Financial Times
With long queues at petrol pumps, teachers blocking Budapest streets in a strike over pay and small-business owners demonstrating against tax rises, Hungary’s economic woes and the resulting public anger have wrongfooted rightwing prime minister Viktor Orbán and threaten to escalate his dispute with Brussels over frozen funding. “I take second jobs and give private classes,” said Budapest teacher Bence Tóth, who joined his profession’s year-long rolling strikes after struggling amid soaring inflation. Despite measures such as retail price caps introduced even before the war in Ukraine sparked an energy crisis, food and power prices in Hungary rose about 50 per cent in December compared with the previous year, according to government data.