Central Europe needs foreign investment to escape the recession, but a populist response to the crisis in Hungary is taking the country in the opposite direction, British weekly The Economist reports in its latest edition.
It writes that American diplomats are “seething” over the National Radio and Television Board’s (ORTT) decision to remove nationwide frequencies from Danubius Rádió and US-owned Sláger Rádió and to award them to local companies, “one of which has links to Fidesz”.
Similar concern surrounds Pécs’s unilateral severance of a contract with French company Suez Environnement, operator of the local waterworks.
The magazine said Fidesz stokes antipathy against “privatisation, foreign investors and, to an extent, free-market capitalism in general”.
The Financial Times covered the ORTT decision in its Friday edition, writing that it has “raised concerns that political interference in business might increase as parties try to raise funds before next year’s general election”.
The owners of both Sláger and Danubius told the newspaper that before the tender results were announced people claiming to represent Fidesz and the Socialists had offered to extend their licences if the parties were given 50% of the companies’ equity.
Anyone got more details on this from local media?
@Mother: This was briefly covered on Saturday in some of the press. That is, the story of how foreign press was reacting to events here. MSZP & Fidesz friendly companies awarded radio contracts become an international concern, articles in FT and Economist http://bit.ly/18b2kJ
If you want local news (in Hungarian) about the radio contracts it was in both HVG and Narancs in detail. News sources friendly to Fidesz have hardly squeaked about it – the shape of things to come.
All righty then! The shape of things to come.
The Economist is a piece of crap rag published in a country down on its knees and on its last leg, so I wouldn’t pay too much attention as to what they are bitching about this week. There is always something they despise, short of looking into a mirror.
But regaring the Yankee diplomats having nothing better to do than “seething” about the Pecs water supply and some Hungo music radio station, now that is more than funny. Yankeeland is crumbling to its raw elemnents, and yet the idiotic and forever meddling American “diplomats” are “seething” about something that is absoluitely none of their business and 100% outside their control?
This takes the prize, surely.
It is the Yanks business, they own Sláger Radio. As for Pecs, the Yanks never even mentioned it. You must have read a different story to everybody else.
Okay, the forever complaining Amis were not the ones bitching about the Suez Canal of Pecs, already then.
Regarding the airwaves of Hungary, this is in fact allocated by the Hungarian governmental entity ORTT. In the USA it is called FCC, BTW.
For instance, let’s say some rich Hungos would open up a radio station in America. They would own the station itself all right, but they would still license the airwaves from the FCC. And renewal of the frequency is never automatic and assured.
Obviously, there was one or more reasons why the operating licenses of these seemingly innocent music stations were summarily yanked by the ORTT. I guess the Commies and their non-Hungo followers are laying the blame on the opposition already. Like anything bad that had ever happened in Hungary since 1948 is someone else’s fault exclusively. The Socialists and Communists are just the poor victims here, as always.
ALL Hungarians think they are the victims of
whatever is the topic of the day, not just one side
or the other. They also think that they are
entitled to whatever they want, whatever the
consequences. And for fuck’s sake, everybody moans
all the bloody time.
Yes, the Yanks might be meddlesome, but I tell you
what: the Economist is a fuck’s sight better than
any crap that comes out of either Hungary or the
USA. Britain has of course been brought to its
knees by the Socialists but I think that the
inevitable alternative over there will be a million
times better than the inevitable alternative here.
@mc: you need to move outta Hungary pronto and into Tadjikistan or some other fu*cking place, where people will still fall for the Western bullshit that you and people like you seem to permeate.
With respect to THE ECONOMIST, it is a piece of shit anti-American Communist rag. Duuuh!!
The Economist and the FT may be UK in origin but the Economist has a circulation of about 1,4m of which only 200k are in the UK. Similarly the FT has a circulation of about 500k of which 75k are sold in the UK.
Advice Man you moronic fucking halfwit. AKA DICKHEAD DONIZELLI. Go and prostitute yourself in vodka-la-la land if any myopic Russian Joe will tolerate your wrinkled arse.
The socialists have wrecked the UK economy. The quasi-socialist/communist MSZP government have all but done for good old Magyarorszag.
American diplomats, and The Economist, I agree, though, should shut up and stop commenting on Hungary’s little soap opera. International businesses operating out of Hungary will be seriously reconsidering their role here- where a communist government with a corrupt bureaucracy
is still alive and well!
As usual, f.. Economist, f… Financial Times! Those are loudspeakers of American (now ‘Yank’) imperialism directed towards Hungarian homeland! Excuse me, but you are using exactly the same language as the one of Kominform in the ’50s! Be more careful, comrades, even when you adopt ‘black’ color instead of ‘red’! And regarding the anti-Semitism professed by some ‘authors’ of this blog, they have to be more careful when using it, because the Communist party of your country lead in the past a campaign almost identical with theirs!(in words, not in means, this time: the anti-Semitic wave inside Hungarian communist party was very violent in the beginning of the ’50s). So your ‘Guard’, Hungarian or whatever else, is very, very thin and old when it comes to written and thought matters. Of course, screaming, using knives, killing people is much easier. You need only some ‘delays’ in police intervention.
God knows, maybe you or people who instruct you have not yet revised your bibliography before getting to work! But they have to do it quickly, because it is outdated, and your discourse looks too much like that of Rakosi and his Politburo. (P.S. By the way: some other comrades of yours insist in using terms like ‘hyenas’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ when speaking about Western people in Hungary. You know, those epithets used to be Stalin’s favorites when he spoke about “imperialists”. In this site I also find “vipers”, one of Lenin’s favorites)
Right you are, bubble: fuck them all!!!
@villain, AdviceMan is a sad little Hungarian
emigree, sitting in his little bedsit in New Jersey, dreaming about living in Panama, with nothing better
to do all day except write insults on this site.
Much has he has a hate-complex about the old
country, he can’t let it go. He deserves and gets
our pity.
URGENT WARNING TO ALL COMMENTERS: I just got the lowdown from someone working for the Hungarian government that this site and its sister sites are under investigation for racist and inflammatory content. Further, that the government watchdog in charge of such secret police activities are recording the IP addressees of all commenters for possible identification purposes.
I am not posting any more comments on this or any of the other All Hungary Media Group sites, and I urge all others here to do the same! I don’t think these web sites will be operational for much longer, if there is truth to what I had just heard from a most reliable “insider” source.