From the Net: 'Hungary's 'Viktator' faces tide of protest at home and abroad' (The Guardian)

I was not even aware that there were such growing protests in the midst of winter in Hungary just months after the right-wing FIDESZ was elected to power (and began an array of ultra-reactionary reforms).

Hungary's 'Viktator' faces tide of protest at home and abroad

(by Helen Pidd at The Guardian)

Viktor Orbán's increasingly authoritarian regime has brought thousands on to the streets in protest, with new political movements and even hunger strikes in progress

Surrounded by half-drunk flasks of tea and bundled up in three pairs of trousers apiece, the hunger strikers entered their 26th night of protest outside the Hungarian state broadcaster on Wednesday evening. Temperatures were hovering around freezing and icy rain had started to spit. But it had been much worse, said Balazs Nagy Navarro. "At least they have turned the music off now," he said, pointing to a sandbox suspended from an upstairs window.

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On Monday at least 30,000 and as many as 70,000 people (estimates vary) gathered outside the neo-Renaissance opera house in Budapest in one of the biggest protests in Hungary in years. They were voicing their anger at the radical new constitution, which was being toasted inside at a gala hosted by Orbán.

While the masses loudly decried the "Viktator!" outside, the luminaries sitting in the gold-lined auditorium listened to a speech from the Fidesz-loyal president, Pál Schmitt. In it, he made not one reference to the street protest that had made it so hard for all the chauffeur-driven cars to arrive on time.

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Read the full article at The Guardian.