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Things NOT Happening With Respect to the Refugee Crisis in Europe

source: J.Borocz’s blog GlobalSocialChange Here are the conversations that are NOT happening: The European Union is not giving any clear signals just what it actually wants the Schengen states most exposed to the refugee inflows–not only Hungary, but also Greece, Bulgaria and Italy–to do. It is completely obvious that, if anybody actually cares about alleviating […]

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Jobbik agrees with the Migrant Solidarity network? (No, not really.)

source: MigSzol.Com UPDATE: Since the writing of this article it has been reported that the German state has suspended Dublin deportations of Syrian refugees, even if they have their fingerprints and asylum claims in countries like Hungary. This is a great victory for the rights of refugees in Europe.  This also begs the question of why Syrians are […]

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The Refugee Crisis: Hungary, Australia, and Worldwide

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was originally commissioned by and published in WarScapes. It was reprinted on LeftEast with the permission of the authors. 1. A Train Stopped at Subotica On June 26, Lisa Rose Steele and Andrew Ryder took a train from Belgrade, Serbia, to Budapest, Hungary. The following is a personal reflection on […]

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The far-right as a counter-hegemonic bloc to neoliberalism? The case of Jobbik (I)

Note from the LeftEast editors: This article has been adapted for LeftEast from the original in Eszmélet 105. Follow the link to read PART II: ‘National rejuvenation’ and ‘social justice’: the ideology and praxis of Jobbik   PART 1: From right –wing movement to the third force in Hungarian politics: Jobbik’s ascendence 1999-2010 In recent years, Hungary […]

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Interviews

Government policy no longer seeks to prevent the processes of social marginalization in Hungary. An interview with Eszter Neumann.

The Hungarian Government’s steps towards creating a ‘work-based society’ are likely to bring cuts and conceptual reforms in education. Eszter Neumann, in an interview for Fent Es Lent, discussed the social processes behind this policy shift. Fent es Lent: The Hungarian government is preparing serious cuts and conceptual reforms in education. Let’s begin with issues […]

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Hungary’s Brokerage Crisis: How Far Will It Reach

Note from the LeftEast editors: This text was originally published on the authors’s blog Global Social Change, dedicated to his book The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis, Routledge 2009 , and is reprinted on Lefteast with the kind permission of the author. Hungary’s National Bank, in its capacity as financial […]

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The illiberal democracy and the revanchist city – The spatial and political transformation of Budapest since 2010

“We need to give back public spaces to the citizens” – argued István Tarlós, the mayor of Budapest and a member of the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party when he tried to justify the city’s criminalizing of homelessness in most of its public spaces. The message here was clear: homeless people do not qualify for citizen status […]

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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary: A radical re-imagination of housing is what we need (part 2)

Note from the LeftEast editors: the first part of Mariann Dosa’s text on the housing policies in Hungary can be read here. Any housing policies that prioritize equity need to be based on broadly accessible public housing, because it is the only way forward that transcends the structure of neoliberal capitalism and hence, offers radical […]

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Struggles in and over Public Space: Hungarian Heritage as a Homeless Free Zone

Source: CritCom, Council of European Studies, Columbia University In November 2013, members of the organization The City Is for All (A Város Mindenkié, henceforth AVM) were forcibly removed from the Budapest General Assembly, after forming a singing, poem-reciting human chain in protest of the extension of criminalization of homeless people ‘to a major part of […]

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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary (part 1)

Housing has recently become a hot topic in Hungarian public discourse. This increase in attention was caused by the alarming hardships caused by the steep increase in the interest on foreign currency (in which most mortgages taken in the 2000’s were taken) and the increasingly harsh, systematic, and overt criminalization of homeless people in the […]