![orban mug](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/orban-mug.png)
Viktor Orbán’s Popular Defiance
An outsider in Budapest seeking to understand the Hungarian election of April 3 in the run-up to the vote was likely to find it a bit surreal. One friend and his wife were set to vote for the Two-Tailed Dog Party, which sadly did not in the end manage to elect any MPs; another friend rang up and told me to leave the country at once because Viktor Orbán planned to welcome Vladimir Putin’s army into Hungary and we were all in danger. This person was herself planning to sell her flat and move to Italy. Another acquaintance, apparently in full possession of his marbles, fulminated against Orbán and all his works for half an hour over tea and sütemények. During a pause in the rant I ventured to ask him who he was therefore planning to vote for. “Orbán, of course,” he said, as though the question was dumb. “There is no alternative.”
The Two-Tailed Dog Party was doing for Hungarian politics what Marcel Duchamp’s urinal did for French art. Its program was creative, if…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins