Orbán Out?

Note: Venue is
Akademika (Studentsenteret)

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You can also follow the event on Zoom
. Breakfast will be served at Akademika

Hungary goes to the polls on 3 April to decide the faith of long-term Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Following the landslide election in 2010, Orbán set out a mission to create a political system he calls “illiberal democracy”. He authorised countless authoritarian reforms, raining in formerly independent institutions, curtailing the freedom of academia, and putting human rights under pressure. The EU has been criticised for not stepping up to halt Orbán attempts to dismantle the liberal state.

Now, his national-conservative Fidesz party faces a united opposition. Will the leader of this alliance, conservative democrat Péter Márki-Zay, create a wave that will wash the national-conservative Viktor Orbán out of office?

Our panel will take you through all you need to know about the upcoming election.

Panel (onsite):

Raimondas Ibenskas
is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. He has previously worked at the Universities of Southampton, Exeter and Gothenburg, and studied at Trinity College Dublin and Central European University. His main research interests are political parties in European democracies.

Dániel Péter Biró
is Professor for Composition at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, Norway. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2004, has previously taught in Canada and the Netherlands and has received prizes and awards for his work (Kodály Scholarship for Hungarian Composers, Radcliffe Fellowship, Harvard University, College of New Scholars, Scientists and Artists of the Royal Society of Canada, Guggenheim Fellowship). He is currently leading the project Sounding Philosophy as part of the Norwegian Artistic Research Program.

Iver Ørstavik
has a Master’s degree in philosophy and has worked for many years in the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights. He has worked on freedom of expression in Eastern Europe in partnership with the now closed Central European University in Budapest. He is currently working, among other projects, on the destruction of rule of law in Poland and the EU.

in conversation with

Thor Olav Iversen
(UiB)

Photo: European People’s Party on flickr