Occupy the State: The Orbán Regime in Hungary

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The reference here is to a police investigation currently underway against Ágnes Heller and other left-liberal philosophers in Hungary (including Mihaly Vajda, Sándor Radnóti, and János Weiss) for misuse of public funds. A politically-motivated attack (those allegations that have been tried in court to date have ruled in Heller's favour), the charge against the philosophers has been challenged by intellectuals across the world, including Jürgen Habermas and Julian Nida-Rümelin, who published a letter in Süddeutsche Zeitung on 25 January 2011. An English translation of the letter is available at: http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/01/translation-of-habermas-and-nida-r%C3%BCmelin-on-the-hungarian-situation.html#_ftn1

2. The Hungarian electoral system is a mix of direct election of representatives in a single-seat constituencies (176 members in the National Assembly), proportional representation (152) and 58 “compensation” seats, which are determined through a complex system in connection with voter turnout and votes that in each electoral round that do not get counted because they do not go to the winning member. The aim of this mixed system is to try to capture voter preference optimally in the actual numbers of representations of each party in the National Assembly.