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From “Returning to Europe” to “Occupying Brussels”: The EU was crucial to Viktor Orbán’s rise — now, he wants to remake it in his own image

The article was originally published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung here. It is reproduced with permission.  In the past decade, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has emerged as one of Europe’s most important — and controversial — politicians: no small feat for the leader of a country whose economic or strategic importance on both European and global […]

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Roma Holocaust Remembrance: The Complicit Silence of History’s Bystanders and the Persistence of Anti-Roma Racism

August 2nd is known in a number of European countries as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a significant day in history because 80 years ago on the night of August 2nd, 1944 the Nazis killed the more than 4,200 Roma and Sinti incarcerated in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp in gas chambers, effectively liquidating […]

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Hungary’s Reindustrialization: Hedging Geopolitical Conflicts?

Note from LeftEast Editors: Originally published by Second Cold War Observatory on May 6, 2024. Hungary’s current cycle of industrialization within electric vehicle (EV) and battery production chains may be seen as a typical case for third-country attempts to “hedge” geoeconomic competition (Camba and Epstein, 2023). Attempting to capitalize on its position at the Eastern periphery […]

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We Asked: How is Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in Hungary? (an Interview with Soma Ábrahám Kiss and Bernáth Lackó)

Most political parties and other actors of the political landscape, significant or niche, openly support the Israeli narrative and there are barely any public figures that condemn the oppression of anti-war protests and opinions in public statements, unless they are asked directly to do so.  On Hungary’s political palette, it is mainly the small and marginal leftist organisations that support peace or the Palestinian people.

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Is There a Global History of Eastern Europe from a Non-Western Perspective?

Note from LeftEast editors: This article is a version of an interview Bence Horváth conducted in Hungarian with Zoltán Ginelli and Eszter Szakács, published by 444.hu on 24 May, 2021. It has been translated and re-edited by Zoltán Ginelli. The original introduced the exhibition ‘Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South’ featured in the OFF-Biennale Budapest and […]

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The 11th March for Housing Will Make the Housing Crisis an Issue for Local Elections in Budapest

Note from LeftEast Editors: The English translation of this interview, which first appeared in Hungarian, is published on LeftEast thanks to our cooperation with Hungarian portal Mérce within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). You can read the original article at: https://merce.hu/2023/10/15/mindenkinek-laknia-kell-valahol-elindult-a-11- The Budapest Housing March (Lakásmenet) was held for the 11th […]

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“The roots of the reactionary bloc lie in the supposed ‘democratic’ camp”: Interview with the Slovak collective Karmína

Can you tell us a bit more about Karmína? What is your origin story? What do you do? How do you define yourself as a platform/collective? Karmína was established in 2017 as an informal group that runs a collective blog. Some of us have previously worked together, since the mid-2000s, in other initiatives on the […]

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“A Story of Hegemony”: The Folk Dance Movement in Hungary (I)

Between Socialist Cultivation and Ethnonationalism Note from LeftEast editors: This is the first of a two-part interview with LeftEast’s Mary Taylor. The result of a collaboration with Mérce within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet, it was also translated into Hungarian by Kristóf Nagy and Ferenc Kőszeghy. Mérce: Your book about the Hungarian […]

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A guide to the Perverted Ideologies: A Review of Fordulat #30

Culture is everywhere. It is present in the factory, in the bank, in the households, on the stage, in the museum and in the school. It is in the books, in the consciousness of the classes as well as in the ways we understand the world. It is in the style of the buildings, in […]

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Citizenship and Exclusion in Contemporary Hungary

This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersectional perspectives of race, gender, class and citizenship. Since the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in 2015, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become a key figurehead of an ultra-conservative and illiberal European right.[1] This politics is anchored in virulent anti-immigration positions and fierce […]