Hungarian educational institutions have been struggling with insufficient funding for a long time. Yet, the reforms aiming to tackle these challenges ended up damaging the education system. Tension is increasing between teachers and the government, with no solution in sight.
The conclusion for the Hungarian opposition shall therefore be quite obvious: they need to find an answer to the abovementioned economic needs. The refugee crisis may dominate the public discussion for now, but everyday lives of the voters are defined by the worsening economic situation and the fear of wash-out.
Although the frontlines are very clear when it comes to democracy, rule of law, European orientation – it is not the case in economic issues. Opposition parties have to remember this when creating a program and looking for alternatives instead of the regime of Fidesz: the Hungarian opposition is not right of left wing, rather eclectic – just like the government.
The purely staff-related nature of the reforms and the statements by Law and Justice’s politicians leave no doubts that the media fight has one objective: undermining the public media’s ability to scrutinise the actions of the government. The attempt to turn the Polish media into a propaganda tool of the government has already been noticed abroad.
The sequence of events in Poland might sound familiar to many of you. Hungary experienced quite a similar scenario. Clearly, Poland is not an isolated case. Political radicalisation and anti-democratic backtracking might be contagious.
President Andrzej Duda has just signed the act passed recently by both the Polish parliament (o, hail, the parliamentary majority of Law and Justice!) and the Senate (yay! another session held at 3am!) that is to alter the way in which Constitutional Tribunal operates. So now instead of 5 independent judges we’ll have 15 (thus 13 will be necessary to make a binding decision) judges of somewhat dubious background while all claims will be scrutinized according to the chronological order in which they have been filed. Sounds sound, but is it really?
You were ‘nice’? Here is a reward. You were ‘naughty’ – here is a punishment. There is a kind of a social contract between an individual and Santa Claus. This simple and intuitive logic is not uncommon in many cultures. But I cannot help at wonder: what would Santa Claus be like if he was a government figure?
The mass scale of the social response to what Law and Justice is doing, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, which within two days gathered over 30,000 supporters may be just a preview of a massive political force that shall defend the rule of law, its sense of belonging to Europe and liberal democracy which it deems indispensable, or even ‘holy’.
More than 20 representatives of NGOs, Roma employment organizations, journalists, politicians, embassies’ representatives, among others, attended a seminar organized by INESS on December 15, 2015 devoted to describing the existing barriers on the labor market, which are the result of existing legislation and discuss possibilities of their removal, or change.
