Pole and Hungarian brothers be. How Warsaw and Budapest use taxpayers’ money to build pro-government propaganda

Graphics by Lenka Matoušková

With almost five hundred media outlets owned by a single pro-government foundation and hundreds of millions of euros of state advertising transferred annually to fund it, Hungary’s right-wing government has built Europe’s largest propaganda machine since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Warsaw follows in Budapest’s footsteps with a growing stream of taxpayers’ money funnelled […]

Attila Bátorfy

VSquare

Konrad Szczygieł

18.12.2019

Hungary in the midst of a U.S. – Huawei war

China, Huawei, Hungary, USA, Viktor Orban

Budapest. Photo:Shutterstock

This article was originally published by Direkt36 on November 1st, 2019. Viktor Orban’s government has found itself in the middle of a great power conflict in 2019. Last year, a new battleground emerged in the trade war between the United States and China. Washington accused Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei of espionage on behalf of the […]

Szabolcs Panyi

07.11.2019

Huawei is at the center of heated political debate around the world. There is a general assumption among experts on China, ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts and politicians that the company uses its ICT devices to spy on its users and provide this data to Chinese government. Though there have been separate cases of Huawei breaches […]

Wojciech Cieśla

Pavla Holcova

Anita Komuves

31.10.2019

Shutterstock

Early in the morning on January 8th, agents of the Polish Internal Security Agency entered the homes of Piotr D. and Wejing W. The former, who used to work in special services, was a manager at Orange, a telecommunications company. The latter was the head of sales at Poland’s Huawei’s office. They were charged with […]

Wojciech Cieśla

Szabolcs Panyi

Tamas Bodoky

31.10.2019

Two years ago Azerbaijani army showed off Czech howitzers and rocket launchers in a promotional video — despite the fact Czech Republic did not officially export military equipment to the country. How the weapons end up in the country immersed in a deadly conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh?

VSquare

10.10.2019

Budapest Pride March 2019. Photo: Zoltan Galantai | Shutterstock

Máté Hegedűs was walking on Deák tér, one of the busiest areas of Budapest recently. His long hair, his earring, flower-patterned shirt and colorful shoes made him stand out from the crowd. Someone suddenly shouted at him ’look, there goes a gay guy!’. He actually used a very vulgar expression. ’I don’t mind being stared […]

Anita Komuves

02.09.2019

Many Western allies of Hungary are worried about Russia’s International Investment Bank (IIB) having moved its seat to Budapest. In the meantime the government of Hungary and IIB’s management are arguing that this is only a regular international bank and cannot even be categorized as ‘Russian.’ However, VSquare and its partners reveal how IIB’s head […]

VSquare

03.08.2019

design by Lenka Matoušková

The management board of the Russian-led International Investment Bank (IIB) held its first meeting in its new headquarters, Budapest, this week. The move of IIB from Moscow to Budapest has been controversial since it was announced: experts, historians and the media have been worried that the bank would be a tool for the Kremlin to […]

VSquare

18.07.2019

The parliamentary elections in the fall in Poland will be crucial. We’ve already seen in Hungary what eight years in power can mean both for the governing party and its loyalist structures and the opposition — says Zselyke Csaky form Freedom House in intervew with Vsquare

Konrad Szczygieł

01.06.2019

Arpad Habony photographed in Washington in 2014. Via Facebook-Fanny Kaminski

The Hungarian prime minister’s enigmatic spin doctor, Arpad Habony has a diplomatic passport – Atlatszo learned recently. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that Habony got a diplomatic passport, it was issued on February 15, 2019, and it was granted to him by minister Peter Szijjártó. Written by Katalin Erdélyi. English version by […]

VSquare

29.05.2019