International Politics

Since 2010 the Fidesz-KDNP coalition adopted a new constitution with so far four rounds of constitutional amendments. This analysis issued by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union and the Eötvös Károly Institute highlights the specific concerns in relation to the Fourth Amendment.

Tímea Szabó is co-president of the new green left party Dialogue for Hungary (PM). In the interview she talks about the new party's strategy after the split from the green party LMP in January. 

With the constitutional amendments adopted on the 11th of March, Viktor Orbán has once again caused a surprise. The reactions of the Western European public show that there is still an inadequate grasp of how political power is exercised by Orbán’s government. European democrats now finally need to formulate a common position against the power centralization in the country.

The new right-wing populism is not the rehearsal of something old but a new political phenomenon – and it is here to stay. In this, the new right-wing populism is the severest challenge to the European project since the beginnings of European integration. 

After passing the Electoral Procedure Act, we are still far from knowing the final rules less than a year and a half ahead of the next parliamentary elections. However, the new electoral system turns out to be a measure of the governing party to increase its chances of winning the 2014 general election, while oppositional parties will be forced to organise their activist network and engage in a door-to-door campaign more effectively than before. 

The debt and financial crisis in Europe has accentuated three major areas in need of reform: national debt, the stability of the financial system, and the unbalanced distribution of incomes and wealth. There are instruments of reform that could work effectively for all three areas.  

The anthology „Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus“, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s office in Beirut, is one of the six books to receive the „English PEN Award for Outstanding Writing in Translation“ in the year 2013. 

Is the Czech Republic “a European state without Europeans”? Vladimír Handl analyses the dissolution of the Czech consensus, its relationship to the German approach in rescuing the EU, the “nation-state-based” current in Czech politics and the risks of Euroscepticism.

During the three years of Europe’s crisis many supposedly rock-solid certainties about the European Union have been shaken up. Today, even dedicated Europeans do have to admit that, in its present shape, the EU may be one of the casualties of the crisis. At our conference Europe’s Common Future such concerns about a possibly disastrous failure of the Eurozone were palpable.