Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave his annual state of Hungary address last week. He offered no new insights, but provided an extensive defence of the government’s policies.

After months of protracted debates within the government and between the responsible ministry and various social stakeholders, Parliament finally passed the reform of the higher education system.

Recent allegations that President Pál Schmitt has plagiarised most if not all of his dissertation threaten to harm beyond repair a presidency that has been beset by difficulties to begin with.

Almost a year to date of his last appearance in the European Parliament, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faced his critics again in a heated plenary session.

Though he took the helm in troubled times, Gordon Bajnai’s premiership is widely considered a brief period of stability in the long period of chaos that has characterised Hungarian politics over the past years.

On January 2nd Fidesz took a little break and celebrated itself and its new Fundamental Laws at the Budapest Opera. After slightly over a week without a demonstration, the opposition, too, gathered for the occasion, though in a less celebratory mood than the official guests.

It took the Hungarian government months of increasing budget qualms to realise that it’s better to have an IMF umbrella than not to have one. Yet it appears that the realisation was theoretical.

We will probably never know for sure whether PM Viktor Orbán meant to say no to the agreement reached at the EU summit, but the major question for now is whether Orbán’s quick reversal heralds an actual willingness to enter into the fiscal union proposed by Germany and France.

With its two-thirds majority Fidesz dominates the present, with the Fundamental Laws supplanting the current Constitution it seeks to control the future, and now Fidesz seeks to make its view of history the definitive one as well. To this end, it has introduced a law on communist crimes and how belated justice might be achieved at least in some cas...

Fidesz’ electoral law is now almost complete and most of the crucial details have been submitted in a bill to Parliament. Most of these details reflect the trends we outlined a couple of weeks ago in our analysis of the bill’s rough draft. The most important novelty – and the one we focus on in our review below – is that Fidesz has also designed th...