A leftist daily welcomes the Prime Minister’s decision to have an anti-Semitic demonstration planned on Holocaust Remembrance Day banned.. Other centrist and left-liberal columnists, on the other hand, call for freedom of assembly for all citizens, including those who oppose freedom itself. READ MORE
A left-wing daily accuses the Mayor of Budapest of closing down a cultural club in order to silence anti-government protesters. A pro-government commentator believes that the Jewish cultural organization running the Sirály cultural club without paying rent used its resources to orchestrate anti-government protest. READ MORE
A centrist blog argues that the award granted to an openly racist journalist reveals the problems with the highly centralised government Prime Minister Orbán has created, as Zoltan Balog, the Minister for Human Resources has to supervise too many areas. READ MORE
The leading left-wing daily calls on the mainstream moderate parties to work out strategic welfare plans to lift the Roma out of poverty, and by implication, take the wind out of the sails of the radical right-wing Jobbik. READ MORE
A left-wing columnist believes that Finance Minister György Matolcsy has joined the chorus of right-wing politicians and intellectuals who try to blame the Holocaust purely on the Nazi German occupiers of Hungary. READ MORE
A moderate conservative commentator accuses Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno of applying double standards, when he turned off the lights of the Coliseum in protest against xenophobic and racist voices in Europe. He specifically cited the Hungarian extreme right opposition party Jobbik as an example. A left-wing commentator criticises Budapest Mayor István Tarlós for rejecting a left-wing request to turn off the lights of Parliament and Heroes’ Square on Sunday night. READ MORE
Left-wing columnists ponder whether the far-right party should be banned, after MP Márton Gyöngyösi’s anti-Semitic slur, and also what one can expect from the radical party after the incident, which was condemned by all major political parties. READ MORE
Columnists commenting on Sunday’s anti-Nazi demonstration wonder if the presence of both left and right-wing politicians is a harbinger of a new consensus to reject anti-Semitism. Both pro-government and left-wing pundits are skeptical about the possibility and the desirability of finding such common ground. READ MORE
Szombat (Sabbat) magazine welcomes the presence of Fidesz floor leader Antal Rogán at the demonstration organised in the wake of another anti-Semitic Speech by a far-right MP. (See BudaPost, November 28, 29, and December 1.) The Jewish magazine deplores the fact that some left-liberal authors oppose Mr Rogán’s presence. READ MORE
The main pro-government daily castigates right-wing politicians for their mild reaction to an anti-Semitic speech by a Jobbik MP and calls on the government and the right wing in general “to wake up.” READ MORE