A majority of Hungarians disapprove of tipping doctors after treatment and want the practice to be classed as a crime, according to Hungarian Academy of Sciences researchers.
Few, however, are familiar with recent legislation that criminalises the acceptance of a gratuity payment in advance, according to the survey conducted by the academy’s Centre for Social Sciences.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said paying gratuities after treatment should be punished, the survey of 1,200 people carried out last October found.
Only 34 percent knew that accepting a gratuity in advance is a crime, the academy said in a statement on Tuesday.
Over 70 percent knew that doctors who accept a tip after treatment do not commit a crime. But only 49 percent were aware that a doctor asking for a fee from a patient entitled to state health-care services free of charge is a crime under Hungarian law.
The board of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) has appointed MTA president Laszlo Lovasz to initiate talks with the innovation and technology minister on the government’s plans to reorganise the structure and funding of the academy’s research institutes.
In a statement issued after its Tuesday meeting, the board asked Innovation and Technology Minister László Palkovics to “ensure the basic funding guaranteed by law for academic research centres”.
The board also asks the directors-general of the academy’s research institutes and the directors of its legally independent institutes to submit their tenders for funding to the president of the academy.
The statement said the president should only forward the funding requests to the innovation and technology minister and the head of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office after receiving a written statement from the minister ensuring that the research institutes will receive the funding they are entitled to from the central budget.
Earlier on Tuesday, MTA employees staged a demonstration at the Academy’s building on Budapest’s Széchenyi Square to take a stand for the Academy’s unity and autonomy, and protest against government’s proposed changes.
Government plans to reorganise the structure and funding of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) have triggered protests from opposition parties on Tuesday.
The leftist Democratic Coalition (DK) said the government has made decisions that ignore the interests of the Academy and the staff of MTA institutes, DK deputy group leader Gergely Arató told a press conference. As a consequence of the planned measures, researchers and scientists are expected to leave Hungary by the thousands, he added.
The government is “angry with” MTA and Hungarian scientists obviously for political reasons, he said.
Group spokesman Zsolt Gréczy said that Hungarian scientists and their workshops could be destroyed by cuts in MTA funds. He said he would ask the head of parliament’s budget committee to revisit issues concerning the Hungarian Academy of Sciences budget.
Innovation and Technology Minister László Palkovics arbitrarily wants to overwrite the MTA budget figures, which could potentially be a violation of the law, he said.
The conservative Jobbik party told another press conference that the insecurity created by the government would cause severe and long-term damage to Hungarian scientific life.
“Fidesz’s anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual policies have reached a new level,” deputy group leader Koloman Brenner said.
Brenner said that “as a people’s party”, Jobbik stands for the freedom of sciences and education, stressing the need of a “sensible policy discussion on modernising the MTA and converging universities and scientific research.” Palkovics’s “Bolshevik-type exercise of power” has caused irreparable damage to 21st-century Hungarian science, he said.
Meanwhile, ethnic Hungarian leaders of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj (Kolozsvár), Romania, which boasts a long-standing tradition in Hungarian-language courses and has many Hungarian students, issued a statement together with the Romanian national institute for ethnic minority research, expressing concern over the planned changes.
Some hundred people staged a silent protest in front of the Hungarian Consulate-General in Cluj on Tuesday.
Employees of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) on Tuesday staged a demonstration at the Academy’s building on Budapest’s Szechenyi Square to take a stand for the Academy’s unity and autonomy, and protest against government plans to reorganise its structure and funding.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with MTA’s board meeting scheduled to decide on the academy’s approach to the government’s plans, Emese Szilágyi, of the organiser Forum of Academic Employees (ADF), told MTI.
Adrienn Szilágyi, an employee of MTA’s Institute of History, said that the innovation and technology ministry’s plan to fund the academy fully from tenders is “actually an austerity measure … that will thwart the operation of the Academy and lead to its collapse”.
“We understand that reforms are necessary but not without the consent of MTA employees and not to their detriment,” she said.
The ADF aims to preserve the Academy’s professional and financial independence, she said.
Hungraian Academy of Science President László Lovász met the demonstrators in front of the building to receive a document protesting against the planned changes.
After speeches by psychologist Csaba Pléh and linguist István Kenesei, the protesters formed a human chain around the building.
At a press conference in December 2018, Minister of Innovation and Technology László Palkovics said that the structure of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences had stayed the same over the past eighty years. The ministry had been tasked with redefining allocations for research and redesigning the entire system, Palkovics said. “Top researchers, rather than institutions, should be supported financially,” he said. “Changes under way have nothing to do either with the Academy or its network’s independence since all of the latter body’s rights are enshrined in the constitution”, he said.
Speakers at a joint demonstration of the opposition parties criticised Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s state-of-the-nation address and challenged him on the state of democracy in Budapest on Sunday.
About 1,000-1,500 demonstrators gathered in front of the President’s Office and the Prime Minister’s Office in Buda Castle, with activists holding flags of the Socialist, DK, Jobbik and Momentum parties.
Zsolt Gréczy, parliamentary spokesman of the leftist opposition DK, said Viktor Orbán is Hungary’s dictator and Hungary’s form of government is dictatorship.
He said Orban’s state-of-the-nation address ignored the deceived foreign currency loan holders, pensioners who do not receive their pension on time, and young people who cannot go to university to continue their education.
Péter Jakab, spokesman of Jobbik, said Orbán had “thrown ten thousand people out on the street” in three years, and “turned his childhood crony into the richest man in the country”.
Erzsébet Schmuck, deputy parliamentary leader of the green LMP, said Orbán had made a huge mistake by adopting the “slave law” because this meant turning against Hungarian workers.
She said the prime minister had announced his family policy measures because he had realised that he could not win the European parliamentary election by constantly talking about migrants.
Anett Bősz of the Liberals told her audience they needed to give courage and faith to those who were “trodden on” by the government, and to rebuild the rule of law and democracy.
Socialist MP Ildiko Borbély Bangó said
members of the next generation will only be able to have a better life than their parents if they leave their country to study and build a future for themselves abroad.
Balázs Nemes, spokesman of Momentum, said “hope is spreading” because “the Fidesz regime has already failed in the capital”, and first major cities, and later smaller towns will follow suit.
Photo: MTI
Independent MP Bernadett Szél said Orbán wants to see “a stupid country with dumbed-down subjects”, this is why he chased away the country’s best university and enchains the others or converts them into private universities that “only his cronies can afford”.
“The Hungarian Academy of Sciences was founded by the greatest Hungarian and the smallest Hungarian wants to put it in the grave,” she said.
Protesters marched over to the headquarters of the State Audit Office to continue the demonstration.
Representatives of the opposition parties said the governing Fidesz party is trying to use the office to hamper their activity by administrative means.
At the end of the demonstration, protesters placed stickers with the words “Fidesz party headquarters” on the entrance of the ÁSZ headquarters.
UPDATE
DK to file criminal complaint over activist hit at Sunday demo
The Democratic Coalition (DK) will file charges for “government brutality” because they say a security guard hit a party activist, Gergo Varga, at Sunday’s demonstration during the prime minister’s state of the nation address, the leftist party told a press conference on Monday.
During the demonstration at Budapest’s Várkert Bazár, activists placed sheets of paper reading “Thief” and other slurs on the cordon, Varga said. One of the security guards lashed out at him, he said. Police also stopped them from projecting an image slamming Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences during the demonstration, he added.
DK spokesman Sándor Rónai said that the party will file charges of brutality against the security guard and a complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Board for what they see as curbing their right to free expression.
Press release – The ADF (Hungarian Academy Staff Forum – HASF in English) is a civil initiative of the researchers from the research institute network at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS).
The Hungarian government is introducing a new system of research financing, in a way which in itself contradicts the appropriate manners of policy making, and which, after implementation, will have disastrous effects on the autonomy of scientific research and scholarship in the entire country as well as academy staff work and life altogether. Given that their voice has not been heard either in public or during the negotiations between the HAS and the government, this initiative is meant to express Hungarian Academy Staff Forum opinions about the situation and the whole process. Summary of the situation:
Background information
The Hungarian government is continuing its crackdown on academic freedom. The government first placed all universities in the country under the direct supervision of a chancellor, an administrator appointed directly by the government, and more recently forced Central European University to move most of its programs from Budapest to Vienna. Now, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is subject to a structural reorganization by the government which will lead to the complete loss of academic independence for the Academy specifically and for scholarship in Hungary in general.
Before the elections in April 2018, government officials made clear in statements published in several right-wing media outlets that the government would intensify efforts to put the research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) under government control because these institutes had not been unquestioning in their loyalty to the government.
What is the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and why does it matter?
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1825 to promote scientific research in Hungary. It was created and maintained with the support of private benefactors. It has since become a national symbol of scientific endeavour and a major centre of cultural life in Hungary. After the First World War, HAS suffered from a major lack of funds, but its autonomy was strengthened and successfully maintained until the last years of the Second World War. Towards the end of the war, purges of the members of the Academy were held by successive regimes (the nationalist-conservative Horthy regime, the Arrow Cross regime which rose to power with the help of the Nazis, a short-lived democratic regime, and the communist regime under Mátyás Rákosi), and by 1948 the Academy had become a typical Soviet-type institution and an organ of the communist state.
Ironically, in the darkest years of the 1950s, an important new element was added to the Academy: the network of research institutes. This network had domestic antecedents, but fundamentally it was based on the Soviet academic world.
After the post-communist democratic transition in 1990, the Academy successfully struggled to retain the values embodied by the various academic institutions, while adapting them to the challenges of the technological revolution. A comprehensive reform of the research network was implemented in 2011–12 by President József Pálinkás, a scholar and former conservative minister of education and research who centralized the smaller institutions into fifteen research centres. The reform introduced a new system according to which scientific performance was evaluated and increased the role of tender-based financing, but it continued to respect the special demands of various disciplines, from the natural to the social sciences and the humanities. Until 2018, academic freedom was guaranteed by the autonomy of the Academy, which was grounded on two pillars affirmed by Law No. XL/1994. First, the Academy was led by a self-governing body of distinguished researchers who played an important role in managing the research centre network and supervising its work. Second, funding was negotiated on non-partisan grounds every year.
In June 2018, László Palkovics, the newly appointed Minister of the newly created Ministry for Innovation and Technology and himself a member of HAS, who enjoyed the strong support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, proposed a seemingly tiny technical amendment to the 2019 budget laws to reallocate the annual financial support for the academic research centre network from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the new ministry.
The real goal of this move was unmistakable. It was intended to deprive the Academy of its position as custodian of the largest network of research institutions in Hungary. Furthermore, it strengthens the position of the new minister as the de facto arbiter over the direction of scholarship and academic research in Hungary in general and, more narrowly, the specific topics covered in some fields of the sciences. The minister left the president of the Academy only 54 minutes to comment on the proposal, which the president of the Academy received by email, and the bill was passed within a few days.
In autumn 2018, several meetings took place between Minister Palkovics and the leadership of HAS driven by the Academy’s hope for an acceptable compromise.
Events took a dramatic turn after the extraordinary meeting of the General Assembly of HAS in December 2018, when an overwhelming majority rejected the reform plans and expressed support for HAS President László Lovász and the Presidium. Although the Academy had previously agreed to establish fast-track evaluation commissions to assess the scientific performance of the HAS research network by March 31, 2019, it soon became clear that reorganization plans would not take this into account.
Minister Palkovics. Photo: MTI
In mid-January 2019, Minister Palkovics sidestepped President Lovász and met directly with the heads of the Academy’s research institutes to “request” their cooperation in making Hungary’s research and innovation system more “efficient,” i.e. to put it under more direct government control.
Following the model of the reorganization of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2013–14, the fundamental goal of Palkovics’ manoeuvrer against the HAS President was to reduce HAS to an innocuous “academic club” of mostly retired members.
The most valuable asset of HAS, its network of research centres with approx. 5,000 active staff members at an average age of 41, would either be transferred to universities and state-controlled research centres or simply eliminated. Entire institutions – mostly in the human and social sciences – would be labelled “unproductive” and dismantled. On January 31, 2019, the National Office for Research, Development, and Innovation, which is controlled by the Ministry for Innovation and Technology, launched a so-called “program of excellence.” According to this new model, research centres must apply for their entire budget by submitting tenders which are assessed according to unclear evaluation principles, allowing for arbitrary, politically motivated decisions. This system replaces the old model of normative financing of the research centre network based on the legally affirmed managerial autonomy of the Academy.
HAS President Lovász and the directors of the research centres face the dilemma of whether to apply for short-term financial support within this new scheme (January 1–December 31, 2019). To do so would mean acknowledging and accepting the end of the post-1989 history of the Academy as a free and autonomous public body and the supervising body of Hungary’s largest scientific research infrastructure. If the Directors choose to comply with the dictate in order to save their employees and projects which are currently underway, they 1) give their support to a move which has been recognized by the legal staff of HAS as “illegal” and “unconstitutional”; and 2) formally defect from their legal employer – the President of HAS. This split would mean the first step toward highly centralized, government-controlled research focused essentially on aims which are considered priorities by the government. If the Directors choose to resist this attempt by the government to assert its control over scholarship and research in Hungary, they jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of employees.
On February 12, 2019 the Presidium of HAS will hold a meeting which promises to be one of its most crucial gatherings in recent decades.
Whatever decision is reached, the effects on the Hungarian academic community will be disruptive. If the government is allowed to dismantle the research network of the Academy by force, which seems to be its intention, Hungary will become the first member state of the European Union to reject, explicitly and unmistakably, the fundamental principle of the independence of scholarly research from political interest.
Stink bug invasion no longer needs to be introduced: these bugs can be found everywhere we go. Unfortunately, experts still do not know about any natural predators that would eat these bugs. The Plant Protection Institute’s researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are working on an effective stink bug trap and several other methods.
We have written before, that green stink bugs and shield bugs are a significant problem in Hungary. Although these bugs are harmless to people, they cause severe damage to our plants, fruits and vegetables. The best weapon against these bugs is physical destruction, regular cleaning and mosquito nets, but they still can be found everywhere.
According to 24.hu, several alternative methods are being created. Experts are trying to find these bugs’ parasites, hoping that they would help to destroy the future stink bug population.
Another efficent method would be stink bugs’ favourite plants. These plants are not useful for the agriculture. To protect our agriculture plants, experts would plant these useless ones among agriculture ones, so the bugs would eat those, instead of our cereals, fruits and vegetables.
The third method is the examination of the bugs’ natural habitat and those places where they hide during the winter. Experts would create an artificial one, which looks the same as the natural one, but it would be a trap for stink bugs to make their destruction much easier.
Jenő Konstchán, the institute’s director said that the prototypes of these traps would be ready by 2020 with the financial support of GINOP (Innovation Operational Programme for agriculture).
Péter Jakab, spokesman of Jobbik, said Orbán had “thrown ten thousand people out on the street” in three years, and “turned his childhood crony into the richest man in the country”.
