USAID’s slogan ‘From the American people’ has become extremely controversial since Donald Trump’s crackdown on the agency, during which his team exposed its most dubious tactics in promoting a woke, progressive agenda worldwide using millions of US taxpayer dollars. Hungary has also been significantly affected, with government-critical media outlets and NGOs receiving substantial grants.
Donald Trump took an unexpected step on Monday by ordering dozens of senior officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to go on administrative leave. USAID has a long history of foreign interference under the pretext of providing aid, including significant grants to Hungarian anti-government media and government-critical NGOs.
‘Unlike France and Germany, Hungary has not been affected by cultural Marxism or wokeist ideology, so our peoples—Latin American and Hungarian—fundamentally share the same values, based on love for God, country and family.’
Tens of thousands of supporters of Romanian presidential candidate Călin Georgescu took to the streets in Bucharest on Sunday to protest the annulment of the presidential election. With no concrete evidence emerging to substantiate the allegations of Russian interference, it has become increasingly evident that the progressive elite will go to any lengths to remain in power.
‘No, Mr Pressman, you never truly believed that Hungary matters. What you and President Biden thought was that ousting Viktor Orbán’s government mattered—to impose a progressive globalist agenda on one of the few European countries that prioritizes its own interests and sovereignty. And ultimately, you failed.’
While the European People’s Party, led by Manfred Weber and Ursula von der Leyen, is conducting an unprecedented smear campaign against Hungary—centred around allegations of corruption—the number of corruption cases linked to the political group continues to grow. Most recently, Weber’s chief of staff has been placed under investigation by Belgian and EU authorities.
‘Today, the Hungarian capital is part of the ongoing political discussion at the highest levels of American political life—for better or for worse. Hungary is either a symbol of all that is bad in the Western world—that’s how progressives, liberals, and neoconservatives see it; or it’s a plucky resister to globalism, social liberalism, and mass migration, a laboratory for a new kind of right-of-center policymaking.’
BioTechUSA, a Hungarian-owned company, has recently achieved significant success by announcing a multi-year partnership with FC Barcelona. One of the world’s biggest football clubs will source a range of sports nutrition supplements, including proteins, vitamins, and recovery support products, from the Hungarian company in the coming years.
After the expansion of the so-called National Card scheme for which Russian and Belarusian nationals have now also become eligible, Budapest came under fire from Brussels politicians who claimed the measure poses a security risk to Europe. However, the conditions under which Russian nationals can enter and work in Hungary have not significantly changed with the introduction of the National Card and are comparable to the visa regimes of other European countries, which in fact allow Russians to apply for long-term visas in a much more generous way than Hungary and yet have never been pilloried for it.
The new regulation does not apply to all electric scooters: scooters weighing more than 25 kilograms require insurance if their design speed exceeds 14 km/h, and all scooters require insurance if their design speed exceeds 25 km/h, regardless of weight. It is not yet clear how authorities will determine the design speed of a given vehicle on the spot.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.