Hungary

Wednesday

The Spectator

Which racecourses have seen the most deaths?

Hero worship Peter Magyar, the new PM of Hungary, has the unique distinction among world leaders of bearing the name of the country he leads. Why do we call the country Hungary when the natives call it the ‘land of the Magyars’? – ‘Hungary’ is literally, the land of the Huns. However, Middle English didn’t distinguish between them and the Magyars, a tribe which, in the 9th century, invaded and settled in what had been known as Pannonia. The Magyars themselves spoke a Uralic language related to Finnish, in which ‘Magyar’ is believed to mean ‘hero man’. Any relationship to the acronym ‘MAGA’ is purely coincidental. School starters The Scottish Green

Monday

Tim Montgomerie

Is Britain losing its sense of fairness?

49 min listen

Has Britain become a freeloader’s paradise, asks the Spectator’s economics editor Michael Simmons in our cover piece this week. Michael analyses ‘the benefits of benefits’, at a time when Britain’s welfare bill is burgeoning and most households are struggling with cost of living. For example, while a family of four can expect to pay £111 to visit the Tower of London, that is just £4 total on Universal Credit (UC), and for London Zoo it is £108 compared to £26. Michael is not arguing against the idea of helping those in need, but pointing out that – as the benefits bill continues to increase – this is another case of

Is Britain losing its sense of fairness?
Cara Usher-Smith

Why Britain needs more marriage

Hungary is something of a bête noire in the international community. Viktor Orban and his government have had much-deserved condemnation over their treatment of certain minority groups, as well as undermining judicial independence and what many see as an attack on the freedom of the media.  But Orban’s administration has been getting something right, and it would be a shame if the country’s pariah status means its greatest achievement goes overlooked. Hungary has become a marriage super-power. According to the Marriage Foundation, which rightly promotes legal matrimony as the bedrock of a healthy society, Hungary’s marriage rate has exploded over the last decade, rising by 92 per cent. The country

Wednesday

William Atkinson

Is time up for Viktor Orban?

For a country of ten million people that spent most of the 20th century occupied and impoverished, Hungary today is thriving. This, in the eyes of his supporters, is down to the 16-year rule of Viktor Orban. Hungary’s Prime Minister has, to use his phrasing, aimed to create an ‘illiberal democracy’. He has reformed the country’s judiciary, given tax breaks to mothers to increase the birth rate and zealously resisted the EU’s refugee policies. The last is illustrated by the 140-mile fence along the Serbian border constructed during the 2015 migration crisis. Proud border guards tell you that 1.1 million migrants have been kept out in a decade. Nevertheless, Orban

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Meet the world’s finest string quartet

Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to form a string quartet. That’s always an interesting choice. For a gifted and ambitious young musician, it takes a special kind of self-knowledge to pool your artistic future with three colleagues. But it’s what followed that makes the Takacs Quartet so fascinating. A relocation from the eastern bloc to the free West, the retirement of all but one of the founding members – and yet 51 years later the Takacs Quartet is still, recognisably, the same group. Some would say that it’s currently the finest string quartet in the world.

Sunday

Philip Mansel

The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism. Yet, partly owing to Maria Theresa’s force of character, this complex tapestry of nationalities remained a great power After she came to the throne in 1740, she felt ‘forsaken by the whole world’. Encouraged by France, Austria’s neighbours Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria invaded the monarchy in order to divide it between them. By

Thomas Lorman

Viktor Orban is not abandoning Europe

The news that Hungary and China have signed a security pact, following a visit by to Budapest by Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security, has been a long time in the making. In 2012, two years after beginning his second term as Prime Minister, Viktor Orban formally re-orientated Hungary’s economic and foreign policy under the slogan of the ‘Eastern Opening’. Orban understood the frustration that had returned him to power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Two decades of integration with western Europe had made plenty of Hungarians prosperous, but not the majority.  The introduction of the free market in Hungary was accompanied by the mass closure of businesses, and

Tuesday

Adam LeBor

Giorgio Perlasca’s Christmas in wartime Budapest

Artillery boomed over the Buda hills, the flashes of explosions slicing through the freezing winter dusk. The crack of rifle fire sounded nearby and the air was thick with the acrid stink of cordite. It was 24 December 1944 and Giorgio Perlasca was trying to get to the Spanish Legation villa to celebrate Christmas. The Hungarian soldiers at the checkpoint said it was not possible to proceed. The Russians were advancing and were now just a few hundred yards away. Perlasca explained that he was a Spanish diplomat and asked again to pass through. The soldiers reluctantly agreed. A few minutes later Perlasca was inside the Legation building. Sixty people

Tuesday

Allan Mallinson

The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed

Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders ‘Silence! In Polish!’ Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls ‘God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery’ as he jumps from his Dakota? Commander Eugeniusz Plawski, the captain of the Polish destroyer Piorun which first spotted the Bismarck and charged at her to draw fire, might be better known if he had featured in the 1960

Tuesday

Andrew Taylor

The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed

Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products. And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers and authors’ estates. In the past 60 years, there have been few bigger brands than the late John le Carré, so it’s no surprise to find a posthumous outing with the words ‘A John le Carré novel’ plastered over the cover. Its author, Le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway, is a well-established novelist in his

Friday

Carson Becker

Viktor Orban’s adviser has made a big mistake

This week Balazs Orban, the bespectacled political director to the Hungarian Prime Minister (and of no relation to him), has found himself in trouble after a podcast interview he gave on Wednesday. He seemed to imply that Ukraine should not have resisted the Russian onslaught – and that if Hungary had been in a similar position, it would have given up without a fight.  ‘We probably wouldn’t have done what President Zelensky did two and a half years ago, because it’s irresponsible,’ Orban said. ‘Because obviously he put his country into a war defence, all these people died, all this territory was lost – again, it’s their right, it’s their

Thursday

Lukas Degutis

Hungary is stretching the EU’s patience to its limit

Hungary is no stranger to spats with its European neighbours. Under prime minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership, it has exercised veto rights to block Ukrainian military aid and Russian sanctions, delayed the Nato accessions of Sweden and Finland and shrugged off EU asylum regulations. For Budapest, the disputes have proven to be effective leverage in unfreezing funds — once €30million (£25 million), now some €22million (£19 million) — held by the Commission over rule of law violations and corruption concerns. For the EU, Hungary is a diplomatic headache – and one that may be about to get worse. When Hungary assumed the bloc’s rotating presidency last month, Orbán flew to Moscow

Sunday

Adam LeBor

Remembering the Roma Holocaust, 80 years later

On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were classified as racially inferior and enemies of the Third Reich. But while Jewish arrivals were immediately removed from their loved ones, Roma families were often allowed to stay together. Their numbers were much smaller and they refused to be separated. Claimant 3102250 finally received the standard compensation for her ordeal That day, the Roma and

Tuesday

Tibor Fischer

The Orban acolyte who became his fiercest critic

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly. Many a grizzled, lugubrious Hungarian hack had tears of gratitude welling as Magyar demolished the tedium and predictability of Hungarian party politics: Viktor Orban trampling a feeble collection of bunglers and chisellers, known as the opposition, again and again. Of course, the foreign correspondents were even more elated. Vilifying Orban? Step this way for your eulogy and hosannas, you smooth-talking cosmopolitan. Magyar is certainly deserving of attention; he’s fought a remarkable one-man blitzkrieg. In February, no one outside the halls of government knew who he was, and if they did,

Oliver Balch

The immigrant’s experience of Europe

Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his

Wednesday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The West has much to learn from Hungarian culture

In central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honour of his centenary year composer Gyorgy Ligeti now has a road named after him. Contemporary classical music is deemed newsworthy in Hungary. Even more astonishingly – and anyone working in British classical music might want to sit down at this point – the ‘Ligeti 100’ concert at the Budapest Music Centre, dedicated to a clutch of bracing new works, was being filmed for transmission prime time on the Hungarian equivalent of BBC1. Here, we’d be lucky if it got a midnight slot on Radio 3. If much of the West’s

Wednesday

Will Collins

Hungarian wine is Europe’s best kept secret

The Ottomans were evicted from Budapest in 1686, but you can still find reminders of Turkish rule if you look in the right places. All these relics are on the western, or Buda, side of the river, for Pest did not really exist in the 17th century. The original Turkish dome crowns the Rudas Baths, which are still in operation, public baths being one of the more salutary legacies of 145 years of Turkish occupation. Just north of the baths, on a slope leading up to the Buda Castle, an out-of-the-way cluster of graves is all that’s left of an old Muslim cemetery. From a distance, the weathered turban headstones

Friday

Thomas Lorman

Viktor Orbán’s Texas rodeo

Say what you want about Viktor Orbán, but he gives a good speech. His address on Thursday in Dallas on the opening day of CPAC, the annual jamboree of the American right wing, was wide-ranging, hard-hitting and quite funny. One of his best jokes – paraphrasing Pope Francis – was ‘that Hungary was the official language of heaven because it takes an eternity to learn’. It also happens to be nonsense. Hungarian is recognised as considerably easier to learn than Arabic or Mandarin, but Orbán doesn’t do nuance. In fact, the entirety of his speech was about drawing an unbridgeable distinction between the ‘Judeao-Christian’ values of himself and his audience on one

Monday

Stephen Daisley

Viktor Orbán won’t save conservatism

It’s always the ones you most expect. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, nationalist strongman and post-liberal poster-boy gave a speech over the weekend on the evils of race-mixing. He was speaking on Saturday to attendees at Tusványos summer university in Băile Tușnad, Transylvania, previously an annual forum for Hungarian-Romanian dialogue but now an intellectual pep rally for the ultranationalist Fidesz party. According to the Budapest Times, he told his co-ideologues the West was ‘split in two’ between European nations and those in which Europeans and non-Europeans lived together. He declared: ‘Those countries are no longer nations.’ This is also how the Daily News Hungary and Hungary Today characterised Orbán’s remarks.

Wednesday

Annabel Barber

Where does brave, stubborn Hungary stand today?

‘Deplorable,’ wrote the historian Denis Sinor in 1958 about the state of Hungarian historiography in English. ‘Not only are the interpretations out of date but the facts themselves are all too often erroneous, and a proper name which is not misspelt is received with a sigh of relief by the reader who knows Hungarian.’ That was only two years after the revolution of 1956, when Hungary was on the world’s lips. Today, when the government of Viktor Orbán and the country’s position on Russia and Ukraine makes it equally talked about, this book – from an author born in Budapest in 1956 – is well timed, and its subtitle ‘Between