Government Assistance and Family Support in Hungary

For a good month now the media have been full of reports about different ideas to reform the welfare system and to modify government support given as an entitlement to families for every child up to the age of twenty-one.

The debate about child support is not new. Read more »

Viktor Orbán’s Philosophical Inspiration

- The language of Viktor Orbán’s “political philosophy”

Viktor Orbán’s philosophical inspiration most likely comes from a couple of local sources. I already mentioned his invocation of biblical quotations, undoubtedly supplied by Zoltán Balog, the Hungarian Reformed minister. His “political philosophy” probably owes a lot to András Lánczi, the author of Conservative Manifesto (2002). Lánczi’s ideas are similar to the until recently fashionable neoconservatism but with a Hungarian twist. The basis of Lánczi’s conservatism is “morality.” His favorite words are “order,” “stability,” “laws of nature,” and “hierarchy.”

These words are echoed in Orbán’s speeches and writings, though in their second life they are stripped of any theoretical sophistication.

But here I don’t want to talk about the hodgepodge of pseudo-philosophical ideas that Orbán invokes but about the language that he (or his speechwriter/ghostwriter) uses. His latest opus appeared in today’s Magyar Nemzet entitled “The Age of the Right in Europe.” The article is actually a more detailed version of his speech in Tusnádfürdő.

In brief, the left is dead and the time of the right has arrived.

But the language! Read more »