Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP alliance has been reelected upon the conclusion of the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election, forming government for the fifth time. Securing 53.10 percent of the votes, Fidesz-KDNP has won 135 seats in the National Assembly and thus kept its two-thirds majority. Péter Márki-Zay’s United for Hungary alliance has secured 35.04 percent of votes, forming the opposition with 56 seats in the National Assembly. The far-right Our Homeland (“Mi Hazánk”) Movement has also been able to secure more than the 5 percent minimum to be represented in the National Assembly, winning 7 seats with 6.17 percent of the vote.

Reklám

The Hungarian National Assembly has elected former Family Minister Katalin Novák to become the country’s first-ever female head of state, with Novák herself announcing she would pursue a course of peacemaking in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Reklám

“What we have now is war, and war can only be stopped by way of talks and a ceasefire,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Beregsurány, at the Hungary-Ukraine border, on Thursday.

Reklám

 “We have to stay out of this war,” the prime minister said. “But we must help the Hungarians and Ukrainians who have left their homes behind fleeing from the war.”

Reklám

We Hungarians are in a cultural expansion, “crisis or no crisis,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the inauguration ceremony of the Hungarian House of Music in Budapest on Saturday.

Reklám

ReConnect Hungary, the Hungarian Birthright Program, is ready to accept applications for the 2022 birthright trip for qualified young adults to participate in its unique cultural, educational and social immersion program. The application period opens November 3, 2021. All those aged 18─28, of any Hungarian ancestry, born in the US or Canada, are invited to apply.

WHAT: Scholarship for cultural immersion trip to Hungary

WHO: Students aged 18-28, of any Hungarian ancestry, born in the US or Canada

WHEN: July 28- Aug 12, 2022

WHERE: reconnecthungary.org

Application Period: November 3, 2021─February 28, 2022

Program Details

Students spend two weeks in Hungary learning about their Hungarian roots—culture, traditions and history—through educational lectures with subject experts, meetings with start-up business leaders, visits to top-level government offices and panel discussions on current-day social and political issues. Local students accompany the group throughout the trip; a service project is undertaken; future internship opportunities are also available. The Program provides participants with a deepened sense of identity, increased knowledge base, broadened cultural horizon, honed interpersonal skills, expanded sensitivity to diversity, and a life-long, bi-continental network.

Please Circulate

We kindly request that you help us get the word out about this scholarship opportunity so we may reach targeted audiences. We would highly appreciate if you would share this email and the attached promotional materials with your mailing list, include it in your newsletter, and post it on relevant (physical and electronic) bulletin boards.

Feel free to consider and promote this program as one of your own, a service you are offering to your members, supporters and local community in general, and urge those who might be interested to check out this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! We hope to get the word out far and wide and need your help to reach every Hungarian community in North America!

Thank you for your assistance,

1 of 3

Reklám

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, alluding to clashes between Fidesz supporters and riot police in 2006 on the anniversary of the 1956 revolution on the spot in Budapest where he delivered his speech, said that 15 years ago “tear gas grenades” had been on one side and “a cheated and humiliated nation” on the other. In his speech, the prime minister added that it had taken “years to clear up the havoc the left-wing government left behind, but we have succeeded in putting Hungary back on its feet”.

Reklám

The march started from in front of the Budapest University of Technology on the Buda side of the capital on Saturday.

CÖF-CÖKA leader László Csizmadia told participants at the start of the event that “we are ready to protect Europe’s Christian-Jewish civilization”.

Participants lined up behind a giant banner with an image of former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, a photo of the mounted police attack on demonstrators in 2006, and an inscription “never again”.

The crowd was scheduled to walk over to the Pest side and of the city and join central commemorations addressed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán later in the afternoon.

“Never again Bolshevism, never again Communism, never again Nazism,” Csizmadia said, addressing the crowd, adding that “we don’t want either extreme liberalism or the decadent ideology of an open society”.

He called on participants to remember the heroes of 1956, the “victims of Kádár’s retaliation” and also to remember “how the Gyurcsány regime desecrated the anniversary of the revolution in 2006, when the streets of Pest were stained with blood”.

On the subject of relations with the European Union, the CÖF-CÖKA leader said Poles and Hungarians could do without “friendly fire”, adding that the peoples represented a Europe of nations and had no need for an empire.

Members of CÖF-CÖKA’s Italian and Polish partner organizations also appeared in the procession. Many of the participants carried national and Szekler flags, while some wore traditional Transylvanian folk costumes.

Details of the events of 2006 were projected onto a video wall along the route of the Peace March and a water cannon truck was also exhibited to recall the way the crowd was dispersed by police at the time.

When the front of the procession had reached the venue of the central commemoration on the other side of the river, the tail end of the march was still at the assembly point, next to the University of Technology.

Featured photo by Zoltán Balogh/MTI

(Hungary Today)

Reklám