Forgotten World (226): Hungary
It’s one of the regular weeks of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World – a look at parts of the world that too rarely feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 225 entries here.
Perhaps the reason why Hungary – a nation of 10 million – is not so much in the public mind as some other others of Central & Eastern Europe is that, unlike many of those countries, it did not experience a revolution in 1989 – it had a long process of gradual political reform – and arguably kick-started those revolutions by allowing East Germans to flee through its territory to Austria.
Hungary’s post-communist economic transition was achieved relatively smoothly. Within four years of the collapse of communism, nearly half of the country’s economic enterprises had been transferred to the private sector, and by 1998 Hungary was attracting nearly half of all foreign direct investment in its region.
Ten years later, the picture looked rather less rosy. A high level of both private and state borrowing left the country particularly vulnerable to the credit crunch of 2008, and in October of that year the government was forced to appeal to international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for massive loans in a bid to stave off economic collapse.
Dissatisfaction with the centre-left coalition government’s handling of the economy from 2002 to 2010 coincided with the rise of the right-wing nationalist party Jobbik, known for its anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric.