Czechia – Former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš was acquitted on Monday, 9 January, by a Prague court in the “Stork’s Nest” case. The news could not have come at a better time for Babiš, with the first round of the presidential…
Poland – The Polish government announced on Wednesday that an agreement had been brokered with the European Commission on the contentious points of Poland’s justice reforms, invoked by Brussels to block the payment of the 35.4 billion euros corresponding to the Polish…
Poland – The surge in energy prices began before the war in Ukraine, and this cannot be stressed enough. A little over a year ago, in early December 2021, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki justified the “anti-inflation shield” implemented by his government by…
Hungary/Poland – With the beginning of December, the cooperation between Poland’s oil giant PKN Orlen and Hungary’s MOL – the other big player in Central Europe’s oil sector – reached a new level, consolidating the first’s growing regional ambitions and the second’s…
When it introduced an embargo against Russian coal several months before the rest of the EU, the government of Mateusz Morawiecki promised in March that Polish black coal production would be increased this year by 1 to 1.5 million tonnes. It has…
Poland / Czechia / Germany - German and Czech environmental organizations – Greenpeace, Bund Sachsen, and Sousedský spolek Uhelná (a local environmental group) – have sent a complaint to the European Commission this week against the agreement reached at the beginning of…
Last Sunday the Hungarian capital Budapest saw one of its biggest demonstrations in years. The demonstrators were protesting against Viktor Orbán’s government, and especially against deteriorating standards of living and low teacher salaries.
The Visegrád Group countries face inflation well above the…
Hungary – In the last few days, Hungarians have been receiving in their letterboxes government letters with a new national consultation that was announced in September. It is the kind of consultations that are organised every once in a while to bolster…
Poland/EU – Since the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine on 24 February, Poland has been on the front line of taking care of Ukrainian refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees figures as of 11 April, by…
Hungary/EU – Is the timing a coincidence? Probably not, as the same thing happened after the 2018 elections in Hungary: only two days after the Hungarians handed the Fidesz-KDNP coalition another mandate with a two-thirds majority in their 3 April parliamentary elections,…
Hungary/Poland/EU – The European Parliament voted on 10 March, by 478 votes to 155, in favour of enforcing financial sanctions against Hungary and Poland after the ECJ’s rejection of the two countries’ objections to the “rule of law” conditionality mechanism. However, in…
Hungary — Interview with Rodrigo Ballester, director of the Centre for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary: “Open-mindedness, critical thinking and freedom of tone are important to us, contrary to the Cancel Culture that wreaks havoc in the West.”…