The Hungarian government has officially handed over the European Presidency to Poland after it’s six-month turn in the rotating post, but one aspect of the country’s largely forgettable semester in charge will remain, at least until the end of the year.

Today Easter Monday April 25th 2011, the Hungarian President Pal Schmitt signed the new Hungarian Constitution which will come into effect on Jan 1st 2012. To get a political analyst’s perspective on the document I caught  Andras Biro Nagy of Policy Solutions Consultancy Institute. The Prague Post [TPP]: The Constitution has been signed into law [...]

“Neo liberalism is not popular but it is more important than bankruptcy’, that was the stinging theme that ran throughout of Polish Minister for Finance Jacek Rostowski speech on European Governance and the Financial crises at Central European University, Budapest April 7. Rowstowski, in Budapest for a two-day summit to discuss, among other things, the [...]

Welcome to our newest blog, CEE Changes. Borne out of the Region section of our print edition, which covers the Višegrad region of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, (as well as the surrounding developing democracies and non-EU nations such as Ukraine, Belarus and some of the Baltic countries) we intend to use this blog to keep our readers updated on news from outside the Czech Republic. It could be policy news, it could be something fun or strange, or it could be a dispatch from a concert in Warsaw. We’re called The Prague Post, but we aim to inform our region.

A report released last month titled ‘’Caught in the middle: Central and Eastern European Journalism at a Crossroads’’ offered a very somber picture of the state of the media in the Central and Eastern European region.  (The report can be accessed here http://www.ellenhume.com/articles/CIMA-Central_and_Eastern_Europe-Report_4.pdf and I’d recommend those with an interest  media in the region to [...]

Tuesday (Jan. 15) marked the 20th anniversary of the Visegrad group’s (VG) founding and the mood at the ‘’ 20 years of former Visegrad Co-operation’ Conference in Budapest was overall very positive as ambassadors and former foreign affairs ministers from all four Visegrad states spoke of an organization that has had its ups and downs [...]

It’s been quite a month but the hullaballoo over Hungary’s controversial media reforms  now seems certain to be entering its appeasement phase after Hungary indicated its willingness to compromise on certain controversial aspects of the law earlier this week. Jonathan Todd a spokesperson for the EU’s Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said that Ms. Kroes [...]

New history map raises questions over Central European diplomatic skills Nobody does diplomacy like the Central Europeans it seems and the Hungarian EU presidency seems to be following a remarkable similar path to the Czech EU Presidency with its political controversies and diplomatic blunders. Politically for the Czech’s it was the fall of the government [...]

The European Newspapers Publishers Association and the World Association of Newspapers ( ENPA) and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers ( WAN-IFRA) have sent a letter to Prime Minister Viktor Orban expressing concern at the media law reforms currently in the pipeline. They argue that the bill would impose extensive fines against journalists [...]

A few weeks ago when writing about the Hungarian media law reforms one of the things that most struck me most was the general apathy among media organizations towards the law. In fact unlike the lawyers and foreign journalists I interviewed at the time many of the major Hungary journalists said that they had no [...]