Suchergebnisse

My current study's main focus concentrates on the political parties and organizations of Vojvodina (officially: Autonomous Province of Vojvodina), from their earliest movements –dating back to the events of the Eastern-European democratic transformations –to nowadays' situation. To establish the topic I consider it quite important to emphasize and give a general view about the possibilities of advocation available during the reign of the previous regime as well as the main characteristics of the Southern Slavic minority politics. Beginning with the 1990s, in the northern territory of Serbia, we witnessed the formation of one of the most complex and complicated party relations existing in the Carpathian Basin between Hungarian parties, due to which the majority of the divided community turned away from the parties declaredly representing their interest. I will attempt to discuss the course events in a chronological order, exploring the reason and origin of the animosity lying between these organizations. Although the autocracy of Milošević had been abolished for over ten years, most of the original goals of these parties have not been met as of yet. Despite this, there is no prospect of cooperation among them, though the underlying cause is not an ideological one but the very reason of nearly two-decade-long individual oppositions.

This study is a natural continuation of the author's earlier book on privatization in Hungary, covering the developments between 1989 and 2009 on 1700 pages. As it is well-known, the right wing FIDESZ government, which came to power with a 2/3 supermajority in Parliament, has embarked upon a totally new economic policy as from mid-2010. Within this setting, illiberal constitutional changes and unortodox economic policies were implemented. Renationalization was a significant (but not the most important) building block of this. As we analysed the individual transactions, it turned out that actually many of them were initiated by the previous, Socialist led government. In other words, there are interesting elements of continuity here, especially in the energy sector. Another interesting finding is, that almost without exceptions, the renationalization deals were not implemented by force, the Hungarian state paid quite generously to the sellers. In the case of the largest deals, there is even reason to speak of sweetheart deals through which the Hungarian government tried to make favour to German and US businesses. So far, the renationalization affected more than 200 firms (including banks) for which some HUF 1600 bn (≈ 5bn €) state money was used. This figure, just as the sums involved in the individual transactions are somewhat misleading, if compared to the privatization revenues generated by previous governments prior to 2010. However, if all transactions – i.e. asset sales and asset purchases – are expressed as a percentage of Hungary's annual GDP, it becomes clear that the post 2010 nationalization deals were much smaller than the 1990-2000 privatization deals.