In the late millennium

Or it may be that we in the West are not exceptional, Russians are also just people, and it can happen to any country that is not willing to resist it.

May be that official comms are MITMed by the three letters, as they should be, and they need a secure channel to commit treason on.

If the election was today, according to a wide range of pollsters, Tisza would beat Fidesz by a wide margin and be able to form a government by itself, but would not get a supermajority to change the constitution. They want to, among other things, join the EU prosecutor’s office, introduce complete confiscation of all property for anyone caught embezzling state funds, introduce term limits for the Prime Minister, and reaffirm the alignment to the EU and NATO.

BTW, Telex is the largest independent Hungarian news site, and they do publish news in English as well.

That accouns for like 2-3% of seats. And it is also a good question who they will vote for this time around, I don’t imagine a lot of Ukrainian-Hungarians will vote like last time.

Gyurcsány was the spoiler for decades and the deciding factor almost every election. He is out of the picture. Finally after 35 years.

Kamala brought back Hillary’s campaign staff. They are the same picture.

Hungary is currently making a serious effort. If nothing changes, Orbán loses the next election and either has to flee the country or go to jail in 2026.

Is he? Where is that being reported on?

Don’t get me wrong, I really hope for this to be a watershed moment for ousting Erdogan. We are all on the same side here.

Except the world is getting tired of it.

These protests were basically spontaneous, since the government wanted to pass the law quickly leaving very little time before announcement and it being passed. In fact, it is technically unconstitutional, since they didn’t even wait to amend their own constitution to allow it before passing it. They will amend it though.

The point is, these people mostly heard at work that this happened and there will be a protest, and took to the streets the same afternoon, no preparation, no notice. Huge turnout for something that was barely organized.

The other special thing is that this crowd, and crowds nowadays are “bipartisan” by Hungarian standards, it is both liberals and nationalists out here. Memes saying “I’ve never been to Pride, this will be my first one” are going viral. When confronted by the police, the crowd sang the national anthem, the folk song “Spring winds bring the flooding water” and the nationalist revolutionary song Kossuth-nóta with the refraine being “Long live Hungarian freedom! Long live the homeland!” at them.

Here’s another picture from the protest, the signs say “I am trans, but still have a bigger dick than Orbán”, and - loosely translated because of idioms - “This would be a better country if you would go jack each other off instead of riling people up”.

They are doing just that, Hungary has been sanctioned and is “paying” daily fines because of the decline of the rule of law in the country, specifically it was sanctioned for inhuman treatment of asylum seekers and refusing to process them. In practice, these fines mean that grant money is not paid out to Hungary.

This is Orbán trying to maintain power and distract from the fact that the country’s economy is collapsing from said sanctions. He looks set to lose the next election.

That said, as long as these abhorrences, like attacks on civil rights, workers’ rights and open corruption were not directly impeding broader European and specifically German policy, the EU was happy to essentailly fund Orbán to create a dystopic propaganda machine and destroy Hungarian democracy. In fact, the destruction of workers’ rights heavily favoured German car manufacturers.

The EU made this mess, but the EU is finally not impeding Hungary, the real, actual Hungary from cleaning it up. And I still maintain I’m staunchly pro-EU, just against business interests fucking it up for all of us.

Epic CEO (makers of Fortnite, the Epic Games Store and Unreal Engine) who has regular rants on social media hating Linux.

They were calling it a cancer just a decade ago. Now they can’t ignore it.

People suck at gauging risk. The only question is whether people have to deal with the threat of losing their job or not. Nobody thinks “how safe is my job in quantitavie terms”, it’s more “do I feel my job is safe”. More people may flip on the second in a market crash, but it doesn’t change anything for already insecure people.

The whole thing bears more explanation.

Orbán look set to lose the election in 2026, and it trying to use this to divide the opposition party that is currently very successful in trying to challenge him. If everyone talks about Pride instead of the collapse of healthcare and education (people are waiting months to get on waitlists that are year-long for everything, thousands of GPs are missing), then he thinks maybe he can scare enough people with the threat of war like last time to stay in power.

It may backfire though, because it looks like it brought out some serious organic support for Pride, and it may turn into a big protest against the government without impacting the opposition since they won’t be leading it.

That said, things are going downhill very fast, there are new lows the government hits every week. They falsified EU parliament documents to aid their propaganda a few weeks ago, last week Orbán has been calling the opposition “bugs that managed to survive the winter” that “survived too much” and “have to be cleaned come spring”.

The last time someone in power used that language, it was the “nemzetvezető” (our word for führer) Ferenc Szálasi, describing Jewish people. Orbán actually had to backtrack, because even his base has the decency to question that.

Also, the Hungarian christian churches, both the Catholics and the Protestants are in bed with Orbán, but it’s not like the US, nobody wants a theocracy, it’s just a vote grab and general corruption. In fact, that alignment is costing them votes now, since there seems to be a pedophilic abhorrence getting outed every month since last year when they had to get rid of the President and the Minister of Justice for one.

Also, technically they are not the worst Middle Eastern ally of the West. Maybe giving Israel the go-ahead for their genocide showed that nobody cares about democracy and the rule of law in that part of the world anyway.

Not even the biggest thing that beautiful trio ruined. Their lobbying and Mutti Merkel’s politics were the main contributors to the Hungary problem. So if you want to know why common defense policies get vetoed or why is the Ukraine response is a shitshow, the root cause is that VW needed cheap exploitable workers.

Meanwhile in Belgium,

“I don’t know where or when will I end up after I board the bus back home from work”