**is this being true??**
>the average hungarians hardly feel anything about it. The country is relatively nice and safe, crime level or drug usage is low and the weather is fine.
im seeing this ( https://join.substack.com/p/will-us-democracy-fall ) and its having a video that is showing that hungary is no longer being a liberal democracy
i am thinking hungary is being a very beautiful country and a very wonderful place with amazing culture and architecture and nature and things..i am being a bit worried and a bit sad if its being not democratic any more tho..i hope every thing is being ok over there..
the video is also saying hungary might be being remove from europe but im not being sure if that will be happening..
24 comments
It hasn’t been truly democratic for quite some time now. And liberal? Don’t think it ever was. Fear for speaking out? Nope. You can say whatever you want, you can expose obvious corruption and not a single soul will care. The goverment controls almost the entirety of the media, the courts, the police, the tax office, there isnt a single soul who would prosecute them. The education system is nearly broken and underfounded, the healthcare system as well and more then a million people actively support this.
We wont be removed from the EU either. Its very hard for the organization to remove anyone, plus we provide one of the cheapest, mostly competent workforce. And the goverment wants to stay, cause they are stealing a lot of the money that comes from the EU.
Bullshit. Hungary is democratic, and noone fear about speaking against any political party or organization here.
It’s true. Our leader called it illiberal. We can say anything about the government, but if you say good things your dick might get sucked.
I think people fear speaking out, if they work for the government, or an oligarch’s company. Teachers feared to speak out for years for example. Now their situation is so bad, that they have nothing to lose.
YOu can still speak about the government in Hungary, at least right now. It is not like in 1984 where you are constantly watched and every word you say is monitored.
Hungary is on the path of autocracy though, it has been on this path since 2014, some would say evern sooner. Where this path will lead us, i can not tell. It would be surely a grimm place and government if they got another few terms. That is for sure
Orbán declared that Hungary is an illiberal democracy, so even officially it’s not a liberal democracy any more. To the second part of your question, I gave some answer in some of the other comments.
Speaking out: it depends. If you know nothing that can hurt the government because you are not in a position to get proof for your words, you can say whatever you want. It’s not forbidden expressing your hate towards the government or critizise them on online forums or offline with colleagues. But if you have proof against them or you really can hurt their interests that’s an other question. For example there were more doctors who were fired during the pandemic just because they talked about how bad the situation was in the hospitals. Similarly it’s forbidden for teachers to talk about the problems of the education and organizing a strike to protest is impossible, it’s practically forbidden by the law (exactly by a bill that was established right after the teachers announced they want to organize one)
So Hungary is definitely not a democracy.
Only people in certain positions have fear of speaking up against the regime because they might lose their job. But the average person won’t get jailed for it (yet)
I experience the hatred of our government every day, as a sexual minority person. I saw the giant posters, the tv ads that put an equation mark between homosexuality and paedophilia.
I work for the government. If I say something bad, I would get fired. Many people got fired because of someone in position didn’t like them.
Fuck Orbán. Hehe I did it.
Our democracy is on ordinary Hungarian style… Half hearted. Keep what is comfortable in it, ignore anything else… This is our basic lifestyle.
The comfortable part from the power’s point of view: you don’t have to do bloody fights for getting and keep the political power. You only have to win the election, where there are other political parties, and the result is correct. So you’ll have legitimate power over the others in democratic way. Cool.
That’s the comfortable part.
But how you can achieve it? … By demolish the independent institutes of the state. So as power, you can do anything what you want, like spending endless tax money on permanent political campaigns. Feed the loyal oligarchy… etc…
But from our side, as an ordinary citizen, who don’t have hard dependencies on chain of command of the government, we can do and speak anything we want. Even we can organise new political parties, the state won’t bother us until they don’t recognise us as a real threat.
Here is the deal. You can say anything you want, unless it matters. You are free to say anything to your friends. You are free to attend a march. You are free to say anything on FB, Reddit unless you work for something government controlled, because then you might get into trouble at your workplace.
If your voice gets heard you and people start listening to you, then after a while you will be observed by P.I.-s (and lately by the police). They will try to reach you through your employer (e.g. if you are a priest, the Church will ask you to stop). After this, they will try to ruin your private life.
NGO-s are being harassed, as the government sees them as potential threat to its monopoly of power. It goes as far as to have police raids on offices of NGO-s like “Ökotárs”. After all in 1989 such organizations (like the “Dunakör”) took active part in the overturning of the communist system, and that was the time when the current government was socialized, so they know.
If you shut up, you can live a comfortable life.
Currently, no-one is put to jail, or being oppressed directly by police.
sorry for hijacking but why are you using double question marks on all your posts and double dots instead of ellipsis.. ?? may i ask where are you from?
Yes, as some said here before me, the appliance of force and terror from the government is very, however not uprecedented. Let’s just say that our messed up government has a quite special relationship with football and this has its perks, namely having an access to pumped up football fans, who could be deployed to harass the opposition. That eas a dew years ago, and they were very careful about bot getting overboard with it, but still, those gorillas were a thing. The other, more common means of supressing their political opponets is digging up some dirt or bending the rules the way they can be implicated in crimes so they can freely arrest them via the police or counter terrorism unit and seize their belongings and start a smear campaign against them. These people are soon released, but the point is that they are out of the practice for a short time, their accounts are frozen for a while and now they are a bit more afraid to speak out and work against the governing party. Also, the level of governmental surveilance is surprisingly high, several politician and journalist have been followed by agemtd and had their cellphones bugged along with several public places, like restaurants or bars, where they were expected to meet. The goal with these is to find out about opponents with th biggest voice and target them with the aforementioned methods more precisely. And lastly, the matter of speaking out against the government. It is true, anything goes, however if you are working somewhere associated with the government or the party and they find out youwill be fired and they will likely try to humiliate you. The problem is, that huge parts of the private sector is dominated by the party members, especially in the country. It is unfortunately a typicall model, that a smaller countryside town or village is the monopoly board of 2-3 people. They own the 1-2 shops, the 3-4 workshops, the majority of the agricultural lands and the infrastructure associated with it, have very strong ties with the local church (which can be a big thing here sadly) and last but not least they own the local newspaper. And those 2-3 people do happen to be the mayor and the parliamental representative, with occasionally a childhood friend joining to the party.
Tldr: You can speak freely here, but the majority of the people will be soft-fucked if they would, and the government is actively working to fuck as many people as they can.
It’s a liberal democracy like any other country. There are election, only a select few are in power, and they get rich from it. Yeah that’s your average liberal democracy
Nothing to see here,Hungary is doing just fine.
Far left propagandists now try to discredit the Hungarian government as they lost in the recent elections and have to explain to their shrinking voter base that all this is due to lack of democracy and the checks and controls.
Hungary is not less democratic than the US or other Western European countries,the difference is that its the leftist woke parties and leaders who control the narrative in the West and get you fired if you speak against their beliefs while in Hungary its the other way around.
Hey mods. Can we have a pinned post explaining things like this? Its annoying to see one of these posts in every 5 days
Being democratic and being liberal is not the same thing! Democracy in Hungary has it’s issues, more and more so if you compare it the “raw” democracy as in propotional to the votes, but most of Europe has unpropotional representative systems. Meaning that if you get similar vote distribution in France for example, you’d get a similar result.
The problem is that the governing party has a majority which allows it to change the constitution where and when it wants. Absolute legislative power seems to corrupt absolutely. And they’re doing whatever the feel like, without consequences basically.
But no, we don’t have a liberal government since 2010, although they atarted out being ones when the party was founded. Also big no on any fear for speaking out. Except if you are a wealthy industrialist, because then they might come for your shit with an offer you’re not supposed to be able to say no to or work in the government itsef.
I’m a Hungarian and I live in the capital Budapest. I’m really depressed about the current state of Hungary.
– There is free speech, you can speak about nearly anything (that is not illegal in the EU like you still cannot deny the holocaust e.g.), and you will not get to prison. However, if you are employed by the government or any government friend company you should avoid criticizing the government publically or you can lose your job or get demoted. My friend is a low-level accountant in a government agency and her boss told her to delete her Facebook posts critical of the government or she will never get promoted or even make her leave using some excuses.
– The opposing parties are suck. Half of them are corrupt and have close or questionable relationships with Fidesz (Orban’s party) other half are bad politicians. There are a few exceptions but they are usually pushed out of politics. Fidesz also uses their unlimited money to spend lies about the successful opposing politicians, e.g. they beat their wives and kids, steal money from their neighbors or from the taxpayers, cheat their wives or just be a pawn of Soros Gyorgy. They are also divided, there are like 5-6 six different small parties.
– Most of the people in Hungry don’t live well and they are very simple. The government offers very low taxes for them and free money if they have many children. The opposition talked about economic restrictions and sanctions that could cost us a lot of money, so they were not popular. Fidesz (the ruling party) lied that it will save Hungary from the bad economic crisis and protect us from sanctions and the opposition will ruin us. People believed them.
– Fidesz also used gerrymandering and other tricks to make the voting not truly democratic. For example, it’s very easy to vote from Romania where 95% of people support Fidesz (you can vote using letters), but it’s where hard (you can only vote in Embassies, long lines, and only a few spots in a whole country) to vote from the west (e.g. Germany, Spain, England). They also use unlimited money for Facebook marketing, posters, TV/newspaper spots, etc….
– The state media is in the hands of Fidesz. These are free newspapers, and free TV channels that are available for everyone. So it’s free marketing for them. For example, they play these propaganda TV channels in nursing homes, hospitals, in the poor countryside, etc… In these channels they say things like the opposition are agents of Soros, they want to ruin our country, they are corrupt or push us in the war with Russia and only Orban can protect us.
We are your russia at home
You again?
Well at least it is a different question from the same link you sent…
First of all don’t believe everything you see.
Second: No I don’t feel fear about speaking out against the government. In fact nobody had anything to worry about even leading up to the elections even if it was the most anti-establishment anti-government material they posted anywhere.
The “united opposition” was free to trash the governing party left, right and center and the trash talking was strong on both sides.
The elections had a record number of observers present and most of them declared it to be a democratic process.
Now generally I would say that the outliers who declared democracy dead should present their cases and it should be investigated, but if I am being honest, this wouldn’t be the first time where certain people make declarations when a decision doesn’t go their way.
Even the “united opposition” was surprised to see when the people have spoken and sent the meassage that they don’t buy what the opposing parties are selling.
In fact up to this day, they still didn’t manage to figure out that trash talking at people you want to vote to your side is not a productive strategy, so naturally they continue to trash talk at the majority of the population.
As for the attempted removal of Hungary from the EU, it speaks more of the EU than of Hungary where they try to strong arm or bully their views through a sovereign EU member nation.
I hope we get removed from EUROPE. They should ship us next to the Hawaii islands or to Cuba
Back in the day in the 90s, there were real plural-party multi-coalitions, no one really liked the current reigning government. Now a good part of the voters are sympathizing with FIDESZ, and if you speak out against FIDESZ, then you easily lose friends/earn enemies.