The Hungarian language is unique as it is neither slavic, germanic or romance. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Hungarian, also know as Magyar, is apart “of the Ugric branch of the Uralic languages.” The country’s minor ethnic groups include Germans and Roma as well as many others.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica about 9 in 10 are ethnically Hungarians and speak Hungarian as a first language.
As has been discussed in earlier posts. Hungary has recently been becoming more authoritarian and more anti-immigrant since Viktor Orban took charge. As a result their ranking has been downgraded by Freedom House, which according to Orban is apart of the Empire of Soros.
Hungary is a member of the World Trade Organization and has been since January, 1 1995. As the World Trade Organizations states Hungary is a member of the EU, and all EU members are members of the World Trade Organization. It’s also a member of the UN since December 1955, and a member of the IMF since 1982.
In 2015, Hungary’s GINI coefficant was ranked at 30.4. According to the website Trading Economics website GINI measures the distribution of income among individuals. The perfect rating would be 0 for equality. According to wikipedia, Hungary has the 16th lowest income inequality. They’re 49th in terms of GDP.
In recent news according to a new report, there’s been reports of apparent electoral corruption in Hungary. This falls within a dangerous trend that ‘s been going on in Hungary recently with it recently being labeled as being partly free by Freedom House. As described in earlier posts, Hungary has been labeled as a competitive authoritarian regime. It’s been a mostly moral blow to the EU who is seen as a promoter of democracy.
Part of the report talks about clientelism or essentially buying votes. As the article states about Hungary:
“‘We show that vote buying is just one of many forms of clientelism in Hungary,’ she said. ‘The most important forms involve the use of state resources.'”
It is interesting to see how quickly democracy can start to erode in certain countries. With things like the recent elections in Brazil and Russia we’ve started to see a sort of new form of government that gives the illusion of having democracy when it’s really just an authoritarian regime.
The article talks about the ways that politicians hold jobs hostage in exchange for political support. Because of Hungary’s workfare program, local politicians will often use it as a way to gain votes in places where the workfare program could be their only source of income. Document says that the use of the workfare program helped Orban’s party succeed in recent elections.
So as has been talked about before. Democracy in Hungary has started to erode under the leadership of Viktor Orban. I’ve talked about the way in which he’s demonized immigrants and the fact that he’s curtailed democracy and freedom in those countries. He’s also fed into right wing conspiracy theories like that George Soros secretly runs the world or whatever. His recent attempts to increase birth rates are somewhat creepy wanting women to produce four or more children which often fits into white nationalist beliefs that white people are going to go extinct, and so we need to keep the immigrants out and keep producing more white children. It’s pretty shocking see this rise in far right politics in Europe in the past couple of years. Since the fall of the Soviet Union there was optimism that the days of totalitarianism were on the decline, but it seems like they’ve made a huge comeback in the past decade and it’s somewhat scary.
Globalization 3510W 