As is the case every year, the speech of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be the main event of the Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp, commonly known as Tusványos. The speech delivered here has become one of Orbán’s most significant yearly addresses in recent times, offering political guidance with his insights and, in many cases, accurately predicting future geopolitical events.
In an unprecedented twist of events, we now have the incumbent party running a non-incumbent candidate, while the non-incumbent party is running a former incumbent candidate. The incumbent advantage is a well-documented phenomenon in American politics, a lot of which is due to simple name recognition. This aspect now heavily favours Former President Trump.
In a letter posted on the social media platform X on Sunday, Joe Biden stated: ‘I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.’ He also promised to elaborate on the details of his decision in a speech to the nation later this week.
‘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.’
‘President Trump’s true character has just been revealed. It turned out that he’s the kind of man who comes under fire, takes a hit, feels the blood—and stands back up, with his fist raised. Obviously, at this point, Biden is no match for him, a President, who lived.’
Vance is serving his first term in Congress as a Senator from Ohio, winning his seat in the 2022 midterm elections. The former marine and venture capitalist, whose 2016 autobiography Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller and was even made into a film, is quite knowledgeable about and apparently appreciative of several policies of the Hungarian government.
President Trump was shot at while speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The bullet only missed his head by an inch and grazed his right ear, causing it to bleed. The FBI has identified the suspect as 20-year-old Bethel Park, Pennsylvania resident Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene.
Just as in the presidential debate, Joe Biden failed to deliver an acceptable performance in his ‘big boy’ press conference this morning. The voices of discontent within the Democratic Party are growing louder. Whether the current president should step aside and hand his presidential candidacy to Vice President Kamala Harris remains to be seen in the coming days.
As more and more people from his own party call on President Biden to step aside, President Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election seems more certain by the day. However, how much can one trust polling data after what happened in 2016 and 2022?
According to former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán aims to create ‘maximum discomfort’ for the new European Parliament with his newly established right-wing alliance, Patriots for Europe. Juncker harshly criticized the Hungarian PM as well as former US President Donald Trump in an interview with POLITICO.
US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman first praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for his trip to Kyiv, then harshly criticized him for ‘overtly and tirelessly’ supporting Donald Trump in the US presidential election race. According to Pressman, the partisan politicization of bilateral relations is dangerous and detrimental to the US– Hungarian relationship.
The Supreme Court ruling does not absolve President Trump from all prosecution, since lower courts can still rule on what conduct fell under ‘official acts’ when he was President; and under what conditions his presumptive immunity can be rebutted. However, it does force Special Counsel Jack Smith to restart his case at the trial court level, and it is very unlikely that he can take the case to trial before the 5 November presidential election.
According to CNN’s own poll, more than two-thirds, 67 per cent of the viewers thought that President Trump had won the debate. President Biden’s odds for re-election plummeted after the event, with bookmakers giving him only about a 22.5 per cent chance for re-election on average. Meanwhile, some in the left-leaning media call on Biden not to stand for re-election.
Donald Trump has expanded his lead over Joe Biden in the national polling aggregate since his conviction. Meanwhile, President Biden’s approval rating by Gallup is at an abysmal 38 per cent ahead of the CNN debate in Atlanta, Georgia tonight, which is not a good indicator for reelection.
‘If we Europeans want to keep up with the Americans, we Europeans must become great again,’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán emphasized in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost. PM Orbán also praised former US President Donald Trump for his pro-peace stance regarding the war in Ukraine, and spoke about his beloved sport, football, as well.
According to the graphic shared by the Prime Minister’s political director Balázs Orbán, Hungary’s slogan will be ‘Make Europe Great Again,’ or ‘MEGA’ for short, for the upcoming presidency of the Council of the European Union. This is an obvious allusion to US President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ which he is using for his presidential campaign as well.
President Trump ended the primary with 76.4 per cent of the popular vote, the most ever for a candidate running as a non-incumbent since the binding primary system was established in 1972. The previous record was held by former Democrat Vice President Al Gore, who got 75.8 per cent in 2000.
‘We won the first half, 1–0 here. Now, let’s wait for Donald Trump to bring in the second half,’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a humorous tone during an interview with M1 public television as he assessed the results of Sunday’s European Parliament and local elections. PM Orbán emphasized that Fidesz defeated both the old and new opposition simultaneously, which he considers a particularly valuable outcome.
In the first 24 hours after the historic guilty verdict, President Trump’s campaign raised a whopping $52.8 million, according to the announcement of the campaign itself. If this is true, that would be a shattering new record, beating out the $26 million the Biden camp raised in one day in August 2020, after they announced that Kamala Harris would be their Vice Presidential nominee, the first black female candidate on a presidential ticket.
Spencer Chretien was the guest of honour at the Center for Fundamental Rights’ latest event, where he talked about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, aiming to help an incoming new Trump administration. Mr Chetien also spoke about his time in the first Trump administration, President Trump’s trial in Manhattan, and the problems with the liberal bureaucracy in Washington, DC.
Former US President Donald Trump, the current Republican presidential candidate, spoke about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in a recent interview, praising the latter’s pro-peace stance on the war in Ukraine. Pro-peace voices are needed more than ever in Europe, as Western leaders prepare for the crucial June elections amid a state of war psychosis.
Incumbent conservative judge Andrew Pinson beat his liberal challenger John Barrow by 10 points in an election for a seat on the Supreme Court of Georgia last Friday. That is despite the fact that Barrow made abortion rights the centre message of the campaign, which is perceived as one of the strongest issues for Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.
President Trump is leading President Biden by double digits in Nevada, a state President Biden won by 2.4 points in 2020. The Republican challenger was also shown to have the advantage in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as well; with the only exception being Michigan, where President Biden leads by a single point.
‘Hopefully, under a second Trump administration, we’re going to see a new high in Hungarian–American relations that we haven’t seen since Kossuth visited America back in the 1850s,’ Republican Congressional Aide Johnny Szani pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
At the height of his popularity, ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern was known for having porn actors perform sex acts on his show and routinely engaged in racial humour, even saying the ‘N-word’ on air. Yet President Joe Biden, who has been criticized even by liberal outlets for being unavailable to the press, chose him to finally give a long-form interview.
For the first time in the 2024 primary season, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in turnout in a swing state. President Trump also got a substantially lower vote total than President Biden. However, Pennsylvania was the only state in which President Trump was polling behind President Biden to begin with, and he can still win in November by taking states where he has been performing better, both in the polls and in the primaries.
Former President Trump’s criminal trial has begun in Manhattan, which some polling data suggests could cost him his victory in the presidential election in November. However, President Biden is not in a great position either as the economy and the state of foreign affairs have recently worsened, and he was already struggling with a low approval rating on these issues. How will all this end?
The voters of Wisconsin voted to amend their state constitution, putting stricter election rules in place. Also, just like in all other swing states, the Republican primary turnout outnumbered that of the Democrats. However, President Biden got a higher vote total (due to his higher vote share) than President Trump in a swing state primary for the first time—what does this all mean?
Based on his primary model, political scientist Helmut Norpoth gives incumbent Joe Biden of the Democratic Party a 75 per cent chance for re-election. However, the same model was widely inaccurate in 2020, giving Donald Trump a 91 per cent chance of becoming president again. Its 2024 forecast again goes against aggregate polling data and consensus in the news and betting industry.
‘It’s just unarguably the case that whatever it is they accuse someone like Viktor Orbán of doing, the progressive left in America, it is quite clear that these conditions apply in immeasurably more effect to the American system.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.