Defend Which Constitution?
Notes from the once and future capital of European conservatism
As the May 31 deadline for President Tamás Sulyok to resign falls away, I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, Magyar is at war with Sulyok.
The PM has been ‘paying him a visit’ this morning. For his part, Sulyok has referred the matter to the EU’s Venice Commission. But whatever the Venetians advise, Magyar has, in his first month, invented the biggest constitutional crisis of modern times.
Exactly the moment when we could all do with some Insights from the Hungarian Constitutional Court — also the title of Thursday’s presentation by Dr. Attila László Szabó, Secretary General of the Constitutional Court of Hungary. One caveat — he’ll be generating insights in Hungarian. Which is fair enough.
5:30PM. Thursday. Tas vezér.
Sign up here:
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-04-insights-from-the-constitutional-court-of-hungary
Latin America is full of people who seem to want to be somewhere else. Many head due North, to America. Others finagle rights of abode in Spain and Portugal. Yet many more just shift around the continent, depending on the latest run of fascist juntas and Bolivarian revolutionaries. Millions who poured out of Venezuela have poured into Colombia. 30 years ago, the situation would have been the exact opposite. The combination of push and pull factors is unique: so what does the future hold for this most diasporic of continents?
Crises, Integrations and Possibilities: Latin America on the Move suggests the answer may be more of everything. Featuring Gustavo da Frota Simões — Professor at the Brazilian Army Command and General Staff College
3PM, Wednesday. MCC.
Sign up here:
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-06-03-crises-integrations-and-possibilities-latin-america-on-the-move
Eduard Habsburg is a former Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See, and 86th in line to the Holy Crown.
Raymond Ibrahim is a former Mr Los Angeles bodybuilding champion, foe of militant Islam, and opponent of what he calls ‘doormat Christianity’: the idea that to follow Christ is to be a supplicant to all.
The duo have already teamed up on Raymond’s blockbuster YouTube channel. Now, in advance of releasing a joint paper for the DI, they’re back at it — asking how we can reinforce the cultural structures of faith, even as modernity tears at the foundations.
It’s the unlikely buddy cop movie you never knew you wanted.
5:30PM, Tuesday, at the Villa.
Link here:
https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/events/the-place-of-christianity-in-the-survival-of-the-west
Around Town
A rumble of thunder down under. Tony Abbott, boat-turner, wombat anthropologist and DI Distinguished Fellow, is to be the next Federal President of the Liberal Party. Since leaving power in 2013, Tony has kept banging the drum for a low-tax, low-migration, Atlanticist West.
Now, with the Liberals having lost two elections in a row, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation stealing a march up their flank, Tony is returning to the front line.
The Federal Presidency is equivalent to being party chairman — not leadership as such, but an important points man in deciding how the party will campaign in the next election.
It has made the press ponder. Robert Menzies was the last Aussie to win two non-consecutive elections — with an 8 year gap between. Could Tony be the first to achieve a 13 year gap?
Our resident Aussie, Andrew Hutchings says Tony is on a hard wicket: “The Liberal Party is under fire from multiple quarters right now. There are the ‘Teals’ — left-leaning green-friendly liberals who have had success running as independents in Liberal constituencies. There is the rise of One Nation. There is the ageing of their own voter base. And there is the fraying of the Liberal National coalition. If he can arrest their decline, it will be very impressive. Seems like Tony has decided to run into a burning building.”
Gourmet Fesztivál is Hungarian for ‘Gourmet Festival’. Held in the lush grounds of Milennaris Park, it’s sort of like Masterchef Live — food stalls, farm produce, plus live cooking demos and talks from the country’s top chefs. This year’s theme is Made In Vidék — a reference to the flavours of the Hungarian countryside, Magyarország Profonde. Day tickets are 8000 Ft, and the show runs for four days, Thursday till Sunday, 3-6 June.
Short films might not always be better than feature films, but they are indubitably shorter. Take advantage of brevity at the Friss Hús Film Festival — Hungary’s premier short film festival — which runs until Wednesday.
In a rare instance of the jokey side-project becoming the main gig, Luke Steele was once known for the winsome Americana of The Sleepy Jackson.
Now, he’s known as an extraterrestrial Xmas tree — electro-pop’s Carmen Miranda.
Eighteen years since their debut, Empire of the Sun have survived that initial burst of novelty remarkably well. This Sunday, they’re at Budapest Park, touring latest album Ask That God.
Europe has misunderstood the meaning of its own modern dominance. That’s the claim of the DI’s Sumantra Maitra in a fascinating 40 000 foot view of how politics will be after the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Sumantra marks out three converging developments: first, the return of India and China (historically inevitable).
Then, AI and automation: particularly its ability to disrupt the middle class. After all, Western political stability has depended heavily on a broad, secure middle class.
Finally, he looks at how, while Europe and North America may still be wealthy in absolute terms, they are having a crisis of self-image as they become less dominant relative to others.
The result, he suggests, is major upheaval. But how we navigate this crisis starts with how we define it.
Paper of the Week
This week, our Paper of the Week is a scoop.
Simon Cottee is a criminologist, lecturer, and a writer for The Atlantic and UnHerd. His first book was The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, and his second and third were on ISIS. For the past nine months, Simon has been doing deep data work, filling in a single question for the DI: how much of the past ten years of post-Merkelwave terrorism was migrant-led?
His answer: 45%.
No one else has run the numbers with the rigour and detail that Simon has — so this is a finding that will drive policy debates for years to come.
Simon’s time at the DI was poleaxed by a major health emergency, and as much as we love his paper, we’re also just very happy that he is still here to finish it. Despite all the time he’s spent poring over beheading videos, he’s one of the kindest men you’ll meet, and we wish him the best as he continues to recover.
Some highlights:
In this decade-long period there were 221 jihadi plots in Europe, of which 100 (45%) involved a migrant. There were 137 migrant plotters in total. Of the 100 plots involving one or more migrant, 51% were launched, while 49% were foiled (see Table 1). For the other 121 plots that didn’t feature a migrant, 36% were launched, while 64% were foiled, suggesting that when migrants are involved in plots those plots are more likely to succeed.
Migrant-related plots killed 279 people and injured 1192 others (see Table 2), while plots that didn’t involve a migrant resulted in 107 deaths and 1449 injuries, which would suggest that when a migrant is involved in a plot it is markedly more deadly, although two migrant-related plots – the November 2015 Paris attacks and the Nice truck ramming attack in 2016 - account for 216 deaths combined.
Across 12 countries, Germany was the most frequent incubator and target of the 100 migrant-related plots, accounting for nearly half, followed by France (21 plots) and the UK (10 plots) (see Figure 1)). Because global jihadism appears to harbour no special animus towards Germany, the latter’s position in this league table can more reasonably be attributed to the sheer number of migrants that it took in during the refugee crisis than to any particular desire to launch attacks there.
Hungary, by contrast, closed its borders to refugees fleeing the civil war in the Middle East and has experienced almost zero jihadi attack activity. (It did, however, incur the wrath of the European Union Court of Justice, which imposed a €200 million lump sum fine and a penalty of €1 million per day until it complies with EU asylum rules.
“Lógatja az orrát.”
(He’s) dangling his nose. (He’s sad.)