Haven’t been following it closely, so will refrain from commenting on it myself.
Matt Forney (who is currently living in Hungary) is optimistic on Fidesz/Orban.
Some comments from region expert reiner Tor during the past month:
1
The most reputable Hungarian analyst thinks Fidesz will win a narrow majority on Sunday. But because of the still many unknowns, he’s unsure, it could be a Fidesz loss (though the opposition will probably be unable to form a government), or in a best case scenario even a supermajority for Fidesz. (Just a list: few and unreliable district level data; questions about “strategic voting,” opposition supporters voting for other opposition parties, especially wrt Jobbik vs. leftists; trends, which have generally been unfavorable towards Fidesz in recent weeks; Fidesz has recently been measured stronger than it really was, whether it still holds; etc.)
Basically, what I wrote recently: difficult to predict, but a narrow Fidesz majority looks most likely, with a Fidesz loss more likely than a supermajority, but even the latter possible.
2
The Hungarian election seems difficult to predict because there is little openly available detailed precinct level data, and also because it’s difficult to measure second preferences and the likelihood of people voting for candidates other than that of their most preferred parties. It’s also difficult to predict turnout, and the Fidesz victory or its size greatly depends on turnout: basically, the lower the turnout, the higher the portion of the votes going to Fidesz. The most likely guess is still a Fidesz win without winning a supermajority, though there’s always the chance of a Fidesz supermajority and also of a Fidesz loss. The March 15 speech of Orbán threatening some unspecified people with retribution was unhelpful in that it could mobilize the opposition voters. The fact that now there seems to be a chance of beating him will probably also mobilize opposition voters.
3
It’s a near certainty that the “don’t know” voters will mostly vote for an opposition party. There’s more of them than usual, especially this close to the election (when normally voters already know for sure if they were going to vote, and for whom).
Orbán is good (he seems to have gotten more and more based over the years), but his corruption and his tendency to surround himself with incompetent hacks and sycophants will be his undoing. As I wrote, I still expect him to win this time, but he will no longer get a supermajority.
Regarding immigration, if Jobbik becomes a part of the coalition, then I wouldn’t expect big changes. Even half of leftist voters are against third world immigration. But I’m not sure if the enthusiasm will stay.
Also Orbán is overusing the migration topic in his election campaign, especially whenever his corruption comes up. It only discredits the topic, which I don’t like.
I still hope he’ll manage to change. As you wrote, he is probably the most based white leader of any country.
We’ll see.
4
Jobbik has drifted to the left. It’s now probably to the left of Fidesz, or at least not significantly to the right. Its relations with any of the leftist parties are better than Fidesz. By the way, Orbán tried to make it impossible for them to campaign. So they also hate Orbán now. And they are definitely not less handshakeworthy than Fidesz. They already engaged in talks to the leftist parties. The “new leftist” parties (untainted with governing 2002-10) actually probably like Jobbik more than the socialists or DK (a spinoff party of the socialists with their least popular politicians, somehow still hanging in the National Assembly).
on the assumption that people MUST vote against Orban whoever is available
That has happened in all of the by-elections since 2014. Fidesz lost each of them. I’m not saying it will happen everywhere, but if Fidesz loses over half the districts…
Let me repeat: I still think Fidesz will win this one. But unless they change significantly (and I’m not sure they are capable of that), they will lose badly in 2022. Probably already during the European elections. Even the municipal elections (I think in 2019). It’s possible that they won’t be able to hold onto power until 2022. (And there’s now some chance of them losing already on April 8.)
They have less than half of the voters, and anyone who is not explicitly their voter hates them. Not a good situation, even if you’re the biggest party in the land…
5
You have to remember he started out as a young, fresh leader. (The name Fidesz originally comes from an abbreviation FIDESZ, which stood for Young Democrats’ Alliance. It was a liberal party in the early 1990s, and until 1992 no new member could be accepted above the age 35…)
His entourage changed a lot since he came to power in 2010. It moved a bit in the alt-right direction, which is to say, it got crankier. Many of his more normal conservative allies left him over the years or started keeping a low profile, while he started to employ stupid lieutenants. Since 2010, but especially since 2014 he really became a Führer of his party, and most people around him were sycophants. He seems to have believed by 2014 that he was an infallible genius, and that it was no longer possible for anyone in Hungary to beat him.
His lieutenants are now either stupid or corrupt or both. He himself is not above all this: his son-in-law started a corrupt scheme in 2010, and was already considered a shady scandal-ridden figure before 2014, but recently new details emerged. It’s possible Hungary will have to pay back some money to the EU (I mean, stealing EU monies when you’re trying to take a stand against them must be stupid…) because of these shady deals. The mayor of his native village became one of the richest people in the country over the past 8 years (he’s a simple gas fitter), and many people now suspect that his wealth actually belongs to Orbán personally. To be honest, it’s not implausible.
6
A number of scandals rocked his party (some corruption scandals involving his close family members, but not all scandals were corruption related), but the most important thing is that already in 2014 he didn’t have a majority of the votes.
The Hungarian election system since 2014 is a mix of first past the post and (to a smaller extent) proportional representation. (Even the latter favors the winner.) Before Orbán changed it, it had a similar system, but one where the MP districts had a second round, unless someone received the majority of the votes. So parties could run separately and then after the first round of voting they could form an alliance.
Orbán changed the system because he understood that for the opposition (which was divided, even without Jobbik) would need to form an alliance in order to be competitive. However, some of the leftist parties were discredited in the eyes of the majority of the electorate (and the voters of Jobbik and the leftists were often incompatible), and so an alliance would have destroyed a large portion of the appeal of the other leftist parties (not to mention Jobbik).
However, that seems to have changed recently. Moreover, there has been open talk of “cross-voting” even with Jobbik, so in many places the parties won’t even have to form an alliance (which, less than three weeks before the election, they have still failed to do anyway), their voters in each district will be voting for the most popular opposition candidate (and now this seems to include Jobbik), and they are encouraging their voters to do so.
It’s a question how many of the voters will actually do so, but I think the floodgates have opened to some extent already. It’s not exactly encouraging that since 2014 Fidesz has lost all by-elections. They were usually explained away as products of unusual local circumstances, but it’s getting increasingly likely that it will happen in a lot of places.
I still expect Fidesz to win, but not by a large margin.
7
Though I still expect Orbán to win in April, his odds have considerably worsened in recent weeks. There is now a serious chance of Fidesz not getting a majority. I don’t know what will happen after that. Theoretically there could be a coalition, but now neither a Fidesz-Jobbik, nor a Jobbik-left coalition seems viable. Even the leftist parties seem to hate each other as much as they hate Fidesz.
But I think Orbán will still probably win this time, but it’s likely his last cycle as prime minister.
8
I don’t think it’s substantially better. Especially not in the long run. Orbán neglects education, which has the side effect of making teachers hate him. Teachers tend to be leftists anyway, but it seems they have become overwhelmingly so in the last few years. High schoolers are now often protesting the government, there have been demonstrations against Orbán by them (nominally about some issues with education, but obviously it was political, including some of the slogans etc.), so it’s probably a mistake which will bear its rotten fruits over the long run.
9
What I don’t understand is that how Hungary could perform so poorly in football. Orbán threw a lot of money on it (he built a number of shiny stadiums, where the same shitty teams play shitty football…), but it got us nowhere. Apparently Hungarian coaches (including those raising young players) are of very bad quality, stuck in the 1970s or something, and it’s very difficult to change that, since older coaches teach the younger ones. The system is also very corrupt, and by throwing money at it, Orbán only managed to perpetuate it. Players enjoy that now they can stay in Hungary for similar money as they would make in the German second league, but for less work or performance, so they prefer staying at home. Ironically, this might depress the Hungarian national team in the coming years.
.
Im keeping the thumbs for Orban. If he goes down, our position will be much worse. He is practically the only reliable ally Poland has now.
Is there any particular reason we as Russians should care? It’s a small and unimportant country, that will always toe the line on EU sanctions no matter what government it has.
Kind of just disillusioned with democracy since it’s so slow & laborious.
I don’t think he’s very reliable because he isn’t strong enough. But he’d obviously like to help if it was possible.
I don’t know about Jobbik. It tried to move left, but on the other hand, it was connected to the nuttiest elements of Hungarian nationalism. (The Sumerian etc. thingy.) So I’m both wary of its right wing self and its newer left wing self. Among the opposition parties it’s the only one which might be friendly to the present Polish government. Actually, it might be better because it’s not an EPP member and so doesn’t need to toe the EPP line at all. Anyway, they have usually promised not to change immigration policies.
You have complained about Russia not having enough soft power. But you don’t seem to have a great talent for creating soft power. You only want to enjoy soft power, but don’t seem to realize what it takes to get it.
I’m afraid this kind of behavior is all too common. Probably often mixed with caring for the elections in Venezuelan or Brazil, because those are bigger and more important countries, worthy of Russian attention.
If Orban loses, it will be spun as a victory for the open borders crowd (they’ll ignore the local corruption issues and claim it’s because he’s too nationalist, I’ve already seen hints of that line in German media), so I really hope it won’t come to that.
Well, strictly speaking, I think something like 60% to 70% of my readers here are Americans. 🙂
Fidesz was overmeasured in 2014 and I think in most by-elections, too. So the polls probably need to be adjusted downwards.
In Hungary pollsters usually give two measures, percentage among total number of voters and among those who are sure to vote. The former category contains vast numbers of unsure undecided voters, who will under the current circumstances almost surely decide against Fidesz, if they do vote. (Many might simply be afraid to say they are planning to vote for the opposition.) The numbers you show are I think the Fidesz share among sure voters, but if turnout gets higher, it could get substantially lower.
With a turnout below 60%, Fidesz will get a supermajority. I think they are almost sure to lose with a turnout of 80% (though it’s difficult to know with any level of certainty, it’s also unlikely turnout will be so high). Right now I think the most likely thing is a 65-70% turnout with Fidesz getting maybe 55-60% of the seats in the National Assembly.
It’s a bit more optimistic for Fidesz than my recent assessment.
Should Fidesz lose, there will almost certainly be a new election soon. The other parties are unlikely to form a coalition. Interestingly, the biggest divide is not between Jobbik and the leftists, but between Jobbik and the new leftist parties formed since 2009 on one hand and the old leftist parties (which have their roots in the old communist party) on the other.
“Soft-power” is a currency, a tool that could be used to achieve our goals. But what goals could we possibly have in Hungary? Don’t take it the wrong way, but the country is a tiny backwater.
If he loses, it will be due to the following issues:
1) corruption
2) neglected public healthcare and education
3) meanwhile spending a lot of money on football in a totally ineffectual and incompetent way
4) using the immigration issue in an extremely lowbrow way to deflect from any and all of the above points
In recent weeks some of my pro-Fidesz friends got more active on Facebook. But I think overall opposition supporters are way more active than in 2014 and Fidesz supporters seem less active than before. But it’s a small sample, so maybe doesn’t mean much.
Just a question to reiner. You write:
Correct me if I am wrong, but didnt Orban change the constitution back in 2011 to pave the way for some kind of hybrid FPTP system wherein you can get a greater share of seats than your vote, in other words, no longer proportional?
In 2014 he got 44% of the vote, which is somewhat less than his polling average now, but ended up with a legislative majority anyway. In the light of this, I do not understand some of your skepticism given his decent polling numbers.
Sure, there’s always the by-election argument but these by-elections are often not dictated by national trends and can often be strong-armed but a nimble political operation and a compelling candidate. A weak actor can pull that off once in a while. Doing so on a national basis is a different story. If it had repercussions on the national trendline, wouldn’t we have seen that in the data?
I’m not a big fan of ‘unskewered poll’ arguments, which were common in 2012 among GOP diehards. Even the polls in 2016 were not as bad as people said. They predicted a slight Clinton win and that is what she got (based on popular vote). It’s just the electoral system in the US which is somewhat wonky and the particular math of how that vote was parlayed translated into a Trump win.
I don’t think Hungary has anything like that, and to the extent it favors anyone, it is probably the incumbent, no?
Maybe I am too sanguine and maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that the odds of Fidesz losing all their marbles on the finish line appears to be of marginal probability.
The US back in the day spent a lot of effort on cultivating Hungary. And many other countries. Having soft power in Hungary helps you get soft power in Poland, and vice versa. Similar with Austria. If you have many such countries, it will get progressively more difficult for the usual suspects to push for more sanctions.
Russia recently sold us a nuclear plant. If the deal goes through, it will be a good reference (in an EU-country) for the Russian nuclear industry. Orbán is corrupt so you could sell some other things like metro cars. (Though they were actually not very good, unlike the nuclear plant.) It’s not much, but probably worth more than countries where you sell things without getting paid, or where you have to forgive old Soviet era debts (and give new ones, which I guess your next regime will forgive later).
Does Jobbik have any (real or imagined) ties to Russia?
Because I find the fact that they drifted to the left to be funny, as I remember back in the days Jobbik and the Bulgarian “Ataka” were mentioned together as the most dangerous “far-right” parties in Europe, but Ataka has also drifted significantly to the left.
Ataka changed its tune in order to be handshakeworthy with their friends in Russia – its leader used to write conspiracy books about the jews but then started to attack Ukrainians for “anti-semitism”, instead of protesting against the gypsies they started to warn that some mysterious forces (CIA etc) are trying to provoke ethnic conflict and we should not fall to provocations, etc.
I like triggering shitlibs as much as anybody, but there are better and worse ways to go about it.
Although Poland might be even more hyperbolic about it, but most of the venom is against Hungary.
https://i.redd.it/u40g1jtz78501.png
Orban has been demonized for years, but his actions regarding the “refugee” invasion were seen as a direct challenge to the Western liberal consensus. He’s also tried to cultivate relations with some Western politicians, notably in Austria, but also with the Bavarian CSU (which imo is totally fake on the CSU’s side, but still, those contacts exist) which raises the spectre of a wider antiliberal bloc for open borders enthusiasts. So it’s not surprising Orban’s Hungary gets special attention. Poland has been less involved in the migration crisis, and the Polish right seems absorbed in its historical grievances against Germany (notice the parts about Niemcy in your pic above) and Russia which are neither interesting nor threatening to Western liberals.
Pollsters incomprehensibly measure 13-25% for Jobbik. Meaning, some pollster (Századvég) measures 13, another one (Iránytű) 25%. So saying that the pollsters must be correct is unfortunately meaningless here. I also bet Jobbik will get 13-25% of the party vote. With Fidesz, it’s something like 41-52% (The high numbers, 51 and 52, coming from Századvég and Nézőpont, respectively, while Republikon and Iránytű measure 41-41 both.) For the socialists, it’s 11-19%.
So the polls are not very useful here. I’d guess something like 45% for Fidesz.
The difficulties only start here. In Hungary you can cast not one, but two separate votes. One is for an individual candidate of the district. Half the seats get decided this way in a first past the post system. Then there’s the party list vote. You’d think the other half is awarded according to the party list votes (among parties above the 5% limit, or 10% for party alliances), wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong, because the losing candidates’ votes get added in a complicated way, so that the party list vote only decides roughly a third (I think) of the seats in the National Assembly.
So you can predict that Jobbik will get 13-25% and Fidesz 41-52% of the party list vote, which is cool, but then two thirds of the seats will be decided by the district level candidates’ votes. You’d need to know the district level polls. Of course, they’d be even less reliable than the national level polls. (I’m exaggerating, many districts are easier to predict than the national level. But those districts won’t decide anything, you need to know about the swing districts.)
Off topic, reinerTor, but have you heard of these people before or come across them:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-er3THRd8Q
Paste.
Jobbik does have some hilarious Russian ties. One of its former MEPs (left the party recently) married a Soviet spy (okay, a “journalist” who had married a Japanese and then an Austrian guy before him, and had traveled a lot, which is not something most Soviet citizens could do; she was unable to produce any evidence of her journalistic work), participated in the Crimea referendum as part of a group of EP observers (all members of fringe parties), led some Russia-Europe EP group, and in general was highly friendly to Russia.
I don’t know anything about their recent contacts with Russia. (This former MEP got them a lot of money, I guess from Russia, though he was a businessman so theoretically he could provide it himself, and he had some motivation if he was influenced by his Russian wife or by the fact he had lived in the USSR for years, and then later once again in Russia in the late 90s and early 00s. But who knows.)
I think their shift to the left has more to do with some internal Hungarian development. Orbán used to be financed by a businessman called Simicska. (Simicska was not a totally legitimate businessman, his wealth was based on the enormous amounts of public contracts he received 1998-2002 during Orbán’s first stint as prime minister.) In 2014 Orbán had a fallout with Simicska, so he started financing Jobbik, but probably he demanded that they move to the left. (It’s difficult to tell how much to the left they are. It’s certainly easier to imagine them in coalition with the new leftist parties than with Fidesz, and they have said so much. But they still seem to be solid on immigration.)
I cannot watch it right now, but is it the Magyarabs? There are occasional news stories about them in Hungary. They are known.
Yes the Magyarabs; the video states near the last two minutes that they have a general level of acceptance in Hungary, the ones that have moved there that is.
Peace.
Who cares about the sanctions? Obviously Russia doesn’t, otherwise it citizenry would criticize its leadership for putting their country in such a precarious situation. It’s also clear that Putler really doesn’t care much either. The sanctions have made Putler seem like a great nationalist hero who doesn’t take any crap from the West, and has created an atmosphere where Russia has been able to jump start and speed forward some industries (especially agriculture) that had previously been mundane and slow to develop. The sanctions are good for everyone!
I don’t know how to embed pictures.
A couple new polls have arrived, here are the latest polls:
https://m.imgur.com/a/85XYW
You just paste the direct link into the comment section. Imgur has a “gallery view” and a direct link view. Since most people only upload one picture at a time, they mistake gallery view for the direct view. Gallery view is the default view that you get right off the bat.
The way to get direct link is to right-click on the image and click on “open in new tab”. In most browsers, you’ll get nothing but the image. Here it is:
https://i.imgur.com/dspdijB.jpg
Some browsers also have “copy image adress” in the options. That typically also works. Finally, there are also some uploaders onto Imgur which provide you with the direct link to the image without any clutter.
So it seems like he’ll get somewhere between low-to-mid 40s, but more importantly anyone other than Jobbik isn’t getting anything else than low teens. I don’t see how he’ll be anything but prime minister, especially considering the post-2011 election law changes which favours the big parties.
P.S. I imagine that most people have heard of today’s terrorist attack in Münster, but for those who didn’t, 5 people (and counting) are dead and scores injured. My reaction is that likely not much will change. If it didn’t after the much bigger attacks in Paris and Nice, it won’t now. I don’t subscribe to the theory that people “wake up” after somekind of magical threshold. Look at South Africa. Unfortunately people have an easy way to adapting/coping with deteriorating circumstances. There’s no shortcut than to do the hard work in the trenches (kulturkampf).
German media are now claiming it was some mentally disturbed 48-year old German…if that’s true, probably not a jihadi attack. I guess it will be useful for the pc narrative (“look, it’s not just immigrants or Muslims who are doing horrible things!”).
But even if it’s just some psycho, a worrying sign of the times…there seem to be an awful lot of mentally ill people with violent tendencies around.
OT from the BBC:
Yeah, I saw it on social media being circulated and was just about to update.
Still, let’s not kid ourselves. This is a complete outlier. Nevertheless, it brings us to your point about:
There will now be moral brow-beating for days about muh Islamophobia and muh stereotyping. This is how the left operates and the liberals, including the cuckservatives, will be too frightened to put up a fight. This is why I despise the center-right more than the left, because at least the latter are ruthless and know how to fight while the former are just a bunch of spineless cowards who run away from trouble the moment they see it.
Ultimately, in the long run, I don’t expect this event be devastating either for our side and our talking points. My skepticism on these spectacular events’ capacity to change the fundamental social and cultural dynamic remains rooted.
Oh, I agree, in Germany it’s CDU people I hate the most, they’re just opportunist, careerist scum.
I agree with you that terror attacks and the like won’t bring about any change…such incidents are too rare, and jihadis aren’t really that common (tbh even most Muslims in Europe aren’t in favour of jihadi terrorism). I’m not so sure about the steady drip of rapes, stabbings, violent assaults and murders committed by “refugees” and immigrants though, they should be good material for a law and order campaign and for denouncing the establishment as being soft on crime. An excessive focus on Islam is somewhat of a diversion anyway and not always that convincing.
Offtopic, but do any of you guys use Hungarian Wizz Air?
This is a very cheap, good Hungarian airline. I’m using it all the time (every few months) to fly in Europe for the last years and always have a good experience. Also the Hungarian stewardesses who work on this airline are usually more charming than on Russian airlines.
Ural airlines is still my favourite value for money, but the destinations available in Europe have much more choice with Wizz Air. It is a real Hungarian success story and contribution to humanity (when you realize how cheaply you can go on holiday to all these places).
I usually just use Sky Scanner (actually more just Google now) to find the best prices and those. Aeroflot is usually competitive.
There’s a small chance I’ll be in Hungary this year – will almost certainly be in Romania in early June, after which I might as well tick some of the V4 nations off the list.
I recommend Wizz Air a lot if you haven’t tried it. The only problem is that their flights from Moscow and Peter are extremely limited (they only go to Hungary).
But if you are already living in Europe, then there is nice variety of choices. The prices are budget, and they don’t give you any food. Also you have to pay extra if you want onboard luggage. But if you just bring hand luggage (they always allow me to bring a large luggage bag (sports bag) and never weigh it, or check its size), then it can be really cheap (e.g. sometimes under $50).
Moscow to Budapest – currently €44 on some days in June on Wizz Air.
Debrecen will be even cheaper, but the airport there is a joke. Was a Soviet military base that they turned into an airport without actually building a terminal. Very close to Romania though.
Wizz are good if you can get a good deal; standard budget airline. I went to Kutaisi with them a few months ago from London which really tested my tolerance for discomfort to the limit though.
Question, of all the left wing parties running, do any of them show signs of being pro-Hungarian and rejecting the pro-non white immigration agenda. Just wondering who to root for (if any) among this group. Hoping for a clear Orban victory tomorrow with Jobbik in second place.
That one is nutty, but exploring it is interesting. Sumerians are not a mystery – their language and culture were a major part of the Indian Ocean early advanced civilization that encompassed Sumer, Elam, Indus Valley, Kushites, etc… invented writing, structured divinity, trade, boats, copper and bronze. After they lost vigour they were displaced by invading Semites, Indo-Europeans, and eventually Turkic people. The last remains retreated to southern India (and a few isolated pockets in between) and today we can see them in the Dravidian civilisation.
There are puzzling linguistic links in Magyar to ancient Sumerian that can probably be explained by Sumerian trade links to Volga-Ural region. The attempt to read more into it by some Hungarian nationalists betrays a sense of inferiority (‘backward Ural tribes, no, we were contenders, we were linked with ancient civilisations like Sumer’).
On Sunday the nationalists will win and the left (‘socialist’) will lose. This has been happening for a few years in all elections. It is Orban or Jobbik, they will outperform. There can be no ‘left’ with uncontrolled borders, no state benefits, no social solidarity – so the modern ‘left’ is done. The only question is whether the winning nationalists will march around in uniforms or not. Longer this gets delayed by the establishment, more likely this will go the uniform route. And that really cannot be good for anybody.
Dmitry, are you from the Urals?
I prefer it to Ural airlines, which is the one I use to visit my parents. In Ural airlines, they don’t think they’re a lowcoster and wake you up when you are sleeping, to force their disgusting food on you. Stewardesses are also rude.
In Wizz Air, the Hungarian stewardess are always friendly. Yes, it’s a bit uncomfortable for your legs though. (I’ve flown quite far on them before)
You always have to check-in online as well (they charge a lot of money if you want to check in at the airport).
The worst experience I’ve had so far was with American Airlines, who are basically pirates. I was flying from San Francisco to San Diego. I arrived on time, but they didn’t allow me on their flight, because some other people had arrived and paid more (something like this? – they didn’t even explain it). Instead they booked me into a hotel, and made me take another plane at 6am the next day.
No complaints with AA, they once upgraded me to business class for free while flying to DC.
That said, they do have an awful reputation.
Lol yes. But it’s not because of that, that I take Ural airlines. Our shit airline has taken over the world in the last two years, you can now take it from anywhere to anywhere
Is Anatoly Karpov a huge hero to people in the Urals?
To be fair, American Airlines was a very nice plane, once they eventually let me on the plane. I also have a good experience on United Airlines from Moscow.
He’s from Chelyabinsk – only gopnik cattle live there. I guess he’s some kind of freak exception.
Offtopic, but do any of you guys use Hungarian Wizz Air?
I flew out of Budapest six weeks ago and judging by the departure board Wizzair looked to be the biggest airline there.
Anyway, the one time I did fly on Wizzair I thought the seats were even tighter than on Ryanair and easyjet, but everything went well. They have a great selection of direct flights to medium sized cities in the old Eastern bloc countries at great prices but make sure you read the fine print before booking.
I was also in Gdansk in February and was seriously tempted to fly to Sweden just for the day. Booking only a couple of days before the flight the prices were less than 30E each way. At that price it’s hard to complain about lack of leg room.
With Ryanair changing its mind on Ukraine Wizzair are really the only budget option for last minute flights to Lviv and Kiev.
Yes it’s a miracle for all cheap inter-EU flying.
With some provisos, like not packing glass souvenirs in your luggage:
John Morgan of Counter-Currents, who lives in Hungary, has a lot of insightful comments here: “For Europe: Hungary’s 2018 National Election.”
Morgan endorses Orban:
with this caveat:
Hungarian communist leader running in this election slams Gypsies, Muslims, says “we should defend the borders of Hungary, [and] we should save Europe and European civilization.” (–Gyula Thürmer)
Government (Fidesz) campaign poster said to be all over Budapest:
https://twitter.com/Hail__To_You/status/982854540859985920
Massive turnout already at 7AM. Not very good for Fidesz.
I think Orbán seriously believes in his anti-immigration viewpoints. But he’s also massively corrupt, and it starts looking like he’s not far from personal enrichment himself.
He also doesn’t believe in intellectual arguments. Lowbrow arguments are necessary and useful, but in themselves they have the opposite effect on the educated. He’s not much of an intellectual himself, and has a healthy disdain for intellectuals in general, but it shouldn’t cloud his understanding of the importance of convincing the intellectuals.
Record turnout.
https://i.imgur.com/6DwuHa3_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium
I don’t what’s the “p” abbreviation, but p1 means first round, p2 second round. Since 2014 there’s just one round.
I just realized that the “p” just means parliamentary election.
Anyway, before 2014 there was a second round, now it’s just one round.
That’s got nothing to do with the airline, those guys are hired by the airport. Though AFAIK there aren’t any non-budget airlines that use Luton.
Wizz are very good for Ukraine, because their aviation laws over there still don’t allow airlines to offer anything other than full service, so no baggage fees or airport checkin fees. Zhulyany is also better connected than borispol.
One way Fidesz could be hugely helped by the high turnout is if the smaller leftist parties fail to reach the 5% limit. In an extreme case it could be a three- or even two-party parliament. (The socialists formed a coalition, so they have to reach 10% instead of just 5.)
A two-party parliament with just Fidesz and Jobbik would be awesome, it’s a pity it won’t happen.
Anyway, Fidesz is still most likely to win.
Turnout until 11AM is still massive, but no longer record, only 29.83%.
Well, it’s a record if we don’t count second rounds. The second rounds were not fully national, because many districts were already decided in the first round.
One hopeful sign for Fidesz is that traditionally Fidesz-voting districts have the highest turnout.
Though the high turnout was very bad in the traditional Fidesz district last month where the mayoral by-election was held. The turnout is once more very high there.
The deal finally went through a few weeks ago.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ryanair-ukraine/ryanair-to-fly-15-routes-from-european-cities-to-ukraine-idUSKBN1GZ15U
Turnout was 42.32% until 1300.
The US polls were well off in 2016, ignore California. Only Trafalgar and Richard Baris at PPD had Trump to win Michigan and Pennsylvania, places like Ohio the polls were well off and some even had Clnton ahead 12 points at some point. It was a complete mess, and I think this was partly a deliberate pysop to depress Trump turnout.
This is a myth that refuses to die. FiveThirtyEight adressed this in their early 2017 round-up:
They wrote at length on this topic in a separate article which you can read in full here:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-just-a-normal-polling-error-behind-clinton/
My personal pet theory is that part of the reason why “it was da pollz” narrative was spun up is because something had to be used in order to save face for an extremely smug pundit class which almost all had discounted Trump and his chances, so instead of doing some soul-searching about their own (in)competency they decided to blame the pollsters.
Furthermore, polling is not an exact science. It can only give you a narrow band at best, and this is what the 2016 polls did on aggregate. The fact that pundits earning many hundreds of thousands per year cannot understand basic mathematical concepts like margin of error should perhaps not surprise us, given that the vast majority of them are utterly useless and just end up parroting whatever conventional wisdom is out there. Whether it is “Trump is doomed” or “Russia is Ebil”. Few if any do any independent analysis and even fewer are even remotely numerate.
PSA: After inexplicably dragging their feet, the mods of /r/Europe finally decided to open a megathread on the Hungarian elections. You can find it here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8apkao/hungarian_election_megathread/
Viktor Orban is a lot like Trump.
Frustrating, but necessary.
If the Visegrad 4 survive in their current ideological orientation for a few more years, immigration restriction will seem normal in Europe. Bridgeheads are already spreading outside of Mitteleuropa, most notably in Austria. Not only did Sebastian Kurz campaign on immigration restriction and form a coalition government with Joerg Haider’s old party, but he declined to attend the faggot parade and instead got married to his beautiful fiance in a Catholic Church. Very trad.
From Russia’s point of view the reason to care about Orban is that we Western nationalists tend to be Russophilic, at least outside of Poland. Hungary itself isn’t powerful, but through Hungary you may one day get a Russophilic government in Germany for the first time since Schroeder.
Regarding airlines all of the legacy American carriers other than Delta are terrible. Delta is the only one which even pretends to offer a competitive transatlantic business class product (American and United don’t even have lay flat bed seats), and Delta has a better on time record than the others.
American carriers also rarely have hot stewardesses which is extremely irritating. I don’t want to be waited on by an overweight middle aged woman, or worse a homosexual.
Best choice is Aer Lingus, because Dublin has US immigration & customs preclearance. The business class product is competitive, and because they fly 757s (single aisle) you can get an entire row for yourself. The cuisine isn’t as good as other European carriers (best here is Austrian Airlines) who fly larger aircraft, but it’s still quite good.
The Luftwaffe is also a nice choice because they operate the 787 on their Chicago – Munich route, so you arrive feeling much more refreshed owing to the greater cabin pressure and humidity. The business class product is inferior to other European flag carriers, but it’s still good.
Avoid London Heathrow and Paris CDG at all costs. Don’t fly SAS unless you need nonstop Chicago to Stockholm.
Worst transatlantic carrier is Air India. Got food poisoning on an empty 747 flying from NYC to London. Later when I got to know Indians they told me Air India has a terrible reputation in India itself and Indian businessmen refuse to fly on it.
I hear great things about the Emirati carriers, but I refuse to fly them as it offends me that Arabs are allowed to own airlines. The British executives who run these airlines should be regarded as traitors.
Looking forward to trying the Asian carriers. Next time I visit India I’ll go transpacific for that reason.
Within Europe itself I prefer taking the train unless distances are truly great. E.g. Aeroflot has a direct flight from Nice to Moscow–not going to bother with the train for something like that.
In the USA I prefer legacy carriers as they have domestic first class unlike the budget airlines, but my main priority is the avoidance of bad airports. Smaller airports outside of big metropolitan areas are generally much more pleasant.
The carrier Allegiant offers nonstop flights between various small airports as a competitive strategy. They for instance offer a direct flight from Rockford, IL to Punta Gorda, FL. This allows the complete avoidance of nightmarish hellscape airports like Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta Hartfield, or Miami.
Downside is Allegiant is a budget airline which not only doesn’t have first class, but the seats don’t recline! Fortunately you can buy an exit row seat which helps.
And as Karlin said, use Google Flights. Just remember that Southwest refuses to work with them. For a complicated itinerary use Flight Fox.
Looks like the high turnout is mostly in pro-Fidesz or pro-Jobbik places. (The two are not nearly identical.)
So it’s quite possible that the high turnout will not be beneficial for the leftist parties. Especially not for the smaller ones, which might drop out of parliament as a result. We’ll know in a couple minutes.
The idea that elections in the EU countries are considered locally relevant on an official level, is conspiracy theory pushed by the EU and Western media, in order to try to undermine various candidates by associating them with Russia (it’s the typical election tactic of accusing your opponent of being ‘fifth column’)/.
Really there was little coverage about Hungary election anywhere – except reported in the BBC.
Most pollsters predicted that low turnout could mean a supermajority for Fidesz, while a very high turnout could mean that they won’t even get absolute majority. But it all depends on how much leftist and Jobbik voters are willing to vote for each other’s more popular candidates. It never happened in 2014, but it will happen this time a lot. It’s a little bit uncharted territory for pollsters (even the election system is quite new with little experience), so they aren’t very confident in their own models.
53.64%, 1500
Still it’s a good indication if they are providing the stewardess as a kind of ‘career for life’, so that they will take it seriously. Also you would hope they are treating the same way pilots, technicians, etc – which show professionalism.
I am reading about this Orban now.
He seems probably to have the right mix of policies for navigating a small country in this situation.
Neo-liberal economic policy to encourage investment in the country, combined with sensible approach to non-EU immigration – and while also still taking advantage of the EU benefits and free money from staying in that club.
It’s an indication that the airline is old and unionized, that’s it.
Compensation for airline staff, including pilots, has been in decline in America ever since air travel was deregulated. In the regulated era the airlines did not face much competition, and their fares were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board. Airfares were as a result very high and the airlines competed on service (which, according to older businessmen I talk to, was spectacular).
This gave organized labor a lot of power, so unions got very generous compensation packages. The legacy airlines as a result still have a lot of the staff they had a generation ago.
Ever since deregulation the legacy carriers have been under constant pressure from budget airlines.
Used to be that chair force and navy pilots resigned their commissions to make more money as airline pilots, but now staying in the armed forces is generally a better financial decision. Plus the workload is much lower (and the planes more fun).
Fidesz was probably running a very efficient get out the vote effort. That’s part of the reason for the high turnout.
Apparently a lot of Gypsies voted. For those who don’t know, they are all bought and paid for votes by Fidesz. The Gypsy voivod gets paid, and provides the Gypsy vote. The precinct is often 90% Gypsy, so it’s easy to know if he delivered or not. (It boggles the mind that leftists and liberals know this, are complaining about this, and yet call you a Nazi for mentioning that Gypsies shouldn’t be allowed to vote.)
OT, perhaps of some importance.
The official reaction of the Leader of the Free World to the latest Putin-inspired atrocity in Syria, following that in Salisbury:
Will be interesting to see what the “big price” is.
By the way, for those not having kept up to date on the Skripal case, here are a 3 articles explaining the state of the art as to: (i) how it was done: (ii) why the Skripals didn’t die; and (iii) what is to become of the Skripals:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/russian-who-masterminded-spy-nerve-12320728
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5590067/Nerve-agent-used-poison-Russian-spy-designed-4-hours-work-allow-culprits-flee.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5589987/Daughter-poisoned-Russian-spy-given-new-identity-granted-political-asylum-UK.html
National polls are meaningless, who knows where those votes in California came from. Except for PPD and Trafalgar they got almost all the swing states wrong. The pollsters were very wrong no matter what spin is put on it. Nate Silver being perhaps the biggest joke.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
This is what Silver forecast.
63.21% until 1700. Please note that it’s not directly comparable to previous years, because previously they disclosed turnout data until 1730, so it’s a little shorter time period.
You have to love the detailed descriptions of the secret Russian labs where they specifically design the weakened boutique form of the nerve agent only for murder. (I guess for at most a few murders only, since after a few cases most hospitals in the first world will be equipped with antidotes and easy ways to identify the symptoms.) When it’s obvious that it’s all conjecture. The more plausible sounding details there are (without any evidence), the more believable the whole story becomes.
It’s a simple conspiracy theory at this point, where any and all details can only further confirm what the conclusion had been before we even started to investigate. I mean, the fact that such a highly sophisticated military grade (i.e. very clean, highly poisonous) nerve agent was produced was proof that it must have been a state actor – a simple chemist in a university lab would’ve killed himself. Later it emerges that it was a highly watered down version of the poison, i.e. not so dangerous, but we don’t need to revisit our previous conclusion that it was a state actor. No. The fact that it was a deviously less poisonous poison is now further proof that it must’ve been the evil Russians – because no one else would’ve been so devious as to produce a less poisonous version of the most poisonous poison ever.
The fact that the method was in fact quite primitive (put some poison on the door handle – if anyone else touched the door handle for any reason, than that would’ve foiled the plans completely; not that the plan worked that way), or that the not very poisonous version of the most poisonous poison in fact seems to be just a “watered down” (i.e. not quite military grade) version of it is not proof that it was cooked up in some home lab by less sophisticated actors, it just deepens the plot.
I cannot really imagine any new developments which will shake the convictions of these people. They will keep adjusting their unfalsifiable theory until it fits the facts (sort of).
The Syrian chemical attack is also very strange. The Russians warned previously about a planned false flag. You gotta love how these stupid Syrians commit a militarily totally ineffectual chemical attack (which only manages to kill a few dozens or hundreds of children for the cameras, but no combatants ever) just at the time when President Trump publicly expresses his wish to disengage from Syria. Last time it was a few days after Tillerson said Assad could stay, now it’s a few days after Trump told his generals to prepare to pull out of Syria. It’s also curious that they would go on to win the civil war regardless.
Reiner can tell us more about who did you vote for and what are the qualities and opinions of Orban (why is he so popular?).
I read his Wikipedia page and he seems very sensible. But you probably have more subtle information about him.
He seems especially good in economic policy. It mentions in Wikipedia, the two-year budget. This is a very good idea.
I don’t support over-unionization.
But my impression with old air stewardesses, is that they have been given a career for life at the same airline (in other words, they should take the job seriously, and see it as their lifelong career – rather than some kind of student holiday job). I would also hope the same from the aircraft technicians and pilots.
I also remember American planes had only old stewardesses, and my view was they seemed professional and gave a good service, without the rudeness of some planes (although you would expect this considering how much the ticket costs).
The two-year budget was back in 2000. I don’t think he did it later. The reason for this was that his parliamentary majority was thinning out (his coalition partner the Smallholders’ Party was breaking up), and so he needed to have the budget for the year 2002 accepted earlier, before his majority would completely disappear. (I think it did finally disappear for the last few weeks before the elections, but it didn’t matter any more.)
The healthcare system and education were both neglected. (I have already explained why neglecting the educations was a strategic mistake. I’m not sure if he’d have had money for both, but since he spent enormous amounts on football, building stupid stadiums for shitty teams, he could’ve provided more money for both. And it’s a bit different when you can point out that you have no more money, than if your opponents can point out that you wasted billions on vanity projects, which eventually came to naught.)
He was very corrupt, probably even personally. His close family members (especially his oldest daughter and son-in-law) enriched themselves, and one of his cronies, a gas fitter called Lőrinc Mészáros, became something like a top 10 richest person in the country. Mészáros had no wealth to speak of until 2010, and his special talent seems to be getting profitable public contracts. Interestingly, his holding company went public early last year, and as of last December (when BTC was at its highest) it proved a better investment than Bitcoin. (I guess it looks still better now.) Because Mészáros seems to be basically an uneducated hick (he doesn’t give interviews, but that’s the impression one gets from the few public appearances he makes), many suspect he’s actually just a front man for Orbán himself. (Or maybe for Fidesz, or maybe for a number of Fidesz potentates, or something similar.)
Now his extremely lowbrow anti-immigrant campaign would’ve been okay, if he was principled about it, and if he started a parallel highbrow campaign to explain the reasons for it. First, he wasn’t principled: he started (and in a typical manner, his cronies profited from) a program where foreigners could easily get Hungarian immigration visas in exchange for having bought a quarter of a million euros worth Hungarian government bonds. (Yes, bonds, which he still owned. I’m not sure if there were safeguards against him selling the bonds immediately.) Apparently a number of high profile criminals got immigration visas that way under Orbán’s watch. Another problem was that the lowbrow campaign was used to deflect from any charges against him. Orbán’s primitive, idiotic propagandists (they clearly could’ve learned a lot from Goebbels) basically shared any anti-immigrant fake news, many of which were easily disproven by the leftists. It’s questionable how effective it was for the 85 IQ target audience, but it was probably counter-productive among the highly educated. Now we have an educated class which is inherently skeptical of any stories about the problems of immigration in Western Europe. They have been inoculated against it.
Just an example: they shared yesterday stories claiming that the attacker in Münster was a Muslim. Later they had to retract (which they did by simply ceasing to talk about it at all), but of course many people can speak English, so people know. Also, at least half the media is still leftist, so they wrote it in Hungarian. It’s just embarrassing, they share stories without checking.
We should soon get results. I think they will win despite all this, but I hope they can get their act together for the next four years.
Jobbik is the only opposition party with solid views on immigration (and at least initially they’d probably be less corrupt), and two leftist parties (LMP and Momentum, the latter probably won’t be in parliament) are at least open to anti-immigration arguments (but their instincts would lead them to opening the borders anyway).
The turnout seems to have been lower for the last couple hours, so it’s probably not a record turnout. This means I think Fidesz cannot lose.
The first estimates show a parliament with 116 Fidesz seats (of 199 or 200). But a lot of seats hand in the balance with just a 1-2% or less advantage, so the estimate is not very reliable.
Because the turnout was less spectacular after 1700, I’d be highly surprised if Fidesz lost. They’d have needed at least 75% turnout to lose.
Actually, the vote is not yet over, because in a lot of precincts there are so long lines that they have to keep them open longer. (They cordon off the people who arrived earlier, so no new voters can arrive, but those who arrived before 1900 will not be sent away until they can cast their votes. This means that voting is actually still going on.)
There’s a possibility in the Hungarian constitution that ethnic minorities can also get seats in parliament using less votes than is normally required for a vote. However, people would have to register for the ethnic minority lists, and usually few people do this. (I would abolish this rule anyway, why should ethnic minorities’ votes be more valuable than anyone else’s?) This year apparently the German minority will be able to elect an MP (which is why the number of MPs would go up to 200 from 199), and the guy will probably be a Fidesz member. (So, it was probably a Fidesz GOTV organization effort.)
Sorry, those estimates are based on some pre-election extra-large polls, not actual exit-polls. I remember once (maybe in 2002) they didn’t even do exit-polls at all. I hope we’ll know about them, but I think no exit poll data can be legally released as long as voting was still going on.
Not very reliable estimates anyway.
Ironically enough, he was actually criticised by liberals on Twitter for giving Trumps “too high” a chance before the election, because those supposed experts thought that such numbers would give a moral boost to the Trump campaign.
In reality, his numbers were eminently reasonable. He has to work on what public information there is available. He doesn’t commission his own polls. Based on the polls – which I remind you were within the post-1968 historical averages – there was indeed a strong chance that Hillary would have won.
Don’t forget that Trump lost the popular vote by 2 million. In some of the key swing states he literally hung onto by the skin of his teeth. Michigan had a margin of just some thousands of votes, same in Pennsylvania. It’s always easy to be a smartass with 20/20 hindsight, but in truth his win truly was an upset and a surprise. Silver’s estimates were reasonable, very reasonable, given the available information and in fact gave Trump better chances than most MSM outlets.
It’s also not correct to claim that polls did a very bad job, they did about as well as most polls did in the last 50 years. Notably, the 2012 polls actually did worse according to the FiveThirtyEight aggregate database than the 2016 ones did. Yet you did not hear that whining about polls in the media. Can you guess why? Because the favored candidate won.
Some folks over at the /r/Europe megathread made the argument that it not only matters if there is strong turnout but where the turnout is. Some Hungarians were claiming – presumably on Hungarian news outlets and similar sources – that a lot of this turnout was coming from rural areas.
Obviously I am not Hungarian, so I can’t confirm, but if this is true then it would mean that Fidesz could outperform the somewhat negative expectations that at least reiner built up over the past few weeks. I guess I was not that worried given their decent polling average, coupled with the 2011 election law changes which mixes a proportional with a FPTP system, which favours big parties. That’s how Fidesz got 2/3 the seats with 44% of the vote.
It’s extremely unlikely that they won’t end up with a majority this time again.
Yes, they are very professional and service is good. But that’s also true of young stewardesses here and frankly just American business in general.
The pilots and technicians are very, very good.
It’s easy for me to complain about things since I live here, but fundamentally most things in America very well.
Yes. See comments #63 and #70 above.
Please note that my prediction was a narrow Fidesz win. This now looks a bit overly pessimistic, and based on what we know now they are likely to win a solid majority (but it still doesn’t look like a supermajority). At least that seems to be the consensus in Hungary for the moment. We don’t yet have exit polls.
Back then no Jobbik voter thought of voting for a leftist candidate if the leftist had a higher chance of being elected, and vice versa. Since 2014 this has become the norm, especially after Fidesz tried to basically outlaw Jobbik using some highly questionable legal pretext. So it’s unlikely they will be able to repeat the 2014 performance with only 44% of the vote.
In 2014 the fptp voting system was still new, and there was very little strategic voting. Usually, like in the old system, people voted for the local candidate of their chosen party, even if he had no chance of winning. There was very little cross voting even among voters of leftist parties. Now it will be more widespread.
Rumors have it that Fidesz is going very strong among rural voters, whereas the left is very strong in the big cities, especially in Budapest.
Yes it’s my impression of America – a very high degree of competence in professional life, even where I am averse to many aspects of the wider culture.
Thanks for the detail. It’s often the case, that politicians that seem good from a distance, are less impressive when you hear detail from people who live in the country.
When I read on Wikipedia the overall ‘broad’ strategy and ideological mix of Orban, it seems to be very similar to what I would argue for if I was Hungarian person.
It’s not a case like Obama, or Trudeau, where their political/ideological orientation is wrong on every issue compared to my view.
Or of Putin – where he is sensible on some or issues, and obviously wrong on others to my view.
When I look at underlying views of Orban (obviously you can correct me on his poor execution of them), then I think to myself that all seems like the right general choices or goals for the country.
Now whether he is acting in an incompetent or corrupt way, that’s another issue from the goals he sets for himself, or personal ideology.
You were correct, I overworried it. It could be a supermajority for Fidesz.
Now I’m going to sleep, since I was traveling this morning and had to get up at 5AM.
YEEEEEEAAAAAAH
Thank you for your contributions on this subject, it was genuinely helpful.
And congratulations on the election win. Your country will continue to resist the colored tide.
No different to Brexit and Trump, the international jew will not simply accept this and move on, they will double down and try even more to destroy Hungary with mass immigration.
Neutral, you might be right, but political outcomes matter. Imagine if Tony Blair and new Labour hadn’t been elected in 1997, and instead the bad (but not catastrophically horrible) Tory immigration policies of the 80’s and 90’s been continued. The UK today would be in a lot better shape today. Or look at Danish immigration policy vs Sweden. In Denmark you have the Progress Party helping to keep the other parties much more pro-Danish than would have been the case without them, with the result that the average Danish city is in a lot better shape than a Swedish city.
Also, its nice to see politicians rewarded for campaigning on a low/anti-immigration platform, to encourager les autres.
In the short run. Denmark is better than Sweden, Trump is better than Clinton, and Brexit was a plus. But I have not detected a real change in the overall massive direction of population replacement and gradual Third-Worldization. Maybe it is slower, maybe a few places delay it, even avoid it for now, but the massive migration continues. And is with osmosis in physics, the new migrants will eventually spread to the places that re currently resisting. The whole point of EU is that anyone can move anywhere, how long before s few ‘enterprising’ newcomers in Malmo decide that Coenhagen is better? Once they have documents – and Swedes are giving them documents – they can go anywhere in EU.
It is good that Orban won, but I am starting to worry that these are all mostly symbolic victories, that current political systems simply are not able to address this.
Sooner or later someone is going to realize that the EU is a paper tiger. The EU is not the United States federal government. There is no EU army, no EU police, and no EU court system.
Any country in the EU could simply ignore EU rules about the free movement of people and announce this publicly.
Then what does the EU do?
I agree with this. Immigration reduction is well and good, but it needs to be reversed as Enoch Powell proposed.
I agree that EU is a paper tiger, no teeth. But what we are facing is not just Brussels ‘commisars’, we are also facing endless NGO comprador elites in most countries that are obsessively devoted to ‘open borders’ EU dream. They tend to dominate the capital cities, even in this election Budapest went against Orban (and no other region did). They control the media, the universities, the public discourse. They are effectively sell-outs in a much more significant way than the alleged ‘corruption’ of Orban and people like him. They are the ultimate sell-outs, because they are willingly selling the future of their nations for a job, or an internship, or often just a free airline ticket with a crappy hotel.
They might account to less than 5% in most countries, and get 10-15% in elections (old ladies like to be ‘nice’), but they dominate 90% of media, 90% of discussions, etc… Until that changes we are truly f..ed.
The Fidesz/Jobbik vote held up pretty well in Budapest, but Fidesz lost a few seats because the left wing parties got their act together and ran just one candidate in a few seats, had they not Fidesz would have held most of their Budapest seats. I’m surprised that they did as well as they did there. At some point in time the left will probably win all the district seats there, but still be surrounded by Fidesz or Jobbik districts nationwide.
The Gypsies save Europe!
I love it!
Unlike Jews, Gypsies are a diaspora people who benefit their host nation!
Gypsies good, Jews bad. That is the lesson of this election, and I will love shoving it in the face of the likes of Cofnas from now till the end of time.
Also glad to hear Vona is retiring, hopefully he will take Vambery’s absurd Turanism with him when he goes. It was painful to watch Jobbik reflexively taking sides with Turkey against Armenia and Cyprus.
By the way, compared to Trump’s 3 am tweets about Miss Venezuela’s weight, Orban’s speeches seem very high brow indeed. Is Orban is a Hungarian Nixon or Reagan, with some Hungarian Buchanan writing his speeches for him?
Ñot only this, but we also face a hostile and often foreign media. A significant chunk of our media is owned by Germans. There was even a scandal where one of the editors of one such large media outlet sent out a memo to his journos about how they need to side with the EU over Poland in a recent dispute and how this is “really good for Poland in the long run”.
Obviously this got leaked and a huge firestorm ensued, but after the initial days of rage and mea culpas, not much happened because PiS dare not openly confiscate media the way Orban did early on(though he handed some of them to his trusted oligarchs, to avoid too much screeching). But most of these moves of Orban were done during the years of austerity, when the gaze of Europe was fixed on Southern Europe, not the Eastern one. It was also before the 2015 refugee wave.
To truly become independent, we’d have to do a full rootcanal of not just NGOs but also the media. However, the political space to do this now is limited since after Russia, the neoliberal/neo-Cohenist obsession with Hungary and Poland are a close second. Orban has also been in power for much longer and he is a more skilled politician than whatever PiS can offer.
Finally, Hungary is a more conservative country. All the right-wing parties get around 45% in total in Poland, in Hungary it is closer to 65%. Their good example will be a great model for us to follow in purging the subversive elements who are working for hostile and foreign agendas.
But all that said, today’s election was a good development.
They are not symbolic. Orban winning will have a decisively positive impact on the V4 at least. If his opposition would have won, it would definitely worsen things in a direct and material way.
However, you’re correct that ultimately what we’re doing now is slowing rather than reversing the tide. This will continue to happen even if we were to exit the EU. It would make movement harder, but geography is like parents: you don’t choose it. Even if we were to leave the EU and/or disobey the EU freedom of movement, then these people would crawl into our countries sooner or later.
It is only a combined Western/Eastern effort at full-scale repatriation that would fix this and for that you need a large political change in Western Europe. I do not subscribe to the idea that EE can ride this one out alone.
I’m sure Orbán would’ve won without the Gypsies. It’s a huge enough victory.
Would like to see the Visegrad countries develop a nationalist establishment, nationalist press, academia, publishing, movies etc a true right-wing (in the nationalist, anti-globalist sense) cultural hegemony, to begin a true cultural/political, overton window moving type counterattack.
Is there a collection of liberal media crying yet to make up a collection for schadenfreude?
In my district, the vote share of Fidesz dropped by 15%. It’s a traditionally Fidesz-voting district, it voted conservative (not Fidesz) already in 1990 and 1994 (when Fidesz was still a liberal party), and started consistently voting Fidesz in 1998.
Perhaps one reason why I thought Fidesz was significantly weakening: because in my social circle (and wider area), it was. (This included this significantly pro-Fidesz area.) It was also the belief of most analysts.
In Budapest as a whole, it’s a mixed bag. Fidesz would’ve lost if the country was Budapest only, whereas I think it’d have a small majority in 2014. (It won 10 districts out of 18 then, now it won only 6. And then, the major leftist parties formed a coalition, whereas now it was limited to a few districts.) But I’ll have to check the overall number of votes (unfortunately I haven’t found aggregate numbers for the whole of Budapest, only electoral district level data) once I have time.
This persistent gap between the metropolis and the rest of the country is in one way puzzling. People in Budapest – or London, Vienna, Prague – experience the costs of Third World mass migration more. Crime, squalor, cost of housing, the general dirty crumminess that results when large migrant ghettoes are created, menacing subways become, hustlers from Tunisia or Nigeria hanging around centers – it happened first in the large cities, and it would also happen in Budapest first.
Many people in capitals benefit economically – government social jobs, NGO’s, foreign owned media, increase in real estate values. But it is selling one’s future for transient benefits (yeah, I know, also the ‘ethnic food’ that Londoners swear by and justify all else when they run out of rational arguments).
If liberal-left-progressives would come to power in Hungary, they would quickly apologize to Brussels and quietly accept their share of migrants. The same pattern that destroyed Western capitals would then follow: first few thousand would come, start bringing in their relatives, small ghettoes would form with those ‘great ethnic’ restaurants. Then the less respectable in-laws and cousins would show up, crime would rise, locals would move out, and within 10-20 years Budapest would have a few ‘no-go’ zones and expensive welfare and crime ghettoes. At that point there would be no civilised way to address it – it would be a bumpy, unpleasant ride into a Third World oblivion (but with that ‘unforgivable’ Pakistani cousine).
Don’t the elites in Budapest see it? Or are they so short-sided and greedy that it simply doesn’t matter to them?
There is a theory in biology and in religion known as costly signaling. The religious application is relevant here.
The idea is that religious rituals which impose substantial personal burdens on the observant proves that he is is faithful and loyal to the group.
Putting up with the burdens of “diversity” is costly, stressful, and even dangerous. By claiming to piously worship the invaders, one demonstrates fealty to the one truth faith of liberalism-progressivism or whatever it ought to be called. This religious cult also polices non-observance by punishing those guilty of the taboo of “racism”.
People who live in metropolitan areas are mostly more ambitious, so they are both more personally willing and find it more professionally necessary to participate in this rubbish religion of self-annihilation.
It’s the same everywhere. For instance in the American state of California whites voted for Hillary over Trump, even though their state has basically been destroyed by immigration.
This is why Reiner Tor is right to point out that lowbrow populism is inadequate. We need something compelling to offer to elites–and especially elite aspirants. And I mean something more than the highbrow, empirical arguments you can find on this website.
We need something people can believe in. National myths and the old religions are one obvious place to look, but it seems like we’ll need more than that to capture the Davos wannabes. I think the NRx people were onto something with their technofeudalism and open embrace of elitism, though obviously they were too autistic and LARPy to be taken seriously.
In the present Hungarian election the incomprehensible thing was that the capital and rural areas were moving in an opposite direction. Budapest got more leftist, while the rest of the country (mostly the rural areas, not even the bigger cities) got more pro-Fidesz. Usually there’s a difference, but at least there’s correlation.
I was thinking about it too. I propose that:
(1) In a large city you do not have really a community, even by – unfortunately – low CEE standards. Without a community, you don’t really get what’s this nationalism is all about.
(2) It’s not like living in big city you experience negative consequences of immigration. Yes, on average criminality might go up; the costs of living might go up; but it might not be discernible from the point of view of average Joe until it’s too late.
(3) The boiled frog theory. If you live in a big city when the change is gradual, you compare current situation to the past year, past two years, and then you do not really see that much a change. When, in contrast, if you go from the province to the big city you might experience a huge shock. A lot of my Polish friends go back from the West racist and islamophobic, while westerners living there for years seem to not care about Londonistan having larger homicide rate than New York.
I indirectly know of a Belorussian nationalist (one of those “zmagar” types who believe Belarus to be a descendant of the Commonwealth), strongly anti-Russian, anti-Lukashenko, and adored the West and especially the UK.
Spent a couple of years in the UAE and a few months in London before returning to Belarus.
Still an anti-Russian Belorussian nationalist, but now also hates Arabs, hates Britain, hates the West, and adores Lukashenko.
Budapest is more exposed to the EU mainstream narrative, isn’t it?
He sounds great, I didn’t know such people even existed.
” Don’t the elites in Budapest see it”
Of course they see it, however this is precisely what they want to happen which then will then justify the establishment of the “solution”, namely : Communism.
The “elites” ( professors) world-wide have but one goal in mind as the ( innefective) cure for all of mankinds, from their viewpoint, flaws : Communism.
This is what the total academic field in every country on planet mirth is relentlessly striving towards, as crazy as it seems, however not hard to comprehend when ones realizes that they are all insane.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and proJazz artist.
That’s been going on for years, and not only originating in Sweden either. Tip to the enterprising asylum seeker: you can pretty easily get gibs from multiple countries, set up collections of wives in multiple countries, etc. And in case one fails, move on.
Question for reiner,
Any thoughts on why certain rural areas were stronger for Jobbik than others? Also, any ideas on which leftist party the Budapest Jews supported, and how many are for Fidesz or Jobbik?
In the case of London, they’re either homeowners whove been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the last couple of decades or they’re renters who live there by choice, knowing full well what living there entails. Besides “diversity” is quite misleading. You tend to get the right tail ends of all nationalities heading to the capital(s). The dregs go to the crappy, depressed provincial towns where there’s a surplus of housing.
In London, it depends a lot on the area of the city. In East side, or South of the River Thame, it feels like a disaster zone.
But in the rich parts of London, everything is very civilized, even with the multi-national atmosphere (it’s mainly civilized behaving people from other parts of the world living there – as well as civilized tourists including from the most civilized countries like Japan).
That generally wasn’t my experience when I lived there for a year. Unlike in provincial cities, where housing projects/sink estates were built on big tracts of then peripheral land, those in London tended to be high density, small in area and dotted around randomly. Supposedly left wing councils are in the process of “redeveloping” them (isteve has extensively covered this phenomena in the states). There are quite a few nasty private hmos/bedsits/kommunalkas though. If you’re talking about “rich” parts, I’ll have to disagree. Land values are absolutely
astronomical in every inch of the place, and the countryside beyond.
That’s been so since 2010. It’s mostly heavily Gypsy infested areas where Jobbik became the strongest, and it stayed that way until this very day.
I can only tell you that the vast majority of Jews supported leftist parties. Each of them had some Jewish support.
In recent years a number of famous Jewish intellectuals have been advocating for some form of coordination with Jobbik. Jobbik itself was open to a coalition with LMP, the only new leftist party which managed to get into parliament. Unfortunately since its founding leader Schiffer resigned (he is of mostly Jewish descent, but interestingly with working class sensibilities and never obsessing over the Jewish issues like the supposed anti-Semitism of Orbán etc.), they are drifting to become a traditional leftist party soon. They were still more accepting of Jobbik than the rest.
Now Vona, the president of Jobbik, responsible for its leftward drift, has resigned (he also gave back his seat in parliament), so it might become a radical party once again.
It’s also higher IQ, more people can speak and read English, etc.
I read the analyses about Fidesz being overmeasured, and it matched my personal experience of people getting progressively more anti-Fidesz. Which was, of course, true of Budapest only. The rural areas were moving in the opposite direction.
Opposition supporters now increasingly claim that the election was stolen.
What’s their reasoning? Is there evidence for any fraud at all?
There seems to have been some incompetence. I’ll write examples later when I have time.
I’m sure it’s just a conspiracy theory, but on the surface there are plausibly enough sounding anecdotes.
There are about 50,000 Jews in Hungary, or about 0.3% of the population. Why is how they voted of much interest? Polling a population that sparse would require patient and labor intensive procedures to construct a probability sample and process the data.
How the hell did Jobbik f*ck up so badly?
I was expecting that the drift of European politics to revolve more and more around immigration and identity issues would benefit Jobbik more than anyone else.
I will write in more detail after the nuclear war has been averted. Also about the accusations of election fraud.