Blogging the democratic revolution
Under Ceausescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej regime (Dej was the political mentor of Ceausescu) 250,000 Jews have been sold by Romania. The German ethnics who held the Romanian citizenship were also sold to the West Germany. Aside from the financial transaction, Ceausescu asked Israel to smooth the relations of Romania with the United States. This…
In Hungary over the past 48 hours it’s the Nika riots all over again. Sort of. First, political parties in Hungary do not immediately line up into conveniently-intelligible left-wing/right-wing definitions, though some are easily mappable for Americans (the SZDSZ are basically libertarians). See my previous posts here and here for some quick shorthand. What do…
Pestiside is a zippy, if probably left-leaning, blog that really makes you feel like you’ve got your hand on the pulse of Hungary. It’s full of the lowdown and fun to read. On this great day that George Bush visited and honored the Hungarian Freedom Fighters of 1956, Pestiside put in a delicious item that…
Hungarian freedom fighters atop the jackboot remains of the Stalin statue Source: 1956 Hungary President George W. Bush, in Europe today, remembered some of the bravest democratic revolutionaries in all history, Hungary’s Freedom Fighters, who stood up to Soviet tanks in the name of democracy. It’s the fiftiest anniversary of that stunning struggle in the…
This would be the first time that any party has managed to hold power for two terms. As previously discussed, the political parties don’t quite conform to typical expectations as understood in the US, nor even as they would be understood a hop, skip, and jump away in Italy. If you’re not familiar with the…
I don’t have an awful lot that I can add to this, but it needs to be noted. If I’d set out for the library a half-hour earlier one day, I’d have wound up either in or walking right past where the Aranykez bomb went off — it is a REALLY central location in downtown…
This would be a completely irrelevant toss-off post except for its potential significance. The MDF (Hungarian Democratic Forum) is raising some eyebrows with a couple pieces of news lately. It needs to, because as discussed before, the MDF is in a fight for its life when it comes to parliamentary representation. If it cannot make…
Putin has okayed the return of the Sarospatak Library, seized by the Nazis and then by the Russians in WWII. Of course, this raises some eyebrows over the larger repatriation issues, even if the Russian official media feel the need to demonstrate that no new repatriation precedents are being set with the move. Given this,…
As part of my previous explication of the Hungarian political parties, and in order to convey how the parties involved are pretty counter-intuitive to American standards, I????????m presenting excerpted transcriptions of speeches regarding the upcoming elections. The first is by Viktor Orb????n, head of FIDESZ, who is presenting his eighth ???????state of the country??????? address…
In the Bucharest Daily News, a little item pops up: the Hungarians want the Romanians to pass a minority status law. Yawn. What else is new? Oh. Yes. That EU thing. Speaking in Targu-Mures on Saturday during a two-day visit to Transylvania, Szili Katalin also spoke about cooperation between Hungary and Romania in view of…
Index recently ran a condensed political analysis from financial analysts at Erste Bank, entitled The Market doesn’t care for Grand Coalitions. The upshot of the article is that across Central Europe, the political scene is characterized by weak parliamentary majorities. The writers give a general overview of East-Central Europe, which is unfortunately so severely condensed…