Hungary held its municipal elections on October 13, 2019. Although the opposition and the regnant Fidesz party applied starkly different communication strategies, one topic featured in both campaigns: antisemitism.
It is crucial to understand the quality and evolution of Hungarian-American relations under the Orbán governments, which have been in office since 2010, as well as the main defining events in the relationship between the Hungarian and American governments.
In mid-June, hundreds of thousands of Czechs took to the streets of Prague calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš in light of both a criminal investigation in the Czech Republic over alleged fraud, and an EU investigation over the abuse of EU funds by his Agrofert conglomerate.
The Hungarian government is not anti-Semitic. It is populist. Playing right into the fears of people is a typical populist strategy. It builds on the same fears as anti-Semitic campaigns do, true, but despite the same foundations, the end results are somewhart different.
Looking at the results in the V4 countries (Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) helps gain a better understanding of the popularity of liberals. In the 2019 European elections, liberal parties performed quite well, especially in light of the popularity of the far-right in the region.
The last days of the Hungarian EP election campaign were characterized by an ever-intensifying anti-EU campaign on government-controlled and fringe disinformation portals. The Hungarian government seeks a strong mandate to represent its interest in the European Union
Swedish think-tank Timbro presented the subsequent edition of the Authoritarian Populism Index. The aim of the index is chiefly to determine to what extent populist parties can pose a real threat to liberal democracy in the European Union and five other countries on the continent.
A study by McKinsey & Company showed that 49% of the working hours in Hungary can be automated with the already existing technologies. This does not necessarily mean that these jobs will be lost forever, but they are going to be transformed.
The conflict of interest of individual parties in Hungary proved to be the opposition’s great weakness, the 2018 election results illustrate this perfectly: The national electoral system was shaped by the 2010 Fidesz government to favor large parties, including winner compensation and different types of gerrymandering.
713 articles shared on Facebook sites belonging to government-controlled media outlets and pro-Kremlin outlets indicate that the governing party’s EP campaign messages mainly attack the EU elite and the bloc’s institutional system through the dissemination of manipulative information concerning migration.
