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Since I last blogged about how the EU’s Rule of Law Framework works and why Article 7 have been triggered against Poland and Hungary, a long list political developments took place both in Hungary and in Poland, as well as in the UK; some are positive and some are negative, but then this is relative […]

Poland and Hungary are the main members of the Visegrad group. They have common cultural and political interests and have shown similar standpoints on the EU’s migrant relocation scheme or the burden sharing policy, but they starkly differ on whether to do business with Russia or America. In fact last week we witnessed that Hungary […]

It has been just over two months since Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary and the leader of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Alliance), is back in power in Hungary. In these past two months Orban and his newly elected government’s policy proposals, such as the so-called ‘Stop-Soros’ bill has been under close scrutiny by the international […]

All major politicians sooner or later find themselves in a hole of their own making. Even if they don’t make mistakes, they will fall into an elephant trap dug by their opponents. There are three laws to follow when in a hole: stop digging; keep afloat; and watch out for someone pulling the plug and […]

Group work can be very fruitful and engaging but there can be conflicts, disagreements and disengagement. Roskilde University students have to write six group projects during their BA degree, and will most likely experience group conflicts. It is, therefore, important to give the students the tools to manage group work. It can be difficult for […]

The EU’s cohesion policy is 30 years old and now accounts for around a third of the EU’s budget. To celebrate, the European Commission has published a new dataset. This details annual payments to the EU’s regions since 1989. The dataset covers most funds under the European Structural and Investment Funds umbrella. For the UK […]

Just like I predicted it, Fidesz’s Viktor Orban recorded a landslide victory in last week’s elections, crushing the opposition political parties’ short-lived confidence. Winning 134 of the 199 seats, Orban guaranteed a super majority in the Hungarian parliament, which would allow him to make any constitutional change he sees necessary. Upon losing the elections, leaders […]

A couple of weeks ago my article ‘Subnational transnational networking and the continuing process of local-level Europeanization’ was formally published in the latest issue of European Urban and Regional Studies (an open access version can be found here). The article explores how local government transnational networking has developed since the 1990s. ‘Transnational networking’ essentially involves […]

In my last blog entry of 1st March, I talked about the possibility of Hungarian opposition political parties’ uniting forces against Fidesz in this General elections of 8th April and have speculated if Fidesz would live up to its statement that it would not use ‘Soros’ in their election campaign.  So what happened in the past four […]

This blog post was original published as part of the BISA Postgraduate Network blog series.      More and more British universities offer modules on the study of the European Union (EU). These allow students to learn how the institutions of the EU function and how its policies are made. The debate on how to […]