Free Republic

An installation by sculptor Péter Szalay, dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement, was pulled down on Friday morning in Hungary just a day after it was put on display. Standing at just a metre high, the 3D-printed work, which depicts New York's Statue of Liberty in rainbow colours, has already sparked controversy in the country among the government of Viktor Orbán. Erected on Thursday in the capital Budapest, Lady Liberty is portrayed bending the knee, stretching her right fist in the air and holding a plaque that reads: "Black Lives Matter".

Poland and Hungary won’t get with the LGBT program, and that makes the European Union mad. On March 11 the European Parliament declared the European Union an “LGBTIQ Freedom Zone” in response to the growth of official LGBT-ideology free zones in Poland and Hungary’s own lack of enthusiasm for the new secularist LGBT religion. According to the European Parliament’s own newspaper, Poland and Hungary are notable for their “backsliding.” “In response to the backsliding of LGBTIQ rights in some EU countries, notably Poland and Hungary, MEPs declared the EU an ‘LGBTIQ Freedom Zone’ on Thursday,” wrote the European Parliament News....

The Polish Prime Minister has defended the blocking of the adoption of the EU budget by his country, which refuses the payment of European funds to be linked to respect for the rule of law. The European Parliament, for its part, does not want to give in. “An EU in which there is a European oligarchy which punishes the weakest [des Etats membres] is not the EU we entered and it is not the EU that has a future, ”Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared with a crash in his country’s parliament, on the eve of a European summit which...

The EU is striking back at Poland for embracing traditional family valuesThe European Union has stripped funding from six Polish cities after they declared themselves to be “free of LGBTI ideology.” “Our treaties ensure that every person in Europe is free to be who they are, live where they like, love who they want and aim as high as they want. I will continue to push for a union of equality,” announced European Union President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday, after rejecting grants for the cities. The EU Observer reports that cities in the European Union are eligible for...

I recognize and understand the enormous pressure under which German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been laboring. She has been Germany’s chancellor for 15 years and is now approaching retirement, in September 2021. With French President Emmanuel Macron temporarily distracted by the laïcité issue and other serious security concerns within France, Merkel has become something of the sole main decision-maker for the EU. I also understand why the German chancellor does not want another country, Hungary, to announce its intention to leave the EU on her watch. That is reportedly what Orbán was preparing to do in recent days, because he...

Enid Zentelis thought she knew everything about her grandmother, Bella Vital-Tihanyi — a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, mother of two and late-in-life avowed nudist who died in 1998. “She was my rock,” said Zentelis, who traveled the world with Bella and even lived with her for a time. Zentelis believed that Bella, born in 1915, had a straightforward war story. A neighbor turned in Bella as a Jew, and she spent several months in a Budapest prison. She survived the Nazi regime thanks to fake papers claiming she was a Swedish citizen waiting to go home. But Zentelis’ view changed in...

Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga said Monday that Hungary is considering sanctions against big tech firms over alleged “systemic abuses” of free speech, Reuters reported. Varga plans to meet with the Hungarian Competition Authority this week to discuss possible penalties for what he says are unfair commercial practices utilized by social media firms including Facebook and Twitter, according to Reuters. In addition, the minister plans to convene a meeting with the state-sponsored Digital Freedom Committee. Government officials have begun to criticize alleged censorship of conservatives on social media platforms. Varga decried supposed “shadowban” techniques used by social media firms in...

Secretary General. Joined by 34 other countries, the document enshrines the Trump administration’s pro-life diplomacy on the official record of the General Assembly. “The United States strongly supports the dignity of all human beings and protecting life from the moment of conception throughout the lifespan,” Ambassador Kelly Craft wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres transmitting the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Following the letter, the declaration was issued as an official document of the United Nations last week and circulated on December 11, after having been translated into all six official UN languages....

The Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's top court, has ruled that Hungary violated EU law when it prevented illegal immigrants from seeking asylum. The ruling paves the way for the European Commission, the EU's powerful administrative arm, to impose financial penalties over Hungary's restrictive immigration policies. The Hungarian government has vowed that it will not bow to pressure to jump aboard the EU's multicultural bandwagon.In its December 17 ruling, the court, informally known as European Court of Justice (ECJ) accused the Hungarian government of corralling migrants into so-called transit zones and of limiting their ability to...

BUDAPEST - Hungary amended the definition of family in its constitution Tuesday to allow an effective ban on adoption by same-sex couples, another win for the ruling conservatives but decried by one pro-LGBTQ group as "a dark day for human rights." The nationalist Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has worked to recast Hungary in a more conservative mold since winning a third successive landslide in 2018,and anti-gay verbal attacks and legislation have become common. In recent years Orban, facing a unified opposition for the first time, has doubled down on propagating his increasingly conservative ideology, deploying strong language...

Soros is the “liberal Führer” turning Europe into a “gas chamber,” wrote Szilard Demeter in an opinion piece for the Internet portal Origo.hu, a Hungarian pro-government outlet.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lambasted billionaire plutocrat George Soros as “one of the most corrupt people in the world” after he called on the European Union to make Hungary and Poland submit to “open society” values. “George Soros is threatening Hungary and Poland,” Prime Minister Orbán told Kossuth Rádió on Friday, referencing the 90-year-old arch-activist’s public lobbying of the EU deprive the conservative-led central European countries of funding. “George Soros is one of the most corrupt people in the world; he has plenty of politicians in his pocket who now want to blackmail Hungary and Poland for access to...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary’s government proposed a constitutional amendment on Tuesday requiring children to be raised with a Christian interpretation of gender roles, as Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling nationalists turn to anti-LGBT rhetoric to shore up support. The draft amendment submitted to parliament by Justice Minister Judit Varga declares that children must be guaranteed an “upbringing based on values stemming from Hungary’s ... Christian culture.” “The basis for family relations is marriage,” it says. “The mother is a woman, the father is a man.” It also says Hungary “protects children’s right to the gender identity they were born with,”...

The European Union cannot afford to compromise on the rule-of-law provisions it applies to the funds it allocates to member states. How the EU responds to the challenge to those provisions now posed by Hungary and Poland will determine whether it survives as an open society true to the values upon which it was founded.NEW YORK – Hungary and Poland have vetoed the European Union’s proposed €1.15 trillion ($1.4 trillion) seven-year budget and the €750 billion European recovery fund. Although the two countries are the budget’s biggest beneficiaries, their governments are adamantly opposed to the rule-of-law conditionality that the EU...

Hungary’s leadership is standing by its decision to block the whole seven-year budget for the European Union over the inclusion of new powers which would, they claim, allow the political persecution of member states that don’t follow the Brussels globalist playbook on matters like mass migration. The Hungarian and Polish governments used their veto powers to block the seven-year Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) — in other words, the EU’s budget — on Monday, having failed to prevent new clauses and rules being inserted at earlier stages of the negotiation process. While the comparatively small central European nations lacked the political...

EU member states Hungary and Poland have followed through on their threat to block the continental power bloc’s seven-year budget, after Brussels attempted to push it through with conditions the populist nations said were akin to “political enslavement”. European Union rules mean that many significant decisions — including whether to approve the bloc’s seven-yearly funding programs — must be taken unanimously, with any single member state able to veto decisions. This safeguard was triggered on Monday by conservative-led Hungary and Poland, who blocked the progress of the €1.8 trillion (£1.6 trillion, $2.1 trillion) ‘Multi annual Financial Framework’ (MFF) as an...

Constitutional amendment proposed to enshrine defence of so-called ‘Christian values’ Moments before Hungary entered a second coronavirus lockdown on Wednesday, the far-right government signalled its intention to pass a range of new legislation, including to make it harder for opposition political parties to join forces and to change the constitution to enshrine the defence of so-called “Christian values”. Opposition politicians criticised both the substance and timing of the moves. The proposed constitutional amendment, submitted to parliament by the justice minister, Judit Varga, late on Tuesday, is the latest assault on LGBT rights in the country, where legal recognition for gender...

Have fake news and deception only just been invented or have creativity with the truth and illusion always been at the heart of what humans do to each other?

At a town hall event in Philadelphia late last week, former Vice President Joe Biden was asked what he thought of America's foreign policy under the Trump administration. "You see what's happened," he lamented, "in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world, and as well, this president embraces all the thugs in the world." With that half-insulting, half-clueless remark—counting Poland and Hungary among the "totalitarian regimes in the world"—Biden set off a small diplomatic firestorm. Or he would have, if these were normal times, and if insults to Poles and Hungarians...

Joe Biden has triggered a huge diplomatic row with NATO members Hungary and Poland after appearing to lump them in with Belarus as “totalitarian regimes”, with the Hungarian government demanding answers on his family’s alleged corruption in Ukraine. “You see what’s happening in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world, and, as well as, this President embraces all the thugs of the world,” said the 77-year-old presidential hopeful at a recent town hall event. Biden’s seeming comparison of Poland and Hungary, both European Union democracies and parties to the NATO defence...