The Budapest Beacon

07/11/2019

Over the past nine years public affairs have gradually become the private matter of people with power, and every relevant law, regulation and practice echoes this perspective.

06/07/2018

This is par for the course.

Black Cube targeted Hungarian civil society.

13/06/2018

The new administrative courts are to be packed with government officials and party apparatchiks!

Hungary’s government is warning the European Union’s executive to avoid overstepping its authority when evaluating the nation’s second judicial overhaul in less then a decade.

09/06/2018

Is Hungary’s Constitutional Court a political court? Hungarian constitutional legal expert Gábor Halmai seems to think so.

On 5 June the Hungarian Constitutional Court issued two injunction decisions, almost identical in their texts, which suspend the constitutional review procedures against two laws enacted in early April, 2017 by the Hungarian Parliament, outside the normal legislative process. The first, an amendment...

28/05/2018

"There are worrying signs that things may get worse before they get better. Viktor Orban now appears set to fulfill his campaign pledge to extract “moral, political and legal” retribution from those who opposed him. He welcomed the publication of an “enemies list” containing some 200 names – including numerous American citizens – and urged the close-to-Orban media to do more to root them out. This is the kind of smear campaign that often comes just before the gloves come off and the blows begin."

In connection with the confirmation vote for the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Ranking Member of the Helsinki Commission, made the following statement on May 24. Senator C…

09/05/2018

Fidesz co-opted the socialists’ economic hinterland back in 2014 with the 16.55 billion Ft (roughly $70 million) purchase by the National State Asset Company (MNV) of the 15-hectare (45 acre) riverfront territory where the 2024 Olympic village was to be built, from Wing Zrt., the real estate division of Wallis Rt., the holding company run by Gordon Bajnai between 2000 and 2005. (Bajnai served as Gyurcsány’s Minister for Economics before becoming prime minister himself in 2009). Wing Zrt. subsequently sold half its shares in Market Építő Zrt., the vertically integrated general contractor that built most of Wing’s office buildings between 2004 and 2010, to István Garancsi, a close associate of Viktor Orbán (and many believe one of the Fidesz chairman’s many strawmen). After a period of relative inactivity, from 2014 Wing Zrt. (as developer) and Market Építő Zrt. (as general contractor) resumed development of a number of large projects around Budapest, including Hungary’s largest office building: the new Magyar Telekom headquarters at the Ferencváros football stadium just across the street from the main Budapest bus terminal. Market Zrt. is the majority owner of the company that is currently building the new headquarters for the National Oil Company (MOL) in Budapest’s 11th district. In short, key businessmen behind Fidesz and the socialist party have been cooperating in business matters for the past four years. So isn’t it high time for the socialist party to "hop on the Fidesz bandwagon"?

If there was one lesson the Hungarian opposition should have learned from the colossal defeat they suffered in the recent national election, it was that without interparty cooperation ever winning …

29/04/2018

The best of the Beacon: Benjamin Novak on the feeble foreign response to passage of the NGO bill stigmatizing civil organizations funded from abroad.

21/04/2018

The best of the Beacon: Justin Spike's "The Rise and Fall of a Modern Hate Campaign: How Fidesz has reproduced a politics of hate and fear that harkens back to the most gruesome dystopian imaginations of the postwar period."

19/04/2018

The best of the Beacon: Justin Spike explains how distributing EU funds to party loyalists and oligarchs has radically reshaped Hungary’s political landscape.

18/04/2018

Is the European People's Party (EPP) responsible for the fact that Hungary is no longer a democracy?

Professor of politics and law says European People's Party and European Council responsible for failing to contain the spread of illiberal democracy.