HUNGARY HUNGRIEST EU COUNTRY

April 22, 2023 -Durt Fibo

According to data from Eurostat –the statistical office of the European Union- over the past year food prices in Hungary increased more than 45%. This is remarkably higher than even its closest contender, Slovakia, which saw the same commodities jump to around 29% in the same period.

Although profiteering in the guise of whatever excuses is at present a global phenomenon, Europe as a block has been affected by an average of 19% food price increases since last year. In Hungary, though, the costs of many basics have essentially doubled, and eggs, milk, oil and bread have increased in price by 72-80%.

While the current average level of inflation in the European Union has dropped to 8.3%, the overall inflation rate in Hungary rose to 25.6%, which is also the highest in the EU.

Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orbán, came to power precisely because of nation-wide vexation over a staggering economy (and resentment of the standard IMF threats of ‘austerity’), but he rapidly transmogrified the state into a dominion of authoritarian crony capitalism which, while enriching his underbosses, repeatedly violated EU laws and thus interrupted the flow of European general funds they purloined -sometimes held in reserve until Hungary returned to the legal fold. Now that the businesses and institutions have all been carved up and EU grants are being repelled by Orbán’s gangster polarity, the national currency -the florint- has been bombed to an historic devaluation.

The predictable effect such statecraft has on citizens was already boiling over into the streets in October of 2022, and in Croatia in January of this year. Swivel your head and you’ll see similar uproars all around. While Orbán’s truculence and conniving have earned him the adulation of reactionaries everywhere, he is just another example of a national honcho gunning into a globally interdependent economic riot. Like others in his position, Orbán cannot truly hope to contain the results of his gluttony within some flimsy ethno-nationalist diaper, pinched together by the safety pin of religious homogeneity.