The “Status Law” is a bill by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior the purpose of which is to regulate the new career path of pedagogues. The educators are deeply unsatisfied with their current work conditions and have been on strike constantly for more than a year now without any success. The “Status Law” is the response by the government to the demands, but in reality, it does not offer a solution. In fact, it only worsens circumstances.
Domestic violence is a serious and insidious social issue that concerns anyone, regardless of gender or social status. It takes several forms, including physical, emotional, verbal, spiritual, sexual, economic, or a combination of the above. Due to the fact that it occurs behind closed doors, it is often completely invisible to society. This makes it difficult to assess how many families are actually involved.
Transnational repression, as defined by a Freedom House report, describes how authoritarian states reach across national borders to silence dissent and critical voices among diaspora and exile communities. It is essentially an assortment of methods that a state can use to subdue its own citizens living outside of its territory. Freedom House first drew attention to this phenomenon in their 2021 report, “Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach.”
Academic freedom is the cornerstone of a thriving educational environment, providing researchers, teachers, and students with the independence to pursue knowledge and engage in intellectual discourse without fear of censorship or political interference. It nurtures an atmosphere that promotes the unfettered exchange of ideas, challenges existing beliefs, and encourages the pursuit of truth.
The Visegrad Group — comprising the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia — has been declared dead, barely alive or at least unconscious a number of times due to disagreements on a wide range of issues such as democratic values, rule of law, European Union as well as foreign policy in a broader sense.
Gaslighting is a psychological term that we hear more and more. It covers serious emotional and mental abuse, a manipulation technique whereby the perpetrator controls the victim by invalidating their perception of reality. In particular, the term political gaslighting is spreading in a new wave of political science mainly in Western Europe and the United States.
In Hungary, women received full suffrage in 1945, after which their number in the parliament increased continuously until 1980. In the most favorable periods female representation was one third of the parliament, which can already be considered a “critical mass of women”.
In December 2022, the Hungarian government launched its 12th national consultation, asking voters about their views on the Ukraine-Russia war and the European Union’s sanctions. The consultation, as usual was filled with manipulated questions, false dilemmas, and vague expressions, and was preceded by a strong, one-sided Eurosceptic and state-funded campaign.
The following article is an analysis of how the Orbán government transformed the form of conditional distribution in Hungary over the past 12 years. How did the support system for the poor become the support system of the middle and upper middle class and how did it exclude the most disadvantaged groups from almost all benefits?
Hungary’s right-wing government, since Fidesz’s first landslide victory in 2010 and their subsequent successes in 2014, 2018, and 2022, has been increasingly willing to put cultural issues, particularly gender and LGBT+, at the forefront of its campaigns. Fidesz’s framing of the issue regularly contained the need for children’s protection rather than overt attacks on sexual and gender minorities.
