Central Europe investigative editor @VSquare_Project | journalist @direkt36 I 'Goulash' newsletter: https://t.co/xiy7Dmj5EM I szabolcs.panyi@vsquare.org
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2/ In 2021, authorities found the kompromat while searching the home of a corrupt government official who regularly bribed Minister of Justice @JuditVarga_EU's deputy. Besides cash, they also found this photo of a threesome, printed chat logs and two DVDs. hungarytoday.hu/former-state-s…
2/ A new government decree has allowed the Minister of Defense to unilaterally terminate the service of soldiers who have reached the age of 45 and have at least 25 years of actual service, with two months' notice. telex.hu/belfold/2023/0…
2/ Béla Kovács is your most average looking politician, yet he has an extraordinary secret life. Like, for example, he married a Russian lady who already had at least two other husbands at the same time - including a Japanese nuclear scientist. Background:
2/ First of all, does Poland sincerely think that they're more important to Orbán than Russia? Another quote from his speech: "...post-Westerners did their best to dismantle the Visegrád Four. In addition, war has intervened, and this has shaken the Polish-Hungarian cooperation."
2/ As part of our #Pegasus surveillance investigations at @direkt36, I wrote a story on probably the most unlikely target: an intelligence officer at the Special Service for National Security (SSNS), which conducts secret surveillance and interceptions. direkt36.hu/en/kemszoftver…
2/ First, I want to emphasize that these are rumours and information originating from sources not in the PM's inner circle, but from the apparatus itself that could be affected. Some of these information are pretty new, others are floating around for quite some time now.
2/ Hungary was the first EU member state where we found that multiple journalists and media company owners were surveilled with the Israeli spyware. Orbán's gov't neither confirmed nor denied anything. Here's our in-depth @direkt36 article with @andraspe: direkt36.hu/en/leleplezodo…
2/ Jobbik, Hungary’s former strongest opposition party tried to transform itself from far-right into moderate right. They allied themselves with left-wing & liberal forces but lost most voters along the way. 800K opposition voters swinged to Orbán & Jobbik offshoot Our Homeland.
2/ There's also video footage by local journalist Cristian Teodorescu working for pontmaros/punctul. He was notified by a reader that there are bags of filled Hungarian ballots half-burnt at a landfill near Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș, Romania:
2/ My source who is familiar with current internal pollings expects something like 105 seats for Fidesz & 94 for the opposition (our parliament has 199 seats in total, 100 needed for majority). Source added that it's an optimistic guess and many would actually be happy with that.
😬Orbán's foreign minister: “An agreement regarding possible EU sanctions against Russian energy supplies or their interruption will most likely not be reached (...) We will not support sanctions that could pose a risk to energy supplies for Hungary.”
2/ Back in April, I broke the story on 🇭🇺 government plans of a €1.5 billion construction of Shanghai-based Fudan University’s Budapest campus. 
2/ Hungary never makes public its expulsion of Russian spies, we do so-called “silent expulsions” to mitigate any conflict with Moscow. This is the result of Orbán’s balancing act between Hungary’s NATO responsibilities and his pro-Kremlin foreign policy.
2/ Today, Kovrig stood trial in China after 2 years in detention. The Canadian ex-diplomat who works for @CrisisGroup is widely seen as a victim of hostage diplomacy - his arrest in Beijing came days after Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada. 