Being familiar with Bulgarian corruption, I’m going to confidently state that their percentages aren’t due to a rounding error.
I was in Hungary last year and the nostalgia for communism is high and a significant portion of the population still remembers all the bad parts - Orban has really destroyed the social safety nets there and it hurts to see.
Being familiar with Bulgarian corruption, I’m going to confidently state that their percentages aren’t due to a rounding error.
I was in Hungary last year and the nostalgia for communism is high and a significant portion of the population still remembers all the bad parts - Orban has really destroyed the social safety nets there and it hurts to see.
Hungary was also the best part of the Soviet Bloc to live in for the people.
So it’s not just that modern Hungary is worse: communist Hungary is more miss-able than communist East Germany.
Nigel Swain’s two books on the subject are good:
Collective Farms Which Work? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1992)
He’s writing from the perspective of a non-red English academic who’s like… “wait… this works?? how do we explain the anomaly?”
Hungary had full shelves, booming agriculture, available consumer goods.