> restrictions that could lead to the closure of the Central European University (CEU)

The rest of what you mention certainly is repressive, but one of the stated aims of the foreign-funded CEU is, by its own admission, open-society propaganda. When the US tries to limit foreign political ads, is that also repressive? If not, why would putting a university behind those ads change things?

> Crackdown on the media, compromising judicial independence, and measures leading to increased obscurantism

That's one interpretation. The alternative is that the media used to be owned/controlled by the (former) communists, and so was the judiciary.

Media. The fourth estate.

Currently in Hungary it's simply controlled by the governing party.

* Via the Media Authority and the public service broadcasters

* Also financially (the public service broadcasters have a budget that dwarf independent media outlets' budgets, 300M EUR vs a few millions EURs at best; plus the government subsidizes gov-friendly outlets through advertisement and public communications contracts - and they advertise their own propaganda [you know, the usual George Soros, fight Brussels, immigrants are raping everybody] )

* Through buyouts (TV2, local newspapers, etc.), consolidation ( https://www.voanews.com/a/huge-pro-government-media-conglome... ) and strict central command ( https://budapestbeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/megyei... https://kep.cdn.indexvas.hu/1/0/1981/19814/198141/19814191_0... )

There are a few independent sites that try to serve the classic democratic role of oversight.

Judiciary.

That's even easier. The current government and the governing party is full of members with ties to the old Socialist/Communist era.

Oh, and don't forget, how since 1990 everyone conveniently forgot to finally grant access to the old secret police archives, or at least set up a process that can clean people holding and/or running for seats and various positions.

Wouldn't make it less of crackdown on independence even if all the owners were who you say they were.

You can't say it's really independent if it's all owned by (proponents of) one political party.

I understand now: the communists are actually the illuminati.

I'll explain:

50 years of communism in the eastern Europe countries left most of the people with no wealth as it was forbidden to own a company, unless you where co-operating with the secret police and singed a deal with them. This caused the issue that after the collapse of communism and soviet union people with wealth were communist collaborators (there were informing about non-safe people and helping throwing them into jails and sharing money with police officers). Then after communism collapsed they've created TV, media and obviously there was still TV, Radio and press which was government owned, where the same people were working. So as you can see everything is post-soviet countries is still mostly owned by communists and police informants.

Not so simple. The GDP and the country's wealth grew very significantly since 1990, and don't forget the enormous amount of foreign capital that entered Hungary. (For example "RTL Klub" is owned by the German RTL Group. And it is the last TV channel that airs segments critical of the government.)

Also, don't forget the privatization boom during the early 90s, when every government sold whatever they could find to fund the country. Early on this of course benefited friends of the old guard.

Furthermore, police informants liked to remain hidden. Secret police officers on the other hand liked to make the deals with the informants, especially those with some kind of business ambition.

But these deals produced a very pathological market state. As soon as the old regime fell, new businesses sprang up, and they soon eclipsed these old protected inefficient ones.

1) true, so they bought and created big supermarkets, factories and kept the salaries low, this did not help people on building wealth anywhere... 2) Privatisation is true - so you agree with me. 3) And? 4) New business? You mean old police informants with capital, investing in what was interesting for them...

Where do you think that GDP per capita growth came from? The economy benefited immensely from those factories and access to cheap stuff on international markets.

Salaries are low because there is not enough high paying job, because there are not enough high-skilled workers to attract/fund businesses that would employ them.

Furthermore, the Hungarian economy and demography suffers from the same problems as other developed economies. Technological improvements made a lot of mid-value jobs so efficient (via automation and of course through global institutions and multinational organizations), that the demand for them disappeared. See David Autor's seminal paper: https://economics.mit.edu/files/11563 (for example page 13, figure 2 is very telling. middle class jobs "disappeared").

Hungary, just as the US suffers from the problem of transforming labor markets (middle class jobs are hard to find, plus typical worker class male dominated fields are shrinking, whereas female dominated service oriented sectors are rising). And whereas in case of the US a lot of people are simply caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and incarceration, about two hundred thousand Hungarians left the country since 2010. (That of course did not help the active population ratio, though people working abroad send a lot of money back.)

The education system is also regressing in the last 5-10 years, now the research institutions are in upheaval too, due to centralization and inefficient restructuring by the government.

This will slowly swing back one way or another. The recent "overtime work hours" law is a good example, because it doesn't make much difference, as the labor market for low-skilled workers is in a gridlock. (A friend of mine works as a HR manager and they can't find enough local workers, so they recruit Ukrainian foreign workers, for a simple, but big warehouse, 1000+ workers.)

And don't forget, wages will rise when labor share of profits increases, but that means more competition, less government protected oligarchs.

Privatization resulted in a lot of foreign companies owning stuff, not commies and informants.

Secret police driven businesses were not particularly successful even back then, they haven't accumulated much capital. There are bound to be some folks living off that, but investors in the early 90s were usually high income individuals. (Doctors, company directors, etc.) They got there during the 80s, which of course required the right party signals, but these people then sold stuff (real estate, companies, etc.) after its value appreciated to foreigners or the new guard.

It's very unlikely that "everything [in Hungary] is still mostly owned by communists and police informants."

Not enough high skilled workers? That is simply not true, highly skilled workers earn good money (programmers, engineers, doctors), the problem is with low skilled ones, who earn 4-5 times less then in Western Europe. In every country you have lot more of low skilled than high skilled workers hence this is where the problem lies.

There is absolutely no difference in how a shop assistant deals with clients in Hungary or Czech Rep. as in UK or US. So why the disparity? It is definitely not caused by skills, the prices of goods are the same (for sure not 4/5 times cheaper), so what is the problem? The foreign companies? Not enough powerful unions? Governments allowing that?

> That is simply not true,

You haven't disproved my claim, you introduced a different one (that high skilled workers earn good money).

Hungary has fewer people that speak foreign languages (as percentage of working age population: https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/18155924_8861... ) than any of the other EU member states. Hungary is the country where the ratio of graduates decreased among the 25-34 year olds between 2014 and 2017 (which might seem like a statistical fluke, but the problem is EU average is increasing monotonically since 2008, whereas Hungary had a peak in 2015 and declined since back to 30% vs 39% of EU average(!), see also: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 2017 )

This pretty much means Hungary has too few high-skilled workers.

> In every country you have lot more of low skilled than high skilled workers hence this is where the problem lies. There is absolutely no difference in how a shop assistant deals with clients in Hungary or Czech Rep. as in UK or US. So why the disparity?

And that's because economics works in the aggregate. Skills matter, because in Hungary you have too many people competing for those low skilled jobs.

Think about what does the emptying of the middle class means. Of what the Autor paper means that I linked. A lot of people move down. The low skilled jobs are threatened not by automation, but by having more people suddenly becoming "low skilled" (because if they are not high skilled enough to count as high-skilled, and middle-skill stuff is disappearing, then more people are now forced to try to find low-skilled work jobs).

https://qz.com/1010831/the-middle-skill-job-is-disappearing-... Hungary lost both low and middle skilled jobs, high-skilled jobs grew. Yet Hungary has comparatively few high skilled workers.

Hence those who are forced to work at "low skilled jobs" are now simply competing with each other more.

Is this much worse than what is happening in America under Trump?

Personally, I'm less worried, if the Eastern European countries goes repressive they'll be leaving the EU one way or another..

Whataboutism. No, it's not "much worse", but what's happening in the US isn't exactly great either. It's also different… The US issues are more impactful on the rest of the world than Hungary's issues are.