News

Ring 1: 2012: Fidesz Government (i.e., Mr. Viktor Orban, P.M.) decides to use parliamentary supermajority power (yet again), this time to reduce the number of tobacco concession licenses countrywide from 40,000 to about 5,500.

Ring 2: Ostensible pretext: To reduce smoking

Ring 3: Owners of about 40,000 tobacco shops ("Trafiks") countrywide, some of them decades-old family businesses, are informed that all of them will lose their right to sell tobacco and must apply to a nationwide assessment  that will distribute the 5,500 licenses that will remain.

Ring 4: The assessment takes place, and the recipients almost all turn out to be Fidesz supporters and their families, some families and individuals being awarded multiple concessions (one each to the husband and wife in one family, 9 to the cleaning lady of another family,).

Ring 5: Almost none of the original 40,000 concessionaires were awarded licenses; almost all those who did win them had no prior experience in the trade: their only common attribute was their Fidesz connection.

Ring 6: News of the outcome emerges; Fidesz denies bias: licenses were awarded to the best qualified.

Ring 7: Testimony as well as tapes emerge of the deliberations in selecting the winners, and the explicit criterion is Fidesz fidelity.

Ring 8: The public demands to see the data on the deliberations.

Ring 9: Orban uses Fidesz supermajority power (yet again), to make the data inaccessible to the public; for good measure, evidence also being systematically destroyed.

Ring 10: July 1 2013: Fidesz preparing to declare its anti-smoking campaign a great success, and to declare Hungary again a model for the rest of the world, as it is in so many other things: finance, governance, justice, constitutionality, and anti-corruption measures.

Ring 11: July 3, 2013: EU votes to put Hungary's government under monitoring for breaching fundamental rights: EU vote is bipartisan, supported by both the left and the right.

Ring 12: Orban uses Fidesz supermajority power (yet again) in a Hungarian parliamentary vote that declares the EU parliamentary vote a biassed, illegal and anti-Hungarian conspiracy of the EU Green/liberal/left under the influence of the international business and bank lobby opposed to Fidesz's utility expense rebate to Hungarian voters...