‘I think being in the conservative world, you’re used to the media fabricating things. So, it’s nice to see with my own eyes, and to hear from the people that live here. Obviously,Hungary is viewed favourably by the right wing. I know Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán have met several times, Tucker Carlson has been here. So, in the circles I run in, people have great things to say about Hungary.’
‘At the moment, there seem to be many priorities, ranging from transgender issues to the fight against climate change. However, the focus on making the European Union a competitive, attractive place to do business and fostering the best or most innovation in the world is lacking,’ former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘The problem we’re having today is I think we’re becoming a culture that’s increasingly obsessive about the factual, technical detail, and we’re losing that sense of the whole into which it fits. And the whole isn’t about facts. It’s about interpretation of facts. That isn’t a fault, but a feature, of being human,’ says Calum T M Nicholson, Director of MCC’s Climate Institute.
‘After all these years, I’m in a phase where I really enjoy my work…I also feel that I’m well known in the local community and that many people come to see me, so my work is a success every day. If only two out of twenty patients thank me for changing their lives because, for example, they can work or because their migraines have stopped, that’s a very good feeling for me. I am also on good terms with my colleagues. My secretaries have learned how to make Hungarian espresso, for example, and when I go to the office, they wait for me with it.’
‘The Nixon coalition that really springboarded him as such a popular President—people really forget how popular of a President he was—that was the same sort of coalition that carried Reagan, it’s the same sort of coalition that is now going to carry Trump. It’s a working-class, America First coalition, it crosses socio-economic divides, it crosses racial lines, it crosses ethnic lines, it’s a very strong and growing emerging populous majority. And I think we are going to see the fruits of that this cycle,’ Gavin Wax told Hungarian Conservative.
‘Especially after the assassination attempt, there will be some sympathy for Trump. The images as he was raising his fist, with the American flag in the background, in defiance of critical violence, with blood on his face—that’s a very strong image that could be burnt into the minds of the American people. And since right now, we are living in the world of images, unfortunately, and not in the world of words, that might be a very, very potent weapon in the hands of Republicans demonstrating that Trump is up to his task, as opposed to Biden, who is frail mentally and physically as well.’
‘This new coalition (between the EPP, S&D, and Renew) wants to ignore what has been decided by free and sovereign nations that have grown tired of the policies imposed by Brussels. The interests of the voters are being systematically trampled on in a scandalous way,’ Vox MEP Hermann Terstch told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
‘It took Hungary 14 years to achieve decisive changes in cultural education. Similarly, we will need time to create a substantial cultural and political movement to bring about meaningful legal changes.’
‘Within the current regime, human rights are too profitable and entrenched for many influential entities to support significant reforms,’ Jonathan Price, Research Associate at Oxford University highlighted in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
According to Portuguese writer, political scientist and university professor Jaime Nogueira Pinto right-wing parties like CHEGA, called populists by the mainstream media, are successful with voters across Europe because traditional parties do not pay enough attention to the issues that are actually important to voters.
‘The protection of human life, the protection of the family, or the protection of the sort of education that characterized Europe are basic values that we should definitely stick to because otherwise we are not Europeans,’ Professor Ferenc Hörcher, Director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at Ludovika University of Public Service told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
‘Family policy will remain of utmost importance to us, as part of our overarching priority of demography during our presidency. It is clear that all of our societies are being reshaped by the challenges of demographic change. The Hungarian Presidency intends to examine demography from the perspective of competitiveness in a holistic way by including it in the agenda of almost all council formations,’ State Secretary responsible for families at the Ministry of Culture and Innovation Ágnes Hornung told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
The staging of the musical version of one of the most popular young adult fiction works ever written in Hungarian, titled Be Faithful Unto Death, was a major undertaking and a dream come true for the initiator of the project, Bernadett Csizmadia. The show was performed on the 50th anniversary celebration of the Széchenyi Hungarian School and Kindergarten of New Brunswick, NJ.
Lili Balogh and István Dániel Molnár of the Angyalföld Vadrózsa Dance Ensemble came to the United States as Kőrösi Csoma Program scholars to teach Hungarian folk dancing in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We spoke with the young Hungarian couple, now engaged to each other, about their motivation, their goals and their US experiences.
Commenting on the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling against Hungary, Professor Allan opined that the Court’s ‘interpretive approach to reading the underlying legal materials is living constitutionalism on steroids.’ He added: ‘If it were an American court or a Canadian court doing it, I’d say they’re making it up at the point of application, they’re just making the law up. When that starts happening it’s very difficult to know how to deal with it.’
Luca Mórocz, who came to the U.S. in 2017 as a Hungarian American Coalition (HAC) intern and has worked as a foreign exchange diplomat at the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs assigned to the U.S. State Department’s Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, is currently living and studying in Washington, D.C., organizing various HAC events and a leadership training program. In the interview she talks about her experience in the US, her professional career, and shares her thoughts regarding the challenges of youth engagement Hungarian organizations in the United States face while introducing her new project, the HYPE Network.
‘The Constitution is ideological in nature, as it implicates modern features such as the separation of powers and the protection of individual rights. We all remember the definition of Article 16 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Today, the situation has undergone major changes. Thus, just as the Constitution displaced the law, the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts (based on supposed “principles” and “rights”) is displacing constitutions. Thus, some embrace the latter against the so-called “new law” of activist judges.’
‘It’s really important to understand that we’re not operating military to military with ground rules and understanding of military bases in uniform as these terrorists are not wearing uniforms and are embedding themselves in schools, hospitals, public areas, kindergartens, homes, hiding weapons in those areas, making themselves and the people around them targets. So it’s a very, very complex situation to fight in. Secondly, I think that Israel understands not only the humane side but also that it’s important to allow more and more humanitarian aid to enter because our goal is to eliminate Hamas and not to harm the people of Gaza,’ IDF Staff Sergeant Nicki told Hungarian Conservative in a recent interview.
‘When discussing on a diaspora level, we should not just share local reports with each other, but actually try to find real solutions to the problems. For example, nowadays, we talk a lot about how to reach people who no longer speak Hungarian. To paraphrase a Sándor Kányádi poem: we have only one homeland, and that is the Hungarian language. If the language is lost, many great things will be lost as well.’
‘Everybody’s awoken now, and they are angry, very angry. And that really is what is meant by the end of the innocence. Because before then, even though we knew there was antisemitism, and even though we knew Hamas was a threat, no one understood its severity,’ Avi Benlolo of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative told us in an exclusive interview after the screening of his short documentary The End of the Innocence about the Hamas attacks.
‘States are free to reject decisions or judgements that are inconsistent with the treaties they signed,’ Senior Research Fellow at the European Centre for Law and Justice Nicolas Bauer told Hungarian Conservative.
‘I am convinced that the current leadership in Brussels does not take into account the opinion or expectations of the majority of European people, and we even see that they represent non-European interests in Brussels on key issues, such as illegal migration, the war in Ukraine or the EU’s competitiveness,’ Hungarian Member of the European Parliament Balázs Hidvéghi stated in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘You have to have different levels of political engagement. You have to win at different levels, the intellectual level, the battle of ideas level, you’ve got to win at this level. And then you’ve got the next level down, that you’ve got to win on policy, and win the debate politically, and then politicians translate these ideas into their own language and then they have to be able to convey that message to the voters. These are two different roles, but they are also overlapping. Like Edmund Burke, one of the greatest conservative thinkers, was also an active politician.’
‘I was on stage already before I could have any inhibitions. That’s not to say that I don’t have them in other areas, but I feel lucky that I was given this way of life. It was put in front of me, and I couldn’t imagine my life without it. It gives me security.’
‘One of the peculiarities of the Hungarian spirit is that—no doubt as a result of our historical past—we have an openness to a kind of spiritual attitude that is willing to make sacrifices, in prayer and fasting, to obtain peace.’
According to Nikola Kedhi, Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Albanian Policy Center, defending a nation’s sovereignty requires a constant battle in the media, academia, and the political field.
‘Being a conservative in Berkeley is like you’re surrounded by Marxists. I think sometimes Hungary feels the same, surrounded by these European progressive elites,’ John Yoo, former US government official and Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley stated in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
‘The more I travelled in America, the more I realized that there is no state in the U.S. where Hungarians have not created something lasting; where there is not some Hungarian thread, some Hungarian history, some Hungarian contribution. We wanted to visualize this centuries-old creative process and make it easily accessible to the widest possible audience. That’s how the idea of the HuGo app was born, and of course it took years to fine-tune the concept with our developers arriving at the publicly available version we have today.’ Anna Smith Lacey on the HuGo app and the power of the community.
‘I’m the Executive Director, but I also know that if there’s garbage, somebody must take it out. Similarly, I’m six feet tall, so if something in the back or on the top needs to be reached, I do it. When I was locked in the elevator once, the repairman showed me how to fix the elevator if I ever got stuck in it again. I am the chief bottle washer or the brain, the archivist, the curator when needed. I wear all these hats. Since I’m approachable, everybody feels they know me from different events in town. For some, I even became the face of the Hungarian community in New Brunswick.’
‘Since 1990, we have had to find new ways of explaining the issues. The communist dictatorships have collapsed, everything seems to be going fine, nice-sounding laws are being passed, but these are not being enforced, and in some cases the situation is deteriorating. The countries have European Union membership, and many border issues have disappeared thanks to the Schengen agreement, but problems remain.’