“There are many lessons to be learned for current initiatives from studying these struggles, because they reveal patterns,” our Research Assistant Eszter Horvath said in an interview with Nepszava about our History of Our Struggles – Resource Bank about Hungarian Social Movements project.

We don't need people from Budapest to go and organize rural movements, we need local people who are prepared to represent local issues, she argued, based on her research on movements in the early 2000s.

She talked about the state of Hungarian civil society, highlighting that “the state, which played a major funding role through foundations in the early 2000s, cannot be relied upon, as there are few bodies left that can provide an independent, value-based approach to NGOs.”

“The political-ideological expropriation of civil society organizations has increased in parallel with the development of a civil democratic system,” she said.

Read the full interview (in Hungarian) here.