Free Market Foundation

We may recently often hear that something is a \"Putinesque measure\". However, in Hungary, the governing party Fidesz, lead by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is really using Putin’s solutions as its point of reference. Let’s see how similar Orbán’s and Putin’s methods are.

Just like communism, Orbán’s regime is unsustainable and doomed to fail. Just like the communists, the current government sees only the collective, rather than the individuals. And the individuals who don’t share Orbán’s illiberal ideas are getting angry.Once again, they want liberty.

Fake news are like religion, you must believe them despite of all common sense and evidence to the contrary. Like any radical religion, it must be protected at all costs. And so, in the fifth volume, Dolores Umbridge made Harry write lines, etching them into his own skin, saying: “I must not tell lies”.

We must not remain silent, we must not accept fear. The government is still in power because it made people believe that it will protect them from the immigrants, NGOs, the EU and capitalistic and imperialistic American interests. And in the meantime they make people terrified of dissent.

With no independent media, no checks and balances, no civil oversight, one of the most corrupt governments in the EU can expand on its already immense powers and get even closer to Putin’s Russia. But it is not too late to act and save what remains of civil society in Hungary.

Years after communism failed spectacularly with the demise of the Soviet Union, long after the horrendous deeds of the collectivist dictatorships became well known, there are still people who have the audacity to laud mass murderers of the likes of Fidel Castro.

The non-partisan or opposition media in Hungary is in decline as the influence of the government increases, since the populist governing party owns a large part of the local media. The government takes more and more drastic steps to silence voices of dissent.

The answer to populism is not more populism. Demagogues can be defeated without lies. In the recent U.S. election two extremely untrustworthy candidates tried to outbid each other in telling the biggest lies. You can promise blood, sweat and tears and still be loved.

The Trump phenomenon has left analysts baffled. Who would have thought that such a clown can stand a real chance of becoming the next President of the United States? While most of the experts were still figuring out what on earth has happened, the explanation came from an unlikely source: South Park.

Sharing and digital economies usually thrive together in happy symbiosis. Digitalization, easy access to the Internet, apps and smartphones made sharing behaviors easier, and provided a platform for buyers and sellers to find each other. The question of the digital and sharing economy is not a purely economic or legal one.