Forum Post: Maybe Hungary is starting too

We don't have an active Occupy movement in Hungary. Two meetings have been held, and then it largely lost its already weak hold on public awareness. Maybe because much political "steam" was already blown off - five years ago, two new parties (one of which is a fairly liberal and progressive green party) went into the Parliament on that. There was very scant reporting about global Occupy events in the media in general.

Not that we wouldn't need something like that. One year ago a new government was installed according to schedule. As the quirks of representative democracy turned out, the new government was to get an absolute majority in the Parliament - enough to form a new Constitution with all the oppositional parties saying nay. And so it did!

FIDESZ (Young Democrat's Alliance - they are not young and not democratic either), the winning party, and Viktor Orban, present Prime Minister

• restricted freedom of press, threatening informants and promising punishments of many hundred thousand dollars for very ambiguously defined media offences.
• replaced progressive tax system with a flat tax, hugely benefitting a minor and wealthy part of the society at the expense of anyone else.
• to replenish the budget that was hit hard by the loss of income induced by this flat tax, they imposed many kinds of different "crisis taxes", hitting foodstuff, specific industries and even - banks.
• it also engaged in classic austerity politics, gutting healthcare, schooling and mass transit in the process.
• it then jumped onto the education. With the austerity measures, the government restricted the allocation numbers for the education of secondary and tertiary students. It also centralized the curriculae, making all kinds of alternative education methods - except church-based schools, of course, which form one of the pillars of the new state ideology.
• it appointed fourteen established churches and took away the rights of all other religious groups.
• it restricted workers' rights and made strike actions essentially impossible.
• it appointed party staff members and their relatives into theoretically independent institutions like the Constitutional Court, the Central Bank (the equivalent of FED) and the institution that governs courts.
• and so on, and so on. (Engaging in sister party relationship with China's Communist Party, funnelling million dollars of taxpayers money into football stadium buildings and other unbelievable antics...)

Today FIDESZ plans to enacts laws, among others, to make proposals possible to be voted on without being debated in Parliament, and a new law on parliamentary elections and modifying electionary district borders in such a way that it seems to make removal of FIDESZ impossible. Some representatives of that little progressive green party blockaded the parking lots of the Parliament building and they got detained. After some demonstrations in the last few days, a large rally is planned today afternoon, at 16:00 CET.

Maybe we won't get to direct democracy right away - I would be very satisfied with the traditional representative kind right now... But maybe today is a great chance for progress(ion) in Hungary. Be with us in spirit.