I'll be honest, I expected better from the Guardian.
I could write a small novel about important and relevant facts being omitted or pussyfooted around, but the main points are:
Just a day before this story, there was a leak in the Hungarian military where a speech of the Minister of Defense was taped in 2023 that the then-recent purge - forced retirement - of military leaders was so that the military could be transformed from a "peace mentality" to a "war mentality" and that "we have to go Phase 0 of the path to war".
The spies were found to be collecting intelligence on specific questions, notably how "a Hungarian peacekeeping force occupying the Transcarpathia region would be received by the local civilian populace, the local law enforcement and the local military".
The Orbán government is not "neutral" with respect to Russia. They have been actively funding Russia from Hungarian taxpayer money by buying Russian gas over world market prices. They have said that the 1956 revolution in Hungary was "unwise", implying there is no point in trying to defend against a Russian invasion. The Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs - guy with the big forehead enthusiastically called the Cockatiel in Hungary - received the Friendship medal, the highest non-military commendation in Russia just four years ago.
The Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs claimed there was a plan together with Orbán, Putin and Kaczyński that would have had Hungarian and Polish peacekeepers occupy Western Ukraine after Russia claims the Eastern half.
I know the Guardian is trying to be non-sensationalist, but in the past few days, a literal decade happened in Hungarian politics.
I know you are not malicious, but conflating Hungary, the will of the Hungarian people and the actions of the Orbán government is the cornerstone of Orbán's propaganda. Please don't do it.
The actual Hungarian people overwhelmingly support Ukraine and its defense, and would like to see it as an EU member. When the Russian total offensive started in 2022, people in Hungary were getting in their cars, packing them full of groceries, and driving hundreds of kilometres to the Ukrainian border to help refugees, with exactly zero prompting or help or even acknowledgement from the government.
You should read up on the EU then, I think you'd like it here.
Much less centralised than the US, member states have broader rights up to and including secession
This indeed makes the EU less corrupt, as it is indeed harder to bribe politicians as there are more of them, see EU vs Big Tech
The EU also has a Human Rights Charter, except it is even more unalienable than the US Constitution as it extends to non-citizens and there are courts independent from the EU who actively enforce it
It is far from perfect, but it works much better than anything else this size.
I'm talking about Trump because there is a strong parallelism between all of these cases, where fascists break the law and then cry political persecution when the courts apply the law to them.
Trump was the example of what not to do, Le Pen seems to be the example of what works.
I get where you are coming from, and I very much agree that wringing our hands is not the good solution. I very much hope that the German government has a better plan to handle this than the plans they had to handle literally anything else in the past 30 years.
I share your frustration, I'm just saying that this is harder and less straightforward than Trump was. It has to be done, and has to be done soon though. But it has to be decisive and final.
So how is 19th century imperialism different from Roman imperial expansion or Greek colonialism in antiquity for example? Or the various attempts to resurrect the Roman Empire by basically everyone? Why don't we call Roman emperors or Alexander the Great or even Sigismund imperialists? Honest question here, I'm not a historian or anything.
The process is very dangerous, for real. It's not like Trump where the crime is in the open, numbering in the thousands, and growing.
And it is very much a political crime, but it is still a crime, being against democracy is a crime. But it is much harder to prosecute than all the shit Trump did. And if they get it wrong, AfD will most likely get a boost from it big enough to get into government.
I'll be honest, I expected better from the Guardian.
I could write a small novel about important and relevant facts being omitted or pussyfooted around, but the main points are:
I know the Guardian is trying to be non-sensationalist, but in the past few days, a literal decade happened in Hungarian politics.