Viktor Orbán feels at home in Iran, Azerbaijan, and China
It’s time to move on, although the saga of the Holocaust Memorial is far from over. Let’s look outside of Hungary to see what Hungarian foreign policy is up to. The first news item is from yesterday; I...
View ArticleHungary’s new friend: Turkmenistan’s dictator
The Hungarian media is full of stories about the visit of the bloody dictator of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov, to Budapest. The trip has been in the making for a long time. It was Hungary...
View ArticleAnother “strategic partnership”: This time with Azerbaijan, a model to follow
While we have been preoccupied with American-Hungarian and Russian-Hungarian relations, the dictator of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, arrived in Hungary for a visit, his third in four and a half years. Not...
View ArticleNo, Viktor, illiberalism is not the key to economic growth
Today’s post was inspired by an article that appeared yesterday in 444.hu with the intriguing title “We only wanted to open the doors to Eastern dictatorships, but they were blown away by the Curse of...
View ArticleViktor Orbán and his entourage in Baku
Not so long ago I wrote about Viktor Orbán’s fallacious theories regarding the direct connection between economic growth and authoritarian regimes. He looked at some of the countries that had plenty of...
View ArticleHungary quits the Open Government Partnership in a huff
Yesterday the Associated Press reported the Hungarian government’s decision to quit the Open Government Partnership (OGP), “a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from...
View ArticleAzeri and Russian companies in charge of the Aquatic World Championship’s...
I already wrote a post on the escalating cost of hosting the Aquatic World Championship. I collected a few figures, going back to 2014, on the estimated cost of the project when the organizers assured...
View ArticleExtradition of Yerzhan Kadesov to Kazakhstan, with Hungarian assistance
In order to understand the ins and outs of today’s post about the extradition of Yerzhan Kadesov, a Kazakh national, from Hungary to Kazakhstan, I’m afraid I have to start with Mukhtar Ablyazov, the...
View ArticleThe “Azerbaijan Laundromat” and Orbán’s Hungary
News of the “Azerbaijan Laundromat” scandal reached Hungary yesterday, thanks to the report of Átlátszó, a group of investigative journalists who participated in an investigation conducted by the...
View ArticleWhy does Fidesz have such a soft spot for Malta?
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted yesterday on a resolution that calls on the Maltese government to set up an investigative committee to look into the circumstances...
View ArticleThe Orbán government under pressure from the West
In the last few days, I have collected seemingly unconnected pieces of news that may indicate some subtle or not so subtle changes in the Orbán government’s domestic and foreign policies. Let’s start...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....