The Hungarian Community in Transylvania Is Viable

The 9 June, Sunday European Parliament and municipal elections in Romania resulted in a historical success for the Hungarian ethnic minority, with the best results achieved in twenty years. As RMDSZ President Hunor Kelemen put it, the mandates RMDSZ won are not just numbers; they also send the message that there is a strong, viable Transylvanian Hungarian community that wants to shape its own future and plans on staying in its homeland.

New Slovak President Inaugurated

Slovakia’s newly elected president, Peter Pellegrini (49), was inaugurated on Saturday, 15 June in Bratislava. This historical moment is not simply a change of guard but, after the 2023 parliamentary elections, it is the last step in a significant shift in the country’s political landscape, stirring anticipation and hope for a patriotic future in Central Europe.

Aerial view of an unidentified person walking on a deserted road covered by sand dunes with the Dubai skyline in the background. Dubai, United Arab Emirates

COP-Out in Dubai

‘It is debatable whether the COP negotiations themselves achieve much, given that a global consensus is typically only possible when the wording is so vague as to mean anything, which is closer to meaning nothing than something…What is clear, however, is that COP has been co-opted by the very form of political economy that provoked its existence. Much like Dubai itself, this is the sort of event that only late-stage capitalism might produce—a monument to the branding-industrial complex. One cannot help but sense that in its contradictions and shallow affect, COP is less a cure for what ails us, but rather a symptom of the problem to be cured.’

‘Young people are interested, but just not familiar enough with Hungarian organizations’ — An Interview with Hungarian American Coalition Fellow Luca Mórocz

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.

Professor Miguel Ayuso Torres speaks at the Danube Institute Ruel of law conference in May 2024

Dilemmas of Rule of Law and Sovereignty — An Interview with Professor Miguel Ayuso Torres

‘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.’

Daniel Pitt

‘Political families have to battle on the intellectual and the political level’ — A Conversation with Dr Daniel Pitt, Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield 

‘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.’