All of Europe has suffered in the financial crisis but no country more so than Hungary, which has been forced to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. Normally this is something one associated with Third World states, not members of the European Union. The recourse to the IMF is very humiliating for the Hungarian government, not least because only two weeks beforehand the head of the Hungarian national bank was saying that the country did not need any special credit lines from anyone. More importantly, in a recent advertising campaign, he government of Ferenc Gyurcsány boasted of the country’s strong economy. (Gyurcsány famously boasted in 2006, albeit in private, that he and his colleagues had lied brazenly about the state of the economy in order to get re-elected.) Now Hungary has taken 20 billion euros in credit from the European Central Bank, the World Bank and the IMF, and the country is facing a severe recession. Salaries will be frozen or even cut; pensions will be slashed. Thus will the conditions be fulfilled which the IMF has attached to its loan. [Reinhard Olt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 October 2008]

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