” he said, congratulating China for the creation of the largest free trade area in world history, the so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and expressed hope that negotiations between the RCEP and the European Union on future cooperation would begin soon. The 17 + 1 format can serve as a good engine to achieve this goal, he added.

    At the summit, Orbán paid tribute to the Chinese scientific community for developing a vaccine against COVID-19. He thanked Hungarian experts for visiting the production sites and consulting with Chinese experts.

    “I have received very reassuring reports from our delegation, based on which our national regulatory authority has issued an authorization for emergency use. We appreciate the constructive attitude of the Chinese authorities, which enabled us to sign the contract for the purchase of the vaccine,” he said, adding that he expects the first shipment of Chinese vaccines to arrive as early as next week.

    Title image: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks at the 9th China-Central and Eastern Europe summit on February 9, 2021. (MTI/Zoltán Fischer)

  • PM Babiš praises PM Orbán for ‘great advice’ on tackling the COVID-19 crisis

    On Friday, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš met with his counterpart Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Among other things, he said appreciated the advice Orbán gave him in the fight against coronavirus. Both prime ministers also agreed on the need for Visegrád Four (V4) countries’ cooperation on the issue of the COVID-19 pandemic. Babiš also suggested that he thinks about following the Hungarian path, and he would consider buying vaccines for Czechia without the European Union.

    “The pandemic is in the next phase. We are no longer just talking about how to prevent infection but also how to save lives with vaccines. We cannot wait for Brussels, so we have started negotiations on vaccine supplies with Russia and China. We passed on all this valuable information to the Czech side,” commented PM Orbán on the meeting.

    Babiš appreciated Hungary being willing to share information, say he regretted not asking for help before.

    “I should have been here in November. The best vaccine is the safe one but at the same time the ones we have are immediately available. The vaccine is not about politics but the safety of citizens. Our task is to protect our citizens. Timing is key,” Babiš said.

    “We’ve got a lot of information about how ‘antibody’ drugs work, and how epidemic teams work in Hungary. We were provided with excellent information based on which we can improve the fight against the pandemic,” he added.

    Babiš also mentioned that Hungary supplied 150 lung ventilators to the Czech Republic last year. Furthermore, both prime ministers agreed that the issue of vaccines should not be politicized. Speed ​​of delivery as well as a sufficient amount of vaccines is important.

    “I spoke with Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Russian and Chinese vaccines, and now it depends on whether both countries apply for approval by the European Medicines Agency,” the Czech prime minister explained.

    Both prime ministers also highlighted the cooperation of V4 countries, emphasizing that despite the economic downturn, these countries maintained low unemployment. Orbán has already mentioned that Hungary could start to lift coronavirus measures from March. However, it will depend on the opinions of experts.

    In addition to vaccinations, the statesmen also talked about the Hungarian experience with the Russian vaccine Sputnik V and the drug Bamlanivimab, which the Czech Republic will also purchase.

    “I have been given an overview of the medicines that Hungary is using. Bamlanivimab is one of them, we expect delivery of 500 pieces, and we plan to order more,” said Babiš.

    The Czech Prime Minister and the coronavirus expert team flew to Budapest on Friday morning.

    “The situation is not good as the number of people in the ICU is not declining. Efforts to reduce the number of infected are failing,” said Babiš about the situation in the Czech Republic before his flight.


    Title image: Czech PM Andrej Babiš with the Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán (Andrej Babiš / Facebook)

  • Hungary approves Sputnik V vaccine

    Hungary’s National Center for Public Health (NNK) has completed the conditional official investigations into the Sputnik V vaccine and gave its approval for widespread distribution, daily Magyar Nemzet reports.

    “The vaccine is in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications in terms of drug quality, and the composition can be used in humans from an immuno-biological point of view,” the NKK analysis concluded.

    Following the coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, this is the fourth vaccine approved in Hungary.

    On Dec. 26, 2020, the first consignment of vaccines arrived in Hungary, which was the first Pfizer vaccine approved in Europe. A few weeks later, on Jan. 12, 2021, Hungary also had a vaccine against coronavirus from the American pharmaceutical company Moderna, which, like the Pfizer vaccine, is an mRNA-based vaccine.

    The vaccine of the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZenca was also approved by the Hungarian authorities on Jan. 20 and by the European Medicines Agency on Jan. 29.

    According to the decision of the National Center for Public Health, the Russian Sputnik V vaccine can now also be used safely and effectively in Hungary.

    “Hungary bought two million doses of coronavirus vaccine from Russia to vaccinate one million people. The vaccine will arrive in Hungary in three stages,” Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó announced in Moscow on Jan. 22 when he met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. The Russian side delivered the first shipment containing 40,000 doses to Hungary on Feb. 2.

    Hungary’s vaccine purchases were initially sharply criticized by both the domestic opposition and the European Union, but due to the stagnation of centralized vaccine procurement, EU member states lagged far behind non-EU European states, some Arab countries, the United States and Israel in terms of population vaccination. In continental Europe, Serbia, which was among the first to approve the Russia vaccine, has the highest vaccination rate.

    As Remix News reported earlier, British medical journal The Lancet last Tuesday published a paper concluding that the vaccine had an over 90 percent efficiency.

    “Vaccine efficacy, based on the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases from 21 days after the first dose of the vaccine, is reported as 91.6 percent, and the suggested lessening of disease severity after one dose is particularly encouraging for current dose-sparing strategies,” the paper said.

    An increasing number of EU countries, including Germany, France, Spain have indicated they are leaning towards purchasing the Russian vaccine. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz also pointed to the possibility that Russian and Chinese vaccines could be produced in Austria if they receive approval from the European Medicines Agency.

  • Poland and Hungary in the crosshairs of the European Commission, says Věra Jourová

    Poland and Hungary in the crosshairs of the European Commission, says Věra Jourová

    Remix News reported earlier on a study showing that countries that emerged from behind the Iron Curtain are severely underrepresented in the top leadership of EU institutions. Yet, for even the few who did achieve a high-ranking position, those picks seems to be an alignment with the ultra-liberal ruling opinion elite and have an unconditional loyalty to the powerful “old-member” bureaucracy represented by liberal member states like Germany and France.

    A prime example of such total conformity with the EU’s liberal ethos is Poland’s Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, who is known to have joined ranks on party-political lines with forces critical of his native Poland’s Christian values and stance against uncontrolled mass migration. Another personality from the former Eastern bloc, the Slovakian vice-president of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, has been showering praise at the embattled leader of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, praising what is widely regarded a shambolic vaccine acquisition process even as EU member states still facing a severe shortage of the drug. Despite the widely criticized failure of the European Commission, in a recent statement he had famously tried to reassure critics of the European vaccination process saying, “We should not have any concerns about whether we will have enough good quality, safe and tested vaccines in Europe, and I am sure that in a few weeks or months we will have discussions about how to share even these vaccines with our neighbors…”

    Perhaps the Central-Eastern European-born official with the most vindictive and radical attitude to punishing all EU member states that have a vision different from the one defined by the currently dominant Franco-German axis is the Czech vice-president of the European Commission, Věra Jourová. She is particularly known for her strong pro-migration views and for her regular threats that she issues against European conservative governments.

    In her latest — perhaps most divisive — statement made during an interview with the German left-wing newspaper Handelsblatt, Jourová was candid about her plans in which she aims to focus on punitive Article 7 proceedings against Hungary and Poland. These, in her own words, may lead to withdrawal of EU funds from the two countries and the revocation of voting rights within the EU’s institutions.

    The openly discusses the two areas in which she intends to make a case against the two countries: freedom of the media and independence of the judiciary. With her remarks, she is effectively using the rule-of-law mechanism to blackmail Hungary and Poland into suppressing conservative opinion and aligning their judiciary with a Western ultra-liberal interpretation of the law. Abandoning every pretence of impartiality that her office usually demands, she had threatened “to impose financial sanctions on individual member states for violating fundamental democratic rights.”

    Jourová had expressed hopes that the legal challenge mounted by Hungary and Poland (against tying the rule of law mechanism to European funds) at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will be fast-tracked. In a vocabulary that leaves little doubt about the outcome of the legal challenge, Jourová seemed certain that the Commission “will have a new, fair and very effective instrument in hand. After all, we can then cut EU budget funds in the event of violations.”

    Until such a decision is made Jourová threatened to use other means to keep rebel EU governments in check. Taking the outcome of the ECJ effectively for granted, Jourová had revealed that the Commission is already working on applying the coming sanctions retroactively. This will mean that even if the EU’s top court would decide only in a few months, the financial sanction would be applied retroactively from Jan. 1, 2021.

    While one of the main areas in which the European Commission plans to attack and penalize Poland is the country’s allegedly biased judiciary, Jourová herself seems to be entirely confident in the positive verdict of the ECJ favoring the European Commission. In such a scenario, infringement proceedings against Hungary and Poland would begin immediately, and “in the worst case scenario can lead to the removal of voting rights in the Council.”

    The unguarded statements from a top EU official, however, may undermine confidence in the European legal process and might indicate a lack of impartiality on the part of the EU’s top court. 

  • The EU is a rock on the inside but a marshmallow on the outside

    The EU provides its rivals with a competitive advantage at its own expense. Only those who don’t want to ignore us, don’t do so. 
     
    I really don’t want to play blood poker, but with all due respect, I would like to point out that Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca are all responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of Europeans every day, the bankruptcies of many European restaurant and hotel owners and billions of euros lost daily due to the massive slump in European economic performance.
     
    They are responsible for all this because, by their continuous breaches of contract, they have created a situation where there are only 2.3 doses of vaccine per 100 EU citizens – whereas this rate is 11.4 in the UK and, even amid a civil war, 7.1 in the USA – and since most vaccines require two doses, a little more than just 1 person has been inoculated out of 100 in the EU.
     
    Moreover, the abundant vaccine supply of the British and Americans was largely made in factories located in the EU, which then turned to Europe with their apologies, citing technical problems and slowdowns. What brazenness, a perfectly transparent attempt by the U.S. to keep the European economy in hibernation.
     
    Europe is thus a mere dust cloth, a doormat, a meaningless bureaucracy.
     
    They have wiped the floor with us.
     
    I really don’t want to play the grumpy teenager, but with all due respect, I would like to point out that for the second month in a row, Facebook has been issuing two types of digital citizenship: a full-fledged and a European one.
     
    Of course, we can easily survive without nicknames, selfie stickers, surveys and the like on Messenger and Instagram; however, the thing is, Facebook has not stopped systematically phishing European users’ data for advertising purposes, referring to EU data security regulations called ePrivacy, and yet has taken away cute little convenience features from Europeans to turn them against existing and future data protection laws, indoctrinating them that data security equals inconvenience.
     
    Europe is thus a mere dust cloth, a doormat, a meaningless bureaucracy.
     
    They have wiped the floor with us.
     
    I really do not want to play Cold War, but with all due respect, I would like to point out that a few days ago, the European Parliament attempted to halt the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which will be completed in a few months’ time, connecting Russia with Germany via the Baltic Sea. And even though energy trade with the Russians can and should be open to debate, it is a fact that with the construction of Nord Stream 2, the European Union is not losing anything at all.
     
    The gas pipeline basically bothers two actors.
     
    On the one hand, there is Ukraine, which will be circumvented by Russia, freeing itself from the blackmail potential that Ukraine has heartily exploited in all geopolitical conflicts. It is unfortunate that this weakens Ukraine’s geopolitical position, but the interests of a schizophrenic state with a repressive, legally and morally unacceptable pogrom policy against several European nationalities, ignorant of effective law enforcement and legal certainty, are the last things we need to consider in our energy policy decisions. Especially if that state is not an ally in either NATO or the European Union.
     
    On the other hand, of course, the pipeline seriously bothers the United States: we will obviously not buy its super expensive shale gas if we have the pipe to the Russians. But this is again about the interests of the U.S., not ours, so we don’t have to revise our energy plans, even if the Americans, never to miss a punch, are demanding the sinking of Nord Stream 2, this time by citing Navalny.
     
    If Europe halts the gas pipeline, it will be a dust cloth, a doormat, a meaningless bureaucracy.
     
    They will wipe the floor with us.
     
    I really do not want to open old wounds, but for the sake of linguistic correctness, I have to say that European foreign policy has become so much like that of Kinga Göncz (a do-nothing Hungarian Socialist foreign minister) that it’s painful to watch.
     
    Only those who don’t want to ignore us, don’t do so in global politics.
     
    We provide our global representation with the prudence of a pension insurer and the hardness of a marshmallow at the same time; we act as if we care about everyone except ourselves. This is a Christian attitude appropriate for one’s private life, but a mindless gamble in foreign policy.
     
    We will never receive the respect (vaccine, trade benefits, data protection…) we deserve from the world based on our economic performance until the European Union cultivates its foreign policy, and there are only two foreign ministers on the continent who actually work: Heiko Maas from Germany and Péter Szijjártó from Hungary. Everyone else has followed the example of Hungarian Socialist foreign policy, becoming much like ex-ministers László Kovács and Kinga Göncz. Even though they are big, they dare only to be small. What a shame.
     
    It further aggravates the situation that the European Union, with its marshmallow-like hardness on the outside, is behaving like a rock internally. With death-defying machismo, it sweeps the Minority SafePack, a national minority rights initiative, off the table, which – let us be honest – does not harm European interest and enjoys wide social support; it seeks to cripple Member States with the highest economic growth and the most favorable demographic trends based on rule of law concerns and other blood libels; and it shows a reluctance to accept what is clearly in its geopolitical interest, that is, the EU accession of the Western Balkans as if they wanted to dump radioactive waste on us.
     
    Europe is riding the bull backwards.
     
    A self-respecting political bloc is hard on its rivals and partners and gives its members as much freedom as possible. Rock on the outside, marshmallow inside.
     
    As long as the EU does the opposite, it will provide its competitors with a competitive advantage at its own expense.
     
    The vaccine campaign and the new investment battle for the regulation of the digital space give the European Union objective feedback about how it’s doing in the world compared to other major powers. Conclusion: not very well. And this is not because of the Liberals, the New Marxists, the Greens, the French, the Italians, the Poles or Viktor Orbán, not even because of the cultural struggle, which is tearing apart our continent, or the coronavirus epidemic. No, it is due to the few hundred people who are meant to represent Europe in the world and the other few hundred whose job it is to hold the Union together, for they have proven to either be incompetent or do not follow the right guidelines.
     
    But until we run out of all our competitive advantages and international relevance, we still have time to fix the situation; so they had better turn around on that bull as soon as possible. 

  • Money, money, and more money

    Hungarian economic growth could reach 5 to 6 percent this year and 6 to 7 percent next year. This is not what just mandatory official optimism from the Ministry of Finance and the government, which are both counting on a modest expansion, but these forecasts come from Fitch Ratings’ latest credit analysis for Hungary. At the same time, the handling of the recession in Hungary proved that the country’s economy is crisis-proof, and this fact could serve as the basis for recovery and expansion.

    But we must ask the question: what is needed to achieve such spectacular growth after the global economic crisis of 2020?

    The answer is very simple: money, money and more money. Of course, within reason. While jumpstarting growth is the most important thing, the budget should not be overburdened. Before we look at the source fund inflow this year and in the years to come, let us look at the status quo. As things stand, we were able to close last year with a decline of roughly 6 percent, with previously well-performing sectors — industry, including manufacturing and retail — returning substantially to pre-crisis performance.

    According to data from the Central Statistics Office, only the service sector has not yet recovered. Last year’s unemployment indicators are already available, and apparently there is no bigger problem in this area than in other European countries. The unemployment rate is just over 4 percent, which is not a bad number even in times of peace. Given that about 4.5 million of us work, this indicates that the economic shock caused by the coronavirus has not sent the domestic labor market in free fall. And there are signs that wage dynamics have persisted. Despite last year’s difficulties, average wages have risen above inflation.

    At the same time, the coveted expansion in the field of economic policy can be expected primarily through investment promotion measures. Here, the goal cannot be anything less than restoring the economy to a pre-crisis investment rate of over 25 percent. What we do know is that the government will strongly support construction and family investment, and wage growth will continue, albeit not at the pace before the crisis until the recovery is fully underway.

    Onto a slightly different topic.

    It is well known that in the previous year that Hungary and Poland withdrew their veto from the EU budget, so overall, EU funds will give the economy a half to 1 percent growth. From this approach, three factors remain the most important for Hungary, which include the protection of families, stimulating the rural countryside, and the protection of jobs. But with the inflow of EU money here, more emphasis will be placed on greening the economy and digitalization. In addition, we have set national economic and strategic goals in which energy, green transformation, education and, of course, health care have a place.

    In addition to the above-mentioned sources, about 50,000 billion forints will be available for state economic development purposes in the period between 2021 and 2027. We are talking about such amounts of money we have never seen before. For those who may not be involved in everyday economics: the figure in question should be seen as Hungary’s full-year economic performance. That is, it is 100 percent of one year’s GDP! According to current calculations, 30 percent of this is from the European Union and 70 percent from domestic and other sources, not to mention other money market sources, such as Hungarian foreign currency bond issuance, bank loans and foreign working capital.

    Speaking of developments, of course, the golden rule must be followed that every forint spent will result in the production of more than one forint of GDP. Incentives for investment meet this criterion. As mentioned, based on government communications, public investment in 2021 and 2022 will focus on public construction investment, and family investment will focus on home renovations and new housing construction. In other words, in the coming years, construction will play a major role in the economy, and as a result, one of the most important areas of industrial policy will be construction and the related production of raw materials for construction.

    The above, essentially budgetary elements are likely to be supported by monetary policy again this year. Moreover, there will be even closer coordination between monetary and budgetary decision-makers, and so-called asset purchases, such as government securities purchases, will be even more targeted. In other words, the central bank incentive will be maintained, meaning that the bank will not fill gaps but subsidize investments that turn to yields.

    The main point is that in the period between 2021 and 2027, about 50,000 billion forints will be available. So, there is plenty of money, but it must be spent wisely.

    Title image: The National Bank of Hungary. (source: Wikimedia Commons)

  • PM Orbán announces economic relaunch

    After successfully fighting off the most dire economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic last year, Hungary is now launching a new economic recovery program, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Thursday at an online conference organized by the Hungarian Industry and Trade Chamber (MKIK).

    Orbán said that before the epidemic, the Hungarian economy reached record heights, but the crisis caused by the current crisis gave the economy a “big punch to the gut” and put Hungary and other nations on the defensive. 

    Orbán took stock of the economic protection action plan that had already been completed, which he said had achieved its goal of retaining jobs, as in December 2020 as many people had already worked as before the epidemic in December 2019. The number of employees has reached 4.5 million again, he stressed, adding that unemployment is the third lowest in the EU.

    Among the tools of the economic protection action plan, Orbán mentioned the introduction of a credit moratorium, which left 3,000 billion forints in the pockets of families and entrepreneurs, as well as providing wage subsidies in the sectors worst-hit by the pandemic. He said that in these cases, the social contribution tax was waived and the business tax was halved, as well as investment support given to 1,434 Hungarian companies, which helped retain 280,000 jobs and create tens of thousands.

    “The government has resisted the temptation to return to an aid-based economy in times of crisis,” Orbán said. In his presentation, he called the system of restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus epidemic as “stable”. While crisis management in Western Europe consists of periodic easing and periodic austerity, which can claim the lives of many hundreds of people due to economic swings, the Hungarian system has been based on commonly agreed restrictions since November, according to the summer national consultation, Orbán said.

    He said the economic restart action plan will be implemented in three phases: the first phase will run from Jan. 1 to April 1, the second from April 1 to July 1, and the third phase will run from early July to October.

    He also enumerated the main points of last year’s economy protection plan that are in place:

    • Reduced VAT to 5 percent on home building
    • Wage subsidies to the most affected sectors
    • The largest increase in wage for those working in the health care sector in decades
    • A credit moratorium for hundreds of thousands of families
    • Gradually re-instating one extra month’s pension
    • Full income tax exemption for citizens under 25 years old starting in 2022

    Title image: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks at the Hungarian Industry and Trade Chamber conference on February 4, 2021. (source: MKIK)

  • Korean mega-investment announced in Hungary

    In a sign that its highly skilled workforce and relatively low wages are still attracting major international investors to the Visegrád Four region, the Hungarian government has announced the signing of a major international electric battery factory in Hungary.

    Hungarian foreign secretary Péter Szijjártó has announced that SK Innovation, a Korean manufacturer of car parts, will expand from their existing two plants in Komárom county to another major manufacturing facility in Inváncsa, about 30 kilometers south of Budapest.

    The investment, reported to be worth approximately the $2.3 billion, will see the largest ever single greenfield development in Hungarian history. The electric battery plant will create 2,500 new jobs in a period of exceptional fragility for the country’s economy, which has already experienced a double-digit recession due to the coronavirus crisis. The extent to which the government is planning to incentivize the mega-project financially has not been announced, but according to the foreign minister, SK Innovation, the plant’s owners, will receive the largest Hungarian state subsidies to date.

    The project is expected to start in the second half of 2021, and the construction will expand on 700.000 square meters of land. Once the plant is up and running, it ls expected to have a 30 gigawatts per hour (GWh) annual output that will rival the largest electric battery producing plant in the world at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, which features 35 GWh annual output. Along with the two existing such factories owned by the Korean company, the new facility may put Hungary at the top spot among European vehicle battery producing countries.

    The new facility will annually produce enough batteries to power roughly 600.000 cars, which offers a clear idea about just how rapidly the global electric car market is projected to expand. Yet, SK Innovation is not the only car battery producing company in Hungary. In recent years, other Asian producers, such as Samsung, Inzi Controls and GS Yuasa, have all opened their manufacturing plants in the country.

    The particular success that the Hungarian government has achieved among Asian investors can largely be attributed to their policy of “Eastern opening” that had seen a frantic effort from the part of Hungarian diplomacy in attracting businesses from countries like Japan, Korea and China on the one had, and from the government’s part in incentivizing investment with attractive land-lease schemes or tax-breaks on the other.

    The European Union’s drive to replace fossil fuel-powered vehicles with electric cars in the coming decades is expected to translate to skyrocketing demand for electric power cells. However, at present there is no clear roadmap for producing enough green electricity to meet these ambitious carbon-neutral goals, especially if the trend of moving away from nuclear continues in the future.

    Yet, in its “Fundamental Transport Transformation” document, the European Commission outlined its plans for at least 30 million zero-emission cars on European roads by 2030 to make zero-emission large aircraft market-ready by 2035, and by 2050, nearly all cars, vans, buses as well as new heavy-duty vehicles should be zero-emission. For this, they are planning to install 3 million public charging points by 2030. In 2020 there were over 500.000 electric cars sold in Europe, thus Europe is overtaking China as the largest market for electric vehicles in the world.

    As Remix News reported earlier, there are other large-scale electric battery related business initiatives in the Central Eastern European region, such as the Artificial Intelligence designed battery plant planned to open in 2022 in neighboring Slovakia.

    It is not by chance though that major car component manufacturing facilities are being built in the region. The Visegrád Four countries are a major hub for mainly German and Japanese car manufacturers such as Audi, WV, Mercedes, BMW, and Suzuki. Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are all within the top 20 of the world’s largest car manufacturers, jointly producing some 3.4 million cars annually (2019). Their factories are expected to be the main clients for the locally produced car batteries.

     

  • Hungary aims to have the region’s most effective civillian intelligence services

    Hungary’s goal is to make its civilian intelligence services the strongest in the region, similar to the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA), which is already the most successful in Central Europe, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó told national news agency MTI in a statement on Wednesday.

    He was speaking after a closed meeting of the National Security Committee of the National Assembly at the Information Office. Szijjártó said that the necessary developments are already underway and that decisions will be made soon. The Information Office (IH) is the country’s main civilian intelligence agency, involved in all non-military intelligence-gathering operations, mainly abroad.

    Szijjártó highlighted that the coronavirus epidemic has accelerated global change: A new world order has emerged that has brought a new type of competition between states, nations and governments, not primarily in politics but much more in the economic sphere.

    As the world economy is fundamentally transforming, there has been extremely fierce competition for investments. In order to win these investments, all means should be used, Szijjártó said.

    “We will protect Hungarian interests, the Hungarian economy; we will create new, large-scale growth in the Hungarian economy and we will protect the jobs of the Hungarian people,” Szijjártó said. “The fact that there is a large, integrated and unified foreign administration to which civil intelligence also belongs is a great help in Hungary’s foreign economic efforts.”

    At the annual hearing of the Information Office before the National Security Committee of the National Assembly on December 9 last year, Szijjártó reported the acquisition of unspecified assets for the IH and on the establishment of two specialized centers, without disclosing any further details. Szijjártó then suggested that the National Security Committee hold an external meeting in the crisis center of IH, where it would also provide information on the details of the planned modernization process.

    According to the constitution, Hungary’s Information Office is under the supervision of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

    Title image: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó at a closed meeting of the National Security Committee. (source: Facebook)

  • Germany says Europe can help with production of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine

    While many international news outlets carried reports on Wednesday that Hungary had begun inoculations with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine without it having the approval of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the tide is now turning, with the Hungarian approach seeming increasingly valid.

    International media — from The Washington Post and Reuters to Germany’s Handelsblatt and Poland’s Rzeczpospolita — all carried reports of the arrival of the first significant batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, with most reports pointing out both the fact that Hungary was forced to seek alternative sources due to the European Union’s slow deliveries and that the vaccine currently lacks the EMA’s approval.

    The Washington Post quoted Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó who said that “The centralized vaccine procurement scheme of Brussels has failed, jeopardizing European lives and the quick restart of the European economy.”

    Meanwhile, German Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn told the DPA news agency that Europe could help Russia produce its vaccine.

    “We could provide support for the production of a vaccine that is not yet or not at all approved in Europe,” Spahn said, adding that any vaccine that was effective in fighting the pandemic and has been proven safe is welcome. “It simply depends on the regulator to consider if this is true in the case of Sputnik V,” he added.

    Moscow officials said an application for approval was accepted at the European Medicines Agency in January. On Tuesday, the medical journal The Lancet published a paper by three Russian researchers regarding phase three clinical trials of the vaccine.

    “Vaccine efficacy, based on the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases from 21 days after the first dose of the vaccine, is reported as 91.6 percent, and the suggested lessening of disease severity after one dose is particularly encouraging for current dose-sparing strategies,” the paper said. It concluded that “the development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticized for unseemly haste, corner cutting and an absence of transparency. But the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated, which means another vaccine can now join the fight to reduce the incidence of COVID-19.”

    Title image: MTI/Sándor Ujvári

     

  • Serbia and Hungary are Europe’s vaccination leaders – Die Welt

    Following the example of its southern neighbor Serbia, Hungary is supplementing its meager supply of coronavirus vaccines from the European Union with Chinese and Russian vaccines, German daily Die Welt writes.

    In the article entitled “Serbia and Hungary go it alone in coronavirus vaccination effort,” Die Welt writes how Serbia, which has been teased with the prospect of European Union membership for the past nine years, has actually benefited from not being tied to EU vaccination regulations and was able to decide on its own to use Chinese and Russian vaccines.

     

    The article emphasizes that Hungary’s decision leaves it flying solo in the European Union, as the EU has so far only approved the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. According to the article, both Budapest and Belgrade are playing a game aimed at making Brussels look bad.

    The author, Maximilian Kalkhof, mentions that the two countries have already ordered the Russian Sputnik V vaccine as well as the vaccine from the Chinese company Sinopharm.

    According to the article, both countries are taking advantage of their close relations with China and putting pressure on Brussels. The author highlights that Viktor Orbán, already in a conflict with the European Union concerning the rule of law and the budget, is now bringing Chinese vaccines into the EU “through the back door.”

    In continental Europe, Serbia is leading the vaccination campaign with 6.4 percent of its population already inoculated, while Hungary, after completing the vaccination of residents of elderly homes, is now kicking off the vaccination of those retired and will proceed with the rest of its population, oldest to youngest. Hungarian media also reported that the country has just received its first significant batch of Sputnik V vaccines (40,000 doses), to be followed by 2 million doses in the next two months.

    Title image: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. (source: Facebook)

     

  • Hungarian hospitality industry receives new lifeline

    The Hungarian Government is extending an additional lifeline to the embattled hospitality industry, daily Magyar Nemzet found out from government sources.

    State wage subsidies will now reach businesses in difficulty faster and easier: The government will pay the wage subsidy in a lump sum by the end of February. In addition to restaurants, the move will also affect hotels and fitness centers. The prospects of businesses were left uncertain by the stagnant operation of a highly bureaucratic support system, so the government decided to significantly alter the accounting and financing system of tenders aimed at protecting jobs.

    In the future, state aid will not be paid following the month of application, i.e., via post-financing; to better alleviate their situation, companies will receive the wage subsidy at the beginning of the current month, meaning businesses will get the money in advance.

    By the end of January, the number of employees in the hospitality sector receiving wage subsidies had already exceeded 100,000. In order to keep the jobs at risk, the program will remain open until February 8 to companies particularly exposed to epidemiological restrictions.

    The depth of the industry crisis is indicated by the fact that by January, companies said they can no longer withstand any more burdens — their reserves have run out, so they cannot pay the wages of essentially idle employees without state help and cannot wait until next month. The change of model introduced by the government will allow these companies to get the help they need now.

    The steadily expanding guest traffic of Hungary’s hospitality sector was unexpectedly interrupted last spring with the onset of the pandemic; then, due to epidemiological restrictions, businesses in commercial catering and accommodation were forced to stop their activity in the spring and again in late autumn.

    As of the beginning of February, there has been no activity for these facilities for the third month in a row, while those who serve takeaway orders (or home delivery) only have a fraction of their previous customers.

    By the beginning of the year, the chances of permanent closures had also increased, especially among smaller businesses. The hospitality sector has lost 30-40 percent of its employees during the pandemic, and without the new scheme, reopenings would also have been jeopardized, whenever they may finally come.

    That is why the government stepped in after hearing the arguments of professional organizations representing employers about payment issues and the deterrent effect of an overly bureaucratic application process.

  • Crime groups increase tariffs for smuggling illegal immigrants

    As Hungarian police are stepping up their raids against people smugglers transporting illegal immigrants from the East to the West across Hungary, organized crime groups are increasing their tariffs to reflect the growing dangers they face, daily Magyar Nemzet writes.

    Organized crime groups operating in Serbia continued to employ human smugglers recruited from the former Soviet states in January, the paper writes. But due to recent successful police actions, only half as many drivers are taking the risk of transporting the border-violators.

    According to international criminal intelligence, prices have also risen, with drivers asking for higher payment, which human smuggling gangs then make migrants pay. After the Estonian, Chechen and Armenian drivers caught recently, just last week, a Georgian man driving a rented car with Polish license plates was stopped in Sopron and arrested. The 25-year-old had been transporting a dozen illegal Syrian immigrants.

     

    In another incident, employees of the National Tax and Customs Office were checking the cargo areas of trucks in a parking lot near Szolnok on January 29 when they noticed a closed van with water and sandwiches in the driver’s compartment. The case was immediately reported to the police. When the police arrived, the driver left his vehicle and ran off through the field on the outskirts of the city.

    Twenty migrants were found freezing in the van and were brought to the police station; they claimed to be Syrian and had no valid travel documents. The car had supposedly entered Hungary at Gyula to pick up Syrians in the area who were crossing the border illegally on foot. The Romanian driver was caught and prosecuted for the crime of people smuggling.

    Then, on January 27, near Ajka-Bakonygyepes, the police stopped a car with Austrian plates. A Syrian man, granted refugee status in Austria four years ago, was driving the rented Mercedes. Five illegal immigrants were also traveling in the luxury car, while one young man claiming to be Syrian had been locked in the trunk.

     

    The driver had picked up his compatriots at dawn that day near the border in Baranya County, used his phone to keep in touch with the smugglers who had transported the Syrians across the border, and, according to the agreement, would have taken his passengers to Vienna. The Syrian migrants have now been deported from the country, and criminal proceedings have been launched against the Syrian driver; also, according to European law, this violation will terminate the driver’s refugee status at the end of the proceedings, and he will have to leave the territory of the European Union.

    People smuggling in Hungary is punishable by up to five years in prison, or ten years if it is perpetrated in an organized manner. 

    Title image: Illegal immigrants found in the cargo area of a van. (source: police.hu) 

  • FM Szijjártó refutes German allegation that Hungary finds Western vaccines too expensive

    Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó refuted a recent allegation by German Social-Democrat (SPD) MP Karl Lauterbach in which he claimed Hungary was buying the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine because it was cheaper than the Western alternatives.

    “Fake news in the German Social-Democrat fashion. Every word is a lie,” Szijjártó wrote in a Facebook post.

     

    In a January 31 tweet, Lauterbach said “It seems unfair that Hungary is now complaining about slow EU delivery and buying Russian Sputnik vaccines,” after saying the BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were “too expensive.” 

     

    Lauterbach (57), who holds degrees in medicine and health economics, is a professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne. He left the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 2001 to join the SPD. He is currently an MP of the party, serving on the German Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection and its Subcommittee on European Law.

    Title image: Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó. (source: Facebook)

  • Hungarian vaccine procurement outpaces EU – State Minister Menczer

    In the past few months, Hungary has outpaced other Member States of the European Union in vaccine procurements, State Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade Tamás Menczer said in a short video posted on Facebook.

    “When it comes to getting a vaccine, every day counts; whoever gains time, gains life,” Menczer said in the video, adding that the vaccine has saved lives and jobs and is helping the country return to normal life.

    Summing up the events of recent months, he said:

    “There are very few vaccines coming from Brussels. The Hungarian Government therefore began negotiations with Russia, and the Hungarian pharmaceutical authority has approved the Russian vaccine. For this reason, the Left and Brussels are constantly attacking the Hungarian Government.”


     

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel then announced that she had begun talks on the Russian vaccine, Menczer said, pointing out that Merkel had also signaled that “this vaccine is important and needed.”

    “The same thing happened with China,” continued Menczer, explaining that the Hungarian Government began negotiations with China, and the Hungarian pharmaceutical authority approved the Chinese vaccine as well. But Brussels and the Left again started attacking the government because of this. “Subsequently, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder also spoke about the importance of the Chinese vaccine,” he added.

    “In recent months, it has been seen that Hungary has overtaken the EU Member States in terms of vaccine procurement; we have overtaken Brussels,” Menczer said.

    He added, however, that Serbia was even faster than Hungary. More than 300,000 people, including many Hungarians from Vojvodina, have been vaccinated with the Chinese vaccine, and no one has experienced any unwanted side effects.

    “He who gains time, gains life, and all life matters!” Menczer said.


    Title image: A resident of the Home for the Elderly of the Reformed Church in the northern Hungarian village of Encs is vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on January 31, 2021. (MTI/János Vajda)

  • Ukraine plans to ban foreign national anthems

    Ukraine is planning to ban foreign national anthems during certain political settings in what is being seen as the latest attempt to crackdown on minority rights in the country.

    Fresh on the heels of Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó’s visit to Ukraine, a representative of the Servant of the People party from the Transcarpathia region introduced a bill to Ukrainian Parliament that would ban playing the anthems of foreign states during any assemblies from the smallest to the largest local and regional councils and assemblies, daily Magyar Nemzet reports.

    The motion was submitted by Anatoliy Kostiuk, MP of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party.

    Ukraine and Hungary have been at loggerheads for several years over the issue of ethnic minorities. Although the root cause of Ukrainian authorities’ systematic dismantling of minority rights is the anti-Russian sentiment in the country, the ethnic Hungarian minority in the southwestern region of Transcarpathia has also become an accidental victim of it.

    But in recent years, far-right, xenophobic groups in Transcarpathia also began to specifically target the Hungarian minority there.

    Last Wednesday, in an attempt to defuse the situation, Szijjártó met in Kiev with his counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba. While Szijjártó said after the meeting that it was a promising start, the official statements of the two officials left little doubt that it is only the beginning of a long road.

    The Ukrainian foreign minister has indicated that he condemns the incitement against the Hungarian minority in Ukraine but finds unacceptable any anti-Ukrainian rhetoric that can be heard from some political circles. He stated that the Ukrainian state does not want to cause harm to the Hungarians.

    “We are a country, a society, and they will remain forever,” Dmitro Kuleba said.

    Szijjártó, for his part, said that Ukrainian police conducting aggressive house searches of Hungarians had raised concerns in Hungary.

    “I would very much like ‘unfair or conceptual procedures’ not to burden this system of relations,” said Hungary’s foreign minister.

    Title image: Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó. (MTI/Noémi Bruzák)

  • Hungary closes ‘horror caravan’ loophole to improve road safety

    As of today, Hungarian authorities will finally have the legal means to root out so-called “horror caravans” that have been plaguing the highways of the region for decades, the Ministry of Information and Technology said in a statement.

    “Horror caravans” are almost exclusively combinations of vehicles towed by foreign vehicles. Their drivers typically transport used cars purchased in Western Europe, often inoperable, to eastern destination countries by transporting multiple cars on trailers attached to each other at the same time, securing their cargo by makeshift means. These unscrupulous profiteers also pose a serious threat to traffic safety in Hungary.

    Why is the new rule important?

    Previously, the transport authority could only check and sanction those vehicles that inadequately securing their cargo for trucks heavier than 3.5 tons on the road.

    “As of now, the relevant provision of the Road Traffic Act allows the vehicle to be detained until the fine or monetary claim insurance is paid. The possibility of sanctions extended to passenger cars and vans therefore also justifies the immediate ban on combinations of vehicles,” the statement says. Now, it will be possible to slap fines of up to 500,000 forints (€1,400) on violators and only allow them to continue driving if the fine has been paid and the caravan of used vehicles has been dismantled.

    “‘Horror caravans’ are extreme examples of driver irresponsibility, and perpetrators must be permanently discouraged from severely hazardous DIY solutions,” said László Mosóczi, junior minister in charge of road safety, adding that there will also be targeted controls along the busiest international transit routes.

    Employees of the transport authority in the Ministry of Innovation and Technology found 108 cases of infringements during their relevant roadside inspections last year.

    In addition to the technical deficiencies, a total of 77 million forints in on-site fines were imposed for failures related to documentation. Using the new opportunity, the inspection authority can now take more effective action against “horror caravans” in order to curb the high-risk practice.

    Title image: Illegal trailer transport in Hungary. (source: totalcar.hu)

  • Budapest mayor’s advisor wants ban on children’s baptisms

    A ban on children’s baptism? Gáspár Békés, environmental advisor to liberal Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony, said he believes it is illegal to force children into belonging to a church, news portal Vasárnap reports.

    The expert, who styles himself as an atheist activist, regularly publishes controversial posts on social media, and in his article published two years ago, he argued that the Hungarian soldiers who fell in the Don Bend during World War II were not heroes. Shortly after that article was published, readers drew attention to another piece from Békés where he had previously argued that the state should prohibit the baptism of children.

    “From a legal point of view, baptism is clearly illegitimate, but how could it be abolished in practice?” He wrote on the blog of the Hungarian Atheist Society called Atheist Revolution in 2018. He explained in the article that by banning baptism, the country would make it clear that violating the rights of others, regardless of age, is unacceptable.

    Opposition radio station Klubrádió also noticed the Békés’ writing on the topic of baptism and followed it up with an interview in which Békés detailed his position.

    “Baptism should be forbidden because it sends a message to both parents and society, and indirectly to other parents, that the child is not subject to the constitution. That is, they are inferior citizens. After all, it is possible to decide for them in which religion they are baptized or included,” Békés said, adding that “Symbolically, it is definitely a violation of the baptism of children’s rights.”

    Listening back to the broadcast, even the host of the radio station, who is a professed liberal, considered Békés’ suggestion completely absurd and associated it with the anti-religious excesses of communism.

    According to the latest 2011 census, 54.3 percent Hungarians are Christian, most of them Roman Catholic or Protestant.

    Title image: Gáspár Békés, environmental advisor to liberal Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony. (source: Youtube)

  • Transparency International in joint attack on Hungary with the European Commission

    The international NGO, once known for its fiercely independent attitude to measuring levels of corruption across the globe, has joined ranks with the European Commission in its criticism of the Hungarian government. In a press conference on Jan. 28, Transparency International Hungary’s executive director, Martin József Péter, blasted the Hungarian government for allegedly using the pandemic as a cover for introducing measures that would weaken the rule of law in the country. In its annual Corruption Perception Index, Hungary ranks at the bottom among EU countries, in a joint last place with Romania and Bulgaria.

    After seemingly abandoning most meaningful criteria of independence or impartiality, Transparency International had in October 2020 published an article based on a report by one of its main financial backers, the European Commission, in which they formulated a damning opinion about the state of rule of law in Hungary.

    Transparency International, instead of evaluating the above criticism as a political verdict from one of the most vocal critics of the Hungarian government, had only managed to scrutinize the European Commission report for being too lenient in the face of what they called a “systematic demolishing of the rule of law by the Hungarian Government.” Alongside Transparency International, this European Commission report evaluation was signed by several other pro-migration, left-leaning political lobby groups, such as Amnesty International, K-Monitor and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. All the above groups receive financial support from George Soros’ Open Society Funds and/or the European Commission.

    While in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, published in January 2021, the top spots are reserved for countries with left-liberal governments such as New Zealand and Sweden, Hungary ranks at position 69, below countries with oppressive authoritarian regimes such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda.

    On the other hand, many of the countries listed as Transparency International’s chief financial donors page struggle with maintaining the rule of law in their societies, including with mass protests, an exponential rise in organized crime and violent rioting becoming commonplace on their streets. For example, despite experiencing a near societal breakdown, and with authorities struggling to control large parts of urban areas, countries such as Sweden and Netherlands, both among the main donors of Transparency International, figure high in the rankings as the least corrupt countries in the world.

    In a particularly embarrassing assessment on the 2020 Index, Estonia, with its left-wing government lead by Jüri Ratas, whose Centre Party was a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), has come crashing down after an embarrassing corruption scandal.

    Since Ratas’ government came into power in 2016, they have experienced a steady rise in Transparency International’s index, moving from 22nd to the 17th place in the rankings. It will come as no surprise that the foreign ministry of the small country with the population of just over 1.3 million is one of Transparency’s main financial sponsors.

    Despite its stellar performance in the Corruption Perception Index, in January this year, Prime Minister Ratas was forced to resign after police and prosecutors launched an investigation into a €39 million property investment deal, in which Ratas’ Centre Party had allegedly received illegal finances from a real estate developer. It remains to be seen how this major corruption scandal reaching into the highest echelons of government will affect Transparency International’s assessment of the country in its 2021 Index.

    According to Transparency International’s assessment, the Hungarian government had exacerbated the problems with corruption by the fact “that since the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic the government had invested little in social crisis management, while in numerous cases used the epidemic as a cover for the demolition of the pillars of rule of law, and for benefitting oligarchs close to the government.”

    In a rhetoric reminiscent of left-wing Hungarian opposition parties, Transparency International had omitted the fact that Hungary had often been accused of populism on the basis of exactly the opposite argument, that is, its generous policies supporting nuclear families, its tax relief and debt moratoria for businesses affected by the pandemic, and most recently, its decision to subsidize the housing market and abolishing income taxes for citizens under 25.

  • Hungarians being threatened with property seizure in Slovakia as EU looks the other way

    On both sides of the Atlantic, the left-leaning political elite seems to have placed the remedying of perceived or real historic injustices committed by European nations against ethnic minorities and identity groups at the center of their manifestos. However, it appears that only groups that fit the liberal class’ political ambitions qualify for protection or compensation.

    In the US, for instance, President Joe Biden had promised preferential treatment for businesses owned by non-white ethnic groups affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, including for Asians, who earn more income on average than Whites. In Europe, violence seems to be an acceptable feature at Black Lives Matter demonstrations justified by the mainstream media on alleged “White supremacy” grounded in colonial history.

    Native European minorities, however, some of whom are still bearing the devastating consequences of two world wars, enjoy no special status or protection, nor are they in line for compensation for grievances that they have suffered as a result of settlements between world powers.

    In his address to the European Parliament’s plenary session, Loránt Vincze, MEP for the Romanian Hungarian Democratic Alliance (RMDSZ), which represents the Hungarian minority living in Romania, he emphasized that abolishing the Beneš decrees remains a historic debt owed on the part of Slovakia. Yet, the “duty of the European Union, that purports to be the defender of fundamental human rights, and claims to condemn all forms of discrimination, won’t speak out in this matter and condemn the discrimination against the Hungarian minority in Slovakia.”

     

    The Decrees, issued in 1945 after the Second World War, bear the name of the then president of Czechoslovakia  Edvard Beneš, who had drafted them in order to rebuild the war ravaged country but also to deal with segments of the population who have been declared collectively guilty of collaboration with the German occupiers.

    Mostly Germans and Hungarians were stripped of their citizenship, their property confiscated, and many were used as forced labor or were imprisoned. Citizens with Hungarian nationality were not allowed to turn to courts, and all newspapers in their native languages were closed down. Their pensions were confiscated, and they were forbidden to use their languages in public life. After 1945, over 40.000 of them were forcibly transported in cattle carriages to the Sudeten lands, and finally, between 1947 and 1949, almost 90.000 Hungarians were forced to leave the territory of what is Slovakia today.

    Although these decrees are still in force and their legal status has been reaffirmed by the Slovakian Parliament in 2018, this topic is regarded as exceptionally contentious between countries of the Visegrád Four alliance, which consists of Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Thus, it is almost never brought up during bilateral negotiations. Yet, the reasons for opening this can of worms is two-fold: on the one hand, Hungary is calling into questions the EU’s double standards regarding rule of law proceedings against the Viktor Orbán government by essentially questioning whether the EU has the moral high ground to do so in view of the existence of such undemocratic legislation such as the Beneš Decrees.

    On the other hand, the legislation, once thought to have been effectively dormant, has been put into effect by a 2015 Slovakian court decision, which would have authorized the confiscation of forestry plots belonging to a Slovakian citizen of Hungarian nationality on the basis of the Decrees. Although the European Court of Human Rights has condemned the Slovakian court’s decision, the confiscation is believed to be going ahead regardless. Encouraged by the above precedent, in 2020, the Slovakian Land Registry has also signaled its intention to confiscate lands belonging to owners of Hungarian nationality.

    In short, while European institutions are busy working to compensate victims of colonial or more recent atrocities across the world, in their own backyard legal owners of property are being stripped of their lands based solely on their nationality, and on the basis of a set of decrees that could not stand the scrutiny of modern democratic standards. Although problems regarding the Beneš Decrees has been discussed in the European Parliament several times in recent years, no decisions against them have ever been issued.

    Referring to the European Commission’s earlier statement, according to which the Decrees are a collection of historical documents, Loránt Vincze had pointed out that this is simply a false conclusion, since their legal consequences are still affecting nationalities branded as collectively guilty by the documents. According to him, “even if we are looking at it from a strictly legal point of view, we still have to conclude that they are unacceptable, since their foundation is an ethnic discrimination reminiscent of the darkest of times.”

  • Foreign investments in Hungary rose by 140%, UN report shows

    Last year, foreign direct investment (FDI) in Hungary rose by 140 percent, bucking the global trend manifested in a 42 percent decline, the latest Global Investment Trend Monitor of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) showed.

    The report said that as a result of the crisis due to the pandemic, greenfield investments fell by 35 percent, cross-border mergers (M&A) by 10 percent and investments based on project financing by 2 percent.

    The automotive industry saw the largest decline in reported greenfield investments globally, with a 52 percent drop.

    The big winner: China

    Several economic analyses have pointed out that China is the big winner of 2020. Due to the epidemic, the Asian country has become the main destination for working capital. The epidemic, according to the Wall Street Journal, only amplified the shift of the global economic power center to the East.

    Hungarian miracle

    Asked about the outstanding Hungarian performance, László György, state secretary at the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, said that the country chose a different path than most other nations.

    “We said that we want to strengthen Hungarian jobs through investments and support companies that spend money on machinery, equipment and technology and to build factories, as they are investing in the future,” György said. “In addition to Hungarians, we support all businesses that consider Hungary as their home and provide a livelihood for Hungarian employees. As a result, while investment sentiment in the world declined by 42 percent, Hungary received almost 2.5 times as much investment capital in 2020 as in the previous year. This is a good foundation for winning once the world economy recovers.”

    In Hungary, foreign direct investment increased by 140 percent, from $1.15 billion to $2.77 billion. It is worth looking at which countries outside Hungary were able to achieve similar or better results.
    Of the nearly 200 countries in the world, only Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark are ahead of Hungary.

    The decline in FDI was the largest in advanced economies with a 69 percent drop, with FDI estimated at $229 billion in these economies. The decline, was the largest in Europe (more than 100 percent), with working capital inflow to the U.S. falling by only half to $134 billion. In this regard, it is significant that China has managed to increase its foreign capital inflow.

    In the EU (now excluding the UK), FDI inflows fell by 71 percent to $110 billion, declining in a total of 17 EU Member States, with the largest declines in Germany (61 percent), Italy (more than 100 percent), and Austria and France (39 percent). A decline of 100 percent means that the inflow of foreign capital completely stopped as a result of the crisis compared to the previous year.

    In Central and Eastern Europe, only two countries escaped the decline, while most of them saw major reductions in capital inflow. In Slovakia, for example, foreign direct investment fell by 87 percent; in the Czech Republic, by 54 percent; and in Romania, by 56 percent. Meanwhile, besides Hungary, Poland was the only other country to buck the trend with a modest 9 percent increase.

    Title image: The launch of new models at the Mercedes factory in Kecskemét, Central Hungary. (source: autogyar.hu)

  • Hungary maintains strict coronavirus measures until March 1, cabinet minister says

    The Hungarian Government has extended its restrictions due to the coronavirus epidemic until March 1, Gergely Gulyás, the Minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office, announced at the weekly press briefing following a cabinet meeting on Thursday.

    Gulyás said that the measures that came into force in November managed to control the spread of the epidemic, and they want to avoid a third wave, so the current rules must be maintained.

    He added that this also requires an extension of the extraordinary legal order, which the government will order on its own authority for an additional 15 days starting from midnight on February 7; after this, parliament will be asked to extend the extraordinary legal order by 90 days. He added that the government will re-evaluate the situation in the second half of February.

    The minister said current restrictive measures can only be eased if the spread of the epidemic continues to decline or if a sufficient number of vaccines arrive. In this regard, Gulyás added that the government wants to procure as many vaccines as possible, but the number of vaccines coming from the European Union is very small.

    Gulyás noted that while Israel has managed to vaccinate nearly 50 percent of its population, the vaccination rate in EU countries is only 2 percent. He added that other vaccines are needed as well to reach the 70 percent rate. Regarding the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, he said that by the end of February, enough of it could arrive for 300,000 people if the contract is honored.

    Gulyás said that the Chinese Sinopharm’s vaccine is also reliable, as 15 million people have already been vaccinated with it. The government has decided to temporarily authorize any vaccine that has already been used to inoculate one million people. Nevertheless, the National Public Health Center will also check every new batch before use, he added.

    He noted that nearly 13 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine had been shipped to the United States, 2.7 million to Israel, and 8.5 million to the 27 EU member states.

    “That’s not enough for a substantive defense,” he said. In terms of vaccination rates, Israel continued to be the best in the world, with almost 50 percent of its population vaccinated, followed by 11.3 percent in the UK, 7 percent in the United States and 2 percent in the EU.

    Gulyás also promised that once the country can relax its coronavirus defense, the hospitality sector, which has been the hardest hit, will be the first to be allowed to return to normal. In the meantime, the government will do all it can to speed up the payment of wage subsidies. So far, the hospitality sector has received HUF 27 billion (€359 million) in wage subsidies, he said.

    Title image: Coronavirus inoculation at the Sunshine home for the elderly in the central Hungarian village of Iváncsa. (MTI/Zsolt Szigetváry)